Why was Hannah Arendt skeptical of the American efforts to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1959?
Why didn’t Hannah Arendt make a connection between the Civil Rights struggle in America and the Nazi persecution of the Jews?
Should Martin Luther King and other black civil rights leaders have endangered the lives of black children by asking them to participate in civil rights protests, including the efforts to desegregate schools in the Deep South?
Many protestors were murdered and many of their houses and churches were dynamited. Plus, the black children asked to initially desegregate schools in the Deep South were risking their lives, as well as the lives of their families.
HANNAH ARENDT AND TOTALITARIANISM
Hannah Arendt was a Jewish political philosopher best known for her ideas on how power and evil can intertwine in totalitarian regimes. Her best-known work is an account of the trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who oversaw the orderly persecution and liquidation of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany, condemning what she saw as the “banality of evil.”
We compared this to Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and the comparisons were more direct than expected, since King compared the Jim Crow legal system under which blacks suffered without legal redress to the Nazi Holocaust targeting the Jews.
When living in Germany, Hannah Arendt had been arrested by the Gestapo for her research on antisemitism. Upon her release she first fled to Paris, and then fled to America, escaping from German custody after the invasion of France. Hannah Arendt lived and taught in America for the rest of her life, mostly in New York, becoming an American citizen.[1] As a student, she studied under some very famous teachers, including Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Karl Jaspers.
Comparing MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail with Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil in Nazi Germany
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/comparing-martin-luther-kings-letter-from-the-birmingham-jail-with-hannah-arendts-the-banality-of-evil/
https://youtu.be/PqFAUEXbi8k
Shortly before this work, Hannah Arendt reflected on the controversial desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas in 1959, where she surprisingly questions the wisdom of forced school desegregation.
Hannah Arendt readily admits that she has never lived in nor is familiar with the Southern states. She notes that in the Fifties, the NAACP prioritized fighting discrimination in employment, housing, and education, that they then prioritized fighting for these social opportunity rights over basic human or political rights. She also concedes that perhaps her opposition to these desegregation efforts overlooks the pivotal role that access to education plays in America. She also concedes that she is an outsider to the Deep South, but that she does sympathize with the struggles of Negroes and all oppressed and underprivileged peoples.
WEB Du Bois and the NAACP, Continuing the Fight For Civil Rights
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/web-du-bois-and-the-naacp-continuing-the-fight-for-civil-rights/
https://youtu.be/MNhkq69CIfo
Hannah Arendt speaks as a political philosopher. In her essay on Little Rock, she states that “it is perfectly true, as Southerners have repeatedly pointed out, that the Constitution is silent on education and that legally as well as traditionally, public education lies in the domain of state legislation.”
Hannah Arendt pronounces: “States’ rights in this country are among the most authentic sources of power, not only for the promotion of regional interests and diversity, for the Republic as a whole.”
STATES’ RIGHTS VS OVERRIDING FEDERAL POWER
What Hannah Arendt, and many conservatives, do not realize is that whereas States’ Rights arguments were valid in the early years of our Republic, after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Amendments dictated that the Federal government could override the laws and policies of any state government that abused the rights of their citizens, even if a majority of their local electorates approved of these abuses. Indeed, the political history of the United States is a struggle between Federal Power and States’ Rights, and the struggle over slavery before the Civil War, and after the Civil War, over civil rights, due process, and voting rights for all citizens. Also, our Founding Fathers were explicitly concerned with protecting the rights of minority interests.
We reflect on how this tension between overriding Federal Power versus States’ Rights is central to American political history. The Constitution strengthened the federal government whereas the Articles of Confederation influenced by the Declaration of Independence, arrogated more power to the state governments. The federal government under the Articles was ineffective in governing, funding the national budget, and standing up to the meddling of European powers.
States’ Rights v Federal Power From the Nation’s Founding to Civil War, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights Movement
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/states-rights-v-federal-power-from-the-nations-founding-to-civil-war-jim-crow-and-civil-rights-movement/
Even after the South lost the Civil War, which was indeed fought to end slavery, Southerners refused to grant true freedom, due process, and voting rights to emancipated slaves. Northern troops occupied the South for over a decade after the Civil War to protect the civil rights of the newly freed black citizens. After the disputed Presidential Election of 1876, Southerners threatened to reignite the Civil War if federal troops were not withdrawn from the South. After federal troops were withdrawn, the Southern states repealed the progressive civil rights legislation of Reconstruction, replacing it with the segregationist Jim Crow legal system, denying due process and voting rights to emancipated slaves. Northern troops occupied the Deep South for over a decade to protect the civil rights of newly emancipated slaves.
During the Jim Crow era, Southern Supreme Court justices neutered the three Reconstruction Amendments, denying black citizens due process and voting rights, ruling in Plessy v Ferguson that the Separate but Equal doctrine was the law of the land, which was the underpinning of the Jim Crow legal system that enforced the segregation of the races.
Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, by Eric Foner
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/second-founding-the-reconstruction-amendments-to-the-constitution/
https://youtu.be/UciDV5laOLg
We Fought the Civil War to Preserve Slavery, Confederate Leaders Proclaimed
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/we-fought-the-civil-war-to-preserve-slavery-confederate-leaders-proclaimed/
https://youtu.be/vBt81M6EWk0
1876 Contested Presidential Election: Precedent for January 6th Fake Elector Scheme?
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/1876-contested-presidential-election-precedent-for-january-6th-elector-scheme/
https://youtu.be/Ny0iyVYatB4
Terror During Reconstruction, White League Confronts General Longstreet and Union Army
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/terror-during-reconstruction-white-league-confronts-general-longstreet-and-union-army/
https://youtu.be/bF3w2RrSaM0
A century after the end of the Civil War, the Warren Court reinvigorated the Reconstruction Amendments, ruling in favor of voting rights and due process for blacks. In 1954, the Warren Court compelled the desegregation of public schools in the Brown v Board of Education decision, ruling that the Plessy decision was wrongly decided. The court knew there would be substantial resistance to this decision, proclaiming that schools must be segregated with “all deliberate speed.”
NAACP Attorneys Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston Challenge Jim Crow in the Courts
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/naacp-attorneys-thurgood-marshall-and-charles-houston-challenge-jim-crow-in-the-courts/
https://youtu.be/fBSNQXDziDU
LITTLE ROCK NINE AND SCHOOL DESEGREGATION
In 1957 the NAACP registered nine black students to attend a previously all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. At first Orval Faubus, Governor of Arkansas, ordered the Arkansas National Guard to “preserve the peace” by preventing these black students from attending. This civil resistance offended President Eisenhower. As a prior general, he viewed this as insubordination, so he nationalized the Arkansas National Guard, instead instructing them to protect the African American students. This did not stop the bullying and taunting, one of the black students had acid thrown in her face. There was a protracted struggle, the public schools were closed for a year, and after reopening black students had to face both white mobs and bullying for several years.[2]
HANNAH ARENDT AND AMERICAN COLONIALISM
Hannah Arendt is only half-right when she declares that “the color question was created by the one great crime in America’s history and is solvable only within the political and historical framework of the Republic. The fact that this question has also become a major issue in world affairs is sheer coincidence as far as American history and politics are concerned; for the color problem in world politics grew out of the colonialism and imperialism of European nations, the one great crime in which America was never involved.”
America is guilty of imperialistic sins, but they are less known in part because her colonial empire lasted less than a century. After the American victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898, Spain ceded the Philippines and Puerto Rico to the United States. The Filipinos fought for their independence for over a decade in the Philippine-American War, resulting in between two hundred thousand and a million civilian deaths. The peace treaty promised Philippine independence in 1944, which was delayed until after the Japanese were defeated in World War II in 1946.[3]
In 1890, Captain Mahan of the US Navy War Board sought to acquire Caribbean colonies to protect a future Panama Canal, and to host coaling and naval stations. Although there was not an armed rebellion in Puerto Rico as in the Philippines, there was a sometimes-violent political movement for Puerto Rican independence. It is a Commonwealth up to the current day.[4]
HANNAH ARENDT’S CRITICISM OF SCHOOL DESEGREGATION
Hannah Arendt comments that “it is unfortunate and even unjust, though hardly unjustified, that the events at Little Rock would have had such an enormous echo in public opinion throughout the world and have become a major stumbling block to American foreign policy.”
Why she finds this unfortunate and unjust is puzzling, what is true is that the United States was embarrassed on the world stage by the segregationist policies of Southern states. Communist countries attacked the hypocrisy of Americans who championed democracy abroad while refusing due process and civil rights to blacks at home. Officials in the State Department were embarrassed when black diplomats from newly independent African nations were denied service in Maryland, Virginia, and other Southern restaurants because of the color of their skin.[5]
Martin Luther King, Lunch Counters, Freedom Riders, and Albany, Lewis’ Biography Chapters 4-6
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-lunch-counters-freedom-riders-and-albany-lewis-biography-chapters-4-6/
https://youtu.be/_TLt2fQqL4w
Hannah Arendt notes that although civil rights for blacks is seen as primarily a Southern problem, the race problem involves the whole country. This is true, but the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North was because they were treated better in the North. Though there was widespread discrimination and even segregation in the North, they did not fear for their lives as they did in Mississippi, and there was a semblance of due process in the North.[6]
Martin Luther King & LBJ: Great Society, Vietnam, Chicago & Memphis, Lewis Biography Chapters 10-12
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-lbj-great-society-and-vietnam-northern-civil-rights-biography-chapters-10-12/
https://youtu.be/IeKssG8mrlk
Is Hannah Arendt off-base when she states that the Negro question “has a special attraction for the mob and is particularly well fitted to serve as the point around which a mob ideology and a mob organization can crystallize?”
She speculates that the differences between the North and South will dissipate as the South industrializes further, and in some ways they have. But the South differs from the North in that she has a strong right to work and anti-Union culture and offers far fewer protections for all workers than do Northern states. These attitudes stem from the Jim Crow segregationist culture that refuses to provide for the welfare of low-income workers for fear that blacks will benefit disproportionally.
Today it is the red Southern states who refuse to integrate Obamacare with Medicaid, forcing many rural hospitals to close due to lack of funding, and want Medicaid recipients to jump through hoops to prove they cannot work. These cruel policies hurt both poor whites and poor blacks, but many think there are more poor blacks than poor whites that would take advantage of these government programs.
Hannah Arendt warns her American friends: “Awareness of future trouble does not commit one to advocating a reversal of the trend which” currently “has been greatly in favor of the Negroes. But it does commit one to advocating that government intervention be guided by caution and moderation rather than by impatience and ill-advised measures.”
This was the position taken by the white clergy of Birmingham, who pressured Martin Luther King to go slow and be patient with his demands for civil rights. His Letter From a Birmingham Jail responded to this pressure from white clergy.
Martin Luther King, Birmingham, Nonviolent Protests v Bombs and Brutality, Biography Chapter 7
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-birmingham-nonviolent-protests-v-bombs-and-brutality-biography-chapter-7/
https://youtu.be/5y0v0tYMdy8
King forcefully contended that blacks had been patient enough for decades, that the time is NOW for positive racial change, that “every Negro was familiar with the cry of ‘WAIT!’ which nearly always meant ‘NEVER.’” While “Asian and African countries were gaining independence,” in America “we creep at horse-and-buggy pace towards gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.” The Letter From a Birmingham Jail then lists the many humiliations and injustices suffered by blacks, and the rights and due process denied to them.
Comparing MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail with Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil in Nazi Germany
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/comparing-martin-luther-kings-letter-from-the-birmingham-jail-with-hannah-arendts-the-banality-of-evil/
https://youtu.be/PqFAUEXbi8k
HANNAH ARENDT’S KEY OBJECTIONS TO LITTLE ROCK
Hannah Arendt warns that though “it will not be possible to avoid Federal enforcement of Negro civil rights in the South altogether, conditions demand that such intervention be restricted to the few instances in which the law of the land and the principle of the Republic are at stake. The question therefore is whether this is the case in general, and whether it is the case in public education in particular.”
Hannah Arendt notes that an overwhelming majority of Southerners opposed school desegregation and felt that their elected officials should oppose the ruling of the Supreme Court. Hannah Arendt quotes William Faulkner, the Deep South author, who said “that enforced integration is no better than enforced segregation.” She observed that “the town’s law-abiding citizens left the streets to the mob, that neither white nor black citizens felt it their duty to see the Negro children safely to school. That is, even before the arrival of Federal troops, law-abiding Southerners had decided that enforcement of the law against mob rule and protection of children against adult mobsters were none of their business. In other words, the arrival of troops did little more than change passive into massive resistance.”
Hannah Arendt asks: “Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world? And do we intend to have out political battles fought out in the schoolyards?” The answer of the civil rights activists is: Of course: YES.
She also asks: “What would I do if I were a Negro mother? The answer: under no circumstances would I expose my child to conditions which made it appear as though it wanted to push its way into a group where it was not wanted.”
The simple response is that some Negro mothers did not want to endanger their children’s lives in the Civil Rights struggles, while others consented. Martin Luther King and the other black civil rights leaders controversially decided to include children in the civil rights protests in Birmingham and Selma, knowing that the images of Southern Sheriffs abusing black children would bolster the cause of civil rights on the television screens watched in the living rooms of millions of Americans.
One of these television images was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young black girls attending Sunday School. The segregationists set the bomb to blow up on Sunday morning so they could kill as many black people as possible.
Martin Luther King, Bloody Struggles in Mississippi and Selma, Lewis’ Biography Chapters 8-9
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-bloody-struggles-in-mississippi-and-selma-lewis-biography-chapters-8-9/
https://youtu.be/eMA_7vLYcdM
Melba Beals’ mother encouraged her daughter to be among the nine selected to break the color barrier at the Little Rock High School. Melba was twelve years old when the Brown decision was handed down. On the day of the decision, her teacher warned her students to go straight home and stay inside, and not to play outside. Melba tried to follow her advice, but she was accosted by an angry white man whom she did not know who tried to lure her into his car with candy. When she declined, her pursued her. While he ripped her underpants one of her classmates came from behind and knocked him out with a brick. That was how close that twelve-year-old Melba came to being raped by an older white man.
American Civil Rights History: Yale Lecture Notes
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/american-civil-rights-history-yale-lecture-notes/
Civil Rights Era, Sixties and Beyond: Yale Lecture Notes
https://youtu.be/GQesHoV5IdI
Hannah Arendt did ask another interesting question: “What would I do if I were a white mother in the South?” “I would agree that the government has a stake in the education of my child insofar as this child is supposed to grow up into a citizen, but I would deny that the government had any right to tell me in whose company my child received its instruction.”
Hannah Arendt reveals the tension between the individual and society. Many white parents have responded to the integration of public schools by enrolling their children in private schools. Ironically, most of them are religious private schools. But the fact remains that all children, black or white, are entitled to a quality education in public schools. How can blacks enjoy a quality education if most of the whites are attending private schools?
Hannah Arendt makes a key point: “Segregation is discrimination enforced by law, and desegregation can do no more than abolish the laws enforcing discrimination; it cannot abolish discrimination and force equality upon society but it can, and indeed must, enforce equality within the body politic,” and the most important equality is that all citizens have the right to vote, and are allowed to vote.
Hannah Arendt observes: “Society is that curious, somewhat hybrid realm between the political and the private in which, since the beginning of the modern era, most men have spent the greater part of their lives.” We enter society to earn a living, to participate in a profession, or to simply enjoy the company of our associates. But once in society, we discover that “like attracts like.”
Hannah Arendt claims that “without discrimination of some sort, society would simply cease to exist, and very important possibilities of free association and group formation would disappear.”
Hannah Arendt admits that the “right to sit where one pleases in a bus or a railroad car or station, as well as the right to enter hotels and restaurants in business districts,” is essential because these are “public services that everyone needs in order to pursue his business and lead his life.” But she seems to suggest discrimination is acceptable in vacation resorts, but not for theaters, restaurants, and museums.
But in the realm of privacy, neither equality nor discrimination matters, only exclusiveness. We can choose our friends and social circles, that is our right. She claims that “discrimination is as indispensable a social right as equality is a political right. The question is not how to abolish discrimination, but how to keep it confined within the social sphere, where it is legitimate, and prevent its trespassing on the political and the personal sphere, where it is destructive.”
Hannah Arendt argues that “while the government has no right to interfere with the prejudices and discriminatory practices of society, it has not only the right but the duty to make sure that these practices are not legally enforced.”
“The only public force that can fight social prejudice is the churches.” “If discrimination creeps into the houses of worship, this is an infallible sign of their religious failing. They then have become social and are no longer religious institutions.”
The sad history of the churches in America, and in particular the white churches in the Deep South, is that they have historically opposed civil rights for blacks. Predominantly white churches usually have five percent or fewer black congregants, racially mixed congregations with a quarter or more black congregants are rare. However, based on my personal experience, if you can find such a church, few of its white parishioners will be faithful watchers of Fox News.
American Evangelicals, Civil Rights, and Republican Politics
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/american-evangelicals-civil-rights-and-republican-politics/
https://youtu.be/XekOz29oWL0
Hannah Arendt makes another good point when she notes that “the right of parents to bring up their children as they see fit is a right of privacy, belonging to home and family. Ever since the introduction of compulsory education, this right has been challenged and restricted, but not abolished, by the right of the body politic to prepare children to fulfill their future duties as citizens. The stake of the government in the matter is undeniable, as is the right of the parents.”
Before the Civil Rights era, the textbooks used by Southern schools taught the Lost Cause myth that the Civil War was fought over civil rights rather than slavery, which is simply not true. There was resistance: I remember learning about George Washington Carver, a safe black history man who found many uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes. I do not remember ever studying the lives of Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, WEB DuBois, Martin Luther King, or any other leading black figure. I presume my elementary school teachers each year noted that: We had our annual class discussion about George Washington Carver and peanuts and sweet potatoes, so we can check the box for teaching black history.
Three Generations of Leading Black Leaders, Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, and WEB Du Bois
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/three-generations-of-leading-black-leaders-frederick-douglass-booker-t-washington-and-web-du-bois/
https://youtu.be/DAEg463i-Tc
Frederick Douglass Tells Us About His Life as a Slave in his Autobiography
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/frederick-douglass-tells-us-about-his-life-as-a-slave-in-his-autobiography/
https://youtu.be/7VkzhyNnuQk
Up From Slavery: Autobiography of Booker T Washington
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/up-from-slavery-autobiography-of-booker-t-washington/
https://youtu.be/yxDnJ6sBoJc
Martin Luther King, Summary of Biography by David Levering Lewis
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-summary-of-biography-by-david-levering-lewis/
https://youtu.be/XtdVGx2C3Cc
The teaching of the Lost Cause myth is being revived. In Florida and several other red Republican states, it is now illegal to teach students about uncomfortable subjects like abolition, slavery, Reconstruction, and civil rights.
Hannah Arendt declares that “for the child himself, school is the first place away from home where he establishes contact with the public world that surrounds him and his family. This public world is not political but social, and the school is to the child what a job is to an adult. The only difference is that the element of free choice which, in a free society, exists at least in principle in the choosing of jobs and the associations connected with them, is not yet at the disposal of the child but rests with his parents.”
But then she declares: “To force parents to send their children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies: the private right over their children and the social right to free association. As for the children, forced integration means a very serious conflict between home and school, between their private and their social life, and while such conflicts are common in adult life, children cannot be expected to handle them and therefore should not be exposed to them.”
But how can white children form a positive image of black children rather than the negative image that they are all dangerous thugs if they never meet anyone who is not white? But Harrah Arendt misses the real issue: the personal safety of the child. In the days of the Little Rock Nine, that was an anxiety for both races, but today this is a fear of mostly white parents. Part of growing up is having to deal with bullies, and young black bullies can be quite vicious, perpetuating negative racial stereotypes, unfortunately.
Hannah Arendt notes: “The idea that one can change the world by educating the children in the spirit of the future has been one of the hallmarks of political utopias since antiquity. The trouble with this idea” is that “it can only succeed only if the children are really separated from their parents and brought up in state institutions or are indoctrinated in school so that they will turn against their own parents.” [7]
Hannah Arendt had reservations about the protests over the 1959 efforts to desegregate Little Rock Central High School because she felt that the laws forbidding interracial marriage were far more damaging to the dignity of minorities than segregated schools. Indeed, the Supreme Court eventually agreed, because in 1967 they issued their decision in Loving v Virginia. Virginia law decreed that interracial marriages were invalid even if the couple were married in another state and then moved to Virginia, arguing that this violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.[8]
BRIEF HISTORY OF SCHOOL DESEGREGATION IN FLORIDA SCHOOLS
Many local government officials and state legislators in the Deep South vowed never to desegregate their public schools, which meant that segregation “with all deliberate speed” progressed far more deliberately than speedily. I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, and the schools began desegregating their schools in the late Sixties, over a decade after the Brown decision. The experiences in the varying states likely differ, but the Florida experience is illustrative.
There were a few predominantly white junior and senior high schools whose surrounding neighborhoods had shifted to mostly black over the years, those were the first that were integrated, and one was the junior high school in our district. Thankfully, our family moved to more distant suburbs, because in those first few years the blacks were angry and bitter and vicious and vengeful in their bullying, since the whites were now in the minority in that school.
The next year my new suburban junior high school was integrated, with black students bused in from across town. My recollection is the blacks were less than ten percent of the student body in both my junior high and high school, and the situation, while quite tense, was never so tense that I felt unsafe. But what strikes me is that years later not one of our former black classmates has attended our class reunions, they never felt like they belonged.
Some years later, magnet schools were invented. You promise the brightest white students a quality college-level education if they consent to be bused into school in a black neighborhood. The building as a whole would be integrated, but inside the building would be segregated into high-achieving white classrooms and average low-achieving black classrooms. However, qualified black students could apply to the gifted program, which would have been impossible before desegregation. Quite likely the cafeteria times were also segregated.
Often the more well-off white parents, and sometimes black parents, pull their children out of the public school system entirely to register them in parochial and private schools, aka segregation academies. Charter schools with long waiting lists also defeat the purpose of a common public education.
Public schools now educate a greater proportion of poor students, black and white. Desegregation is now over, in 2007 the Supreme Court ruled five to four that school districts could not use race to determine which schools children should attend. Since then, most schools have largely resegregated according to race.[9]
DISCUSSING THE SOURCES
This Penguin Collection includes many of her essays, including several from her book on Totalitarianism. The conundrums she discusses in her essay on school desegregation in Little Rock help explain why this is such an elusive goal. Today, the nation’s schools are functionally Separate but Equal, but because of the segregation efforts, they are far more equal than they were before the Brown decision. But the schools are still not equal, and they will only be as equal as the economic opportunities and wages for blacks and whites.
What did the forced desegregation of the schools, often by busing children across town, accomplish in the long run? Was the incredible effort worth it? Without desegregation, the federal government could have never compelled the Southern states to fund with relative fairness all schools regardless of color. Over time, many decrepit school buildings formerly housing black students were demolished. Schools in prosperous neighborhoods will always be better off than schools in poorer neighborhoods, though many states reallocate school funds collected locally roughly by need across the state. But in the long run, perhaps Hannah Arendt was correct: the government cannot indefinitely mandate with whom you will freely associate.
We also asked: Why didn’t Hannah Arendt make a connection between the Civil Rights struggle in America and the Nazi persecution of the Jews? There was definitely a connection, soon after Hitler became Fuhrer of Germany, the Nazi lawyers used the Jim Crow laws of the Deep South as precedent when drafting the Nuremburg Race Laws that persecuted the Jews.
How the Racist Jim Crow Laws Served as Precedent for the Nazi Nuremberg Race Laws
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/how-the-racist-jim-crow-laws-served-as-precedent-for-the-nazi-nuremberg-race-laws/
https://youtu.be/_td3jPGD5TI
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_War
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Puerto_Rico
[5] https://review.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/03/Briker-Driver-74-Stan.-L.-Rev.-447.pdf, link for Briker and Driver, Brown and Read: Defending Jim Crow in Cold War America, Stanford Law Review, Volume 74, March 2022. Other sources can be found by asking Dr Google about “segregation embarrassing United States in the post-World War II era”.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American)
[7] Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hanna Arendt, Reflections on Little Rock, pp. 231-246.
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia
[9] https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/columns/nate-monroe/2019/05/24/nate-monroe-jacksonville-cant-afford-to-repeat-history-on-public-schools/5061556007/ and https://www.floridatrend.com/article/29950/segregation-in-florida-schools-in-2020
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