Last week, CNN reported that Mark Robinson, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in North Carolina, had once identified himself as a “black Nazi” on a pornography forum, as well as stating his preference for Adolf Hitler over Barack Obama and his support for reinstating slavery. Robinson has a long history of outlandish and offensive statements, but these revelations have captured more attention than any of his earlier scandals. As with the Hitler-sympathizing comments from black public figures like Kanye West and Candace Owens, the seemingly contradictory notion of a “black Nazi” is a source of public fascination. Yet it isn’t as novel as it seems.
My 2007 book, Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture Between the Wars, explored how, starting with Marcus Garvey, some black nationalists looked to European fascism as a model. Indeed, in 1937, Garvey even claimed that he had invented fascism, declaring: “Mussolini and Hitler copied fascism from me.”
Garvey believed that Italy’s National Fascist Party and the German National Socialists had appropriated formal, ideological, and organizational elements of his Universal Negro Improvement Association, which achieved global fame in the early 1920s. At the time of the interview in which Garvey said this, well after his disappearance from the international spotlight, some black nationalists continued to evince admiration for German and Italian fascism, drawing on aspects of these movements to imagine a black fascist empire.