What Black journalists covering Confederate monuments taught me about fighting antisemitism today

A participant in a far-right demonstration, wearing a T-shirt with the federal eagle and an iron cross chain, is pictured in Berlin on March 22. Photo by Ralf Hirschberger / AFP via Getty Images

By Olivia Haynie September 5, 2025

It was fitting that my first Looking Forward column debated what to do with Hitler’s Inferno, a collection of Nazi marching songs and speeches produced by Jewish audiophile Sidney Frey. I’ve been involved in a research project for the last few years investigating how Black newspapers — from the Reconstruction era to the modern day — reported on Confederate monuments, and now I’ve contributed to news chatter on artifacts of discrimination.

The monuments project required my research partner and I to look at 100 newspapers and create a database of more than 1,200 articles related to Civil War statues. Usually, once I uploaded the articles to our shared online folder, I would delete them off my laptop’s hard drive. But there were a few that I felt compelled to keep, and one that’s been on my mind lately.

The column, headlined “The symbol of prejudice,” appeared in the New Journal and Guide, a Black newspaper from Norfolk, Virginia, that has been published since 1917. It was written by Manning Marable, a history professor and the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. In the column, Marable reflected on the time, as a 17-year-old, he accidentally purchased an iron cross necklace at a mall in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio.

Wearing the cross, he picked up a watch from a jewelry store he frequented, whose owner happened to be Jewish. The owner confronted a naive Marable, showing him a numbered tattoo on his arm. Marable remembers the man saying, “The men who gave this to me also wore the cross you are wearing now.”

Writing the column nearly 30 years after this exchange, Marable acknowledged that at the time, he didn’t understand the depth of the man’s pain. Marable goes on to draw an analogy between Nazi symbols and the Confederate battle flag — a rhetorical tactic that shows up in quite a few of the articles in our database. But it’s what he says about bigotry that I felt compelled to revisit:

There is an urgent need for all of us to historicize the dynamics of oppression. We are all witnesses to each other’s history. We cannot in good conscience say that historical responsibility ends when each successive generation disappears from the scene. When evil is generated, it has a life of its own and it cannot be destroyed by forgetting or not learning the lessons of the past.

I think this is what Frey had in mind when he decided to preserve Nazi anthems. His label also produced a record of Confederate marching songs — and an album of steam and diesel train noises. Frey was concerned with capturing sounds that he thought would disappear from history. He didn’t want the depravity of the Third Reich — which he thought was underscored by the cheery tunes they wrote to accompany their genocidal campaign — to be forgotten.

But how much does teaching about history help? Frey’s own record was co-opted and used as Nazi propaganda. Some of the feedback I received on my column expressed doubt that these artifacts can be useful enough as teaching tools to justify their continued existence. Isn’t that what textbooks are for?

Another article in our database, written by Chicago Defender editor Lucius Harper, argued that if America had conducted their own version of the Nuremberg trials against Confederate soldiers after the Civil War, “The youth of the South would have worshiped at purer altars” instead of Confederate monuments. “Because of Nuernberg,” Harper wrote — using an alternate spelling of Nuremberg — “the youth of Germany will no longer have to bow in reverence or get its lessons in brotherhood and democracy from a bunch of perverts, fiends and murderers.”

Written in 1946, this must have felt true. Reading it in 2025, after the Alternative for Germany, a far-right extremist group, has gained enormous popularity and nearly took over the German government, this sentiment now sounds like wishful thinking.

I’ve often found myself shaking my head at how 19th-century debates about Civil War statues sound like conversations we’re still having today. I sometimes have the sense that we’re trapped in a loop.

There are many economists, political theorists, and sociologists who could apply models to explain why these themes recur, but what troubles me is this: What are we to do when these loops feel inevitable? If you keep relics of hate, no matter whether or not they’re put in the appropriate context of a museum, bigots will continue to co-opt them. If you destroy them, you risk losing the history and evidence of what horrors are possible.

Marable ends his column with a word of advice:

The real challenge before us in the construction of a real democracy in America is learning to listen to our mutual voices and histories. We must “speak truth to power” to reclaim our common humanity.

And that’s part of why the work we do at the Forward is so important.

I know how that sounds — I promise our fundraising team didn’t put me up to this. This is a conclusion I have reached all on my own.

Today, people are less inclined to surround themselves with others who think differently, who have different lived experiences, different histories. This makes political and social allyship seem impossible. Jews are feeling increasingly isolated. Part of the Fourth Estate’s job is to connect people to stories and perspectives from across the country and the world that they would otherwise not discover. It’s why opinion sections with large breadth are so important.

When we cover events like the founding of an all-white neo-Nazi community in Arkansas, the history of crossdressing in the Borscht Belt, or the first ordination of an openly gay rabbi at an Orthodox rabbinical school, we are doing more than just publishing facts. We are bringing voices and stories to our audience that would otherwise be left out.

Waking up and reporting on the current antisemitic violence or recounting past pogroms is not among the most pleasant activities one could do, but as Marable said, bigotry does not just fade out in time. The work of combatting hate is a constant one, and an important part of it is discussing the relics with messages we may deplore and their ongoing impact that is undeniable.

Maybe one day, my articles will be in someone else’s database of how Jewish newspapers have covered Nazi relics.

Correction: A previous version of this column suggested that Lucius Harper misspelled “Nuremberg” as “Nuernberg.” In fact, both names are used to refer to the same city in Germany, which in German is known as Nürnberg.