Throughout Song in a Weary Throat, Pauli Murray highlights the intersections between Jim Crow segregation and Nazi Germany. Specifically, Murray uses the term “fascism” in these comparisons, drawing attention to the ways that the United States, while working to promote and save democracy abroad nevertheless allowed fascism to grow and spread in the United States, not just in the South. This, of course, is something I have written about extensively over the past few years, and at this moment, it is an extremely important aspect of history that we need to remember, especially as we head towards November where democracy and fascism are on the ballot. We say fascism can’t happen here, but it has and it still exists.

In a recent Rolling Stone article, Tim Dickinson notes, “More than a third of Trump’s 2020 voters — 35 percent — agree with Trump’s claim, parroted from fascists before him, that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ according to survey results from the University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll. Only 32 percent of Trump voters and 37 percent of Republicans outright disagree with the Nazi slogan.” Equally disturbing, as Dickinson notes, is that about 25% of those polled overall “neither agree nor disagree.” On the one hand are individuals who buy into the rhetoric full throatily and on the other are those who push it aside, not even confronting it. The “banality of evil” at work.

Murray understood the long arc of history, and she saw, after starting a Black studies group at Hunter College when her history professor ignored the role of Blacks in the formation of the nation, her role within the historical trajectory and that her place within the body politic was her “birthright and not something to be earned.” However, the systemic injustices of white supremacy made her fight to earn her birthright. Its here that Murray draws her first linkage between white supremacy and fascism.

Murray writes, “One did not need Communist propaganda to expose the inescapable parallel between Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany and the repression of Negroes in the American South. Daily occurrences pointed up the hypocrisy of a United States policy that condemned Fascism abroad while tolerating an incipient Fascism within its own borders.” Murray, along with countless others such as Thurgood Marshall, recognized the growth of fascism in the United States and they also recognized the one-party, totalitarian rule set up in the South through voter suppression, poll taxes, and more. To maintain that grip, wealthy Southern politicians allowed paramilitary mobs to enact “justice” on anyone who challenged their position. Thus, they promoted Blackshirts and Brownshirts committing vigilante violence on Blacks and others.

For Murray, segregation on the bus existed as “the quintessence of the segregation evil.” In an enclosed and intimate public space, travelling down the road, the bus “permitted the public humiliation of black people to be carried out in the presence of privileged white spectators, who witnessed our shame in silence or indifference.” What hurt Murray was that everyone knew “the that fact that the overriding purpose of segregation was to humiliate and degrade colored people” in the same way that Nazi propaganda in Der Stürmer and in other mass media presented Jews as “vermin” or “roaches,” dehumanizing Jews. This constant rhetoric of dehumanization and degradation served as the precursor to pogroms and the Holocaust.

Murray continues by comparing white bus drivers’ “contemptuous treatment of Negro passengers” and the drivers’ uniforms created “a striking resemblance to a Nazi storm trooper.” Later, when Murray and her friend Adelene “Mac” McBean get arrested in Virginia for disorderly conduct and trespassing Jim Crow laws on a bus, the driver, Frank W. Morris exercises his power to get Murray and Mac arrested. Upon entering the bus, Murray and Mac went to the “colored” section at the back of the bus and sat on the wheel, and Mac started to get sick. To alleviate the issue, Mac proposed moving up a few rows to vacant seats, still behind white passengers. Murray worried that Mac, not being from the South, didn’t comprehend what she proposed, but they moved forward a few rows.

When he saw them move forward, Morris turned around and told Murray and Mac to move back a row, to which Murray replied that that seat was broken. They stayed in their spot, and Morris threatened them with arrest. Mac told him they paid their money, like everyone else, and they had their rights. Morris got off the bus, was gone for forty-five minutes, and returned with two police officers. The officers spoke with Mac and Murray, and Mac again reiterated that she had rights. Mac’s logic embarrassed the officers because “she had openly ridiculed the official symbols of white supremacy and, in a public place, had demanded courtesy to a black woman from a white man.”

The officers said they had to enforce “Virginia law” requiring Black riders to fill the bus from the back and asked Murray and Mac to move back one seat. When they told the officers the seat was broken, Morris came back and fixed it, quickly. Instead of wasting over an hour, he could have done this initially. After they moved back, Morris began passing out incident cards to the white passengers, leaving Black passengers without any say in what happened. For Murray, “this final damning implication that black people were nobodies and did not have to be taken into account was more than [Murray] could bare.” When Murray “called out to the driver” about not getting an incident card, Morris stormed off the bus and returned with the officers who proceeded to arrest Murray and Mac.

Morris epitomizes Murray’s earlier comparison of the “white contemptuous bus driver” with a “Nazi stormtrooper” because like members of the Sturmabteilung, Morris used his position and power to victimize others. While it is not a one-to-one comparison, Morris’ actions mirror those of paramilitary and organized entities such as the Sturmabteilung. While Morris actively engages in oppression, openly and violently through his words, the passengers on the bus acquiesce to its presence and Morris’ acts. Most of the whites do nothing and the Blacks, while trying to survive, do not confront Morris or the officers but they do make sure Murray and Mac get legal representation. E.C. Davis, a member of the Petersburg NAACP aked Murray and Mac for their information and he passed it along to the local chapter. A white passenger, Harold Garfinkel, wrote about the incident in Opportunity, bringing further illumination to the injustice. These passengers fought back and assisted in their own ways, subversively countering the Jim Crow strictures.

Murray recognized that segregation in the South acted the same way that segregation and ghettoization worked under the Nazi regime. Instead of a Jewish badge sewed onto clothing, Murray’s phenotype and signs that read “colored” and “white” served to segregate and deny her her rights. What Murray and countless others highlight are the ways that we need to think about Jim Crow violence and Nazi atrocities together, even though they are not one-to-one comparisons. We need to, as well, think about the fact that “incipient fascism” grew in the United States alongside Germany, and we must also remember that the ever-spreading fascism didn’t go away following World War II. It smoldered, looking for a way to escape the rubble and engulf the world in flames again. To face the present, we must remember the past, all of it, and not paint the past in such a way that removes the blood stains we don’t want to face.