to the inhabitants of Harlem. What purported to be a stenographic report of one of his addresses was furnished by the Anti-Nazi Minute Men.
“Hitler don’t want the damn Jews in Germany. We don’t want them in Harlem,” he is quoted as saying. “We will run them out of Harlem like Hitler is running them out of Germany, and if it’s war they want, they’ll get it. In fact, I’ll start it, and no one can start a war better than myself.
“Roosevelt is no good. He was only elected because of those damn Jews and I’ll bet any one of you damn Negroes that he won’t be elected again.
“The damn Jews walk around and tell you funny jokes about yourself and say, ‘Yah sa, boss,’ and you think it to be funny.”
LOOKS MILD ENOUGH
In appearance, Hamid belies his alleged militancy. Mild of mien and cultured in tone, he toyed yesterday with a sleek, long mustache, which, coupled with his thick Van Dyke, gave him the appearance of an Oriental potentate. He received a reporter into his “office,” at the head of the dance hall of the Hotel Dumas, 216 West 135th street.
Indignantly he denied the speech attributed to him in the stenographic report. He said he would like to take court action against the “slanderer.”
“Court action is too slow,” snarled Francis Minor, his right hand man, sitting at Hamid’s left. “If we get him we’ll handle him in our own way.”
Minor seemed to be the Goering of the outfit. Throughout the interview. Hamid carefully eschewed anti-Jewish utterances. Minor interjected words of praise for Hitler’s method of handling the Jews and spoke bitterly against the Jewish employers of Harlem.
“We are not against the Jews,” said Hamid, speaking slowly in a smooth baritone voice. “Nobody knows the Yehudim as well as I do. To us here it is an economic matter. We have between 11,000 and 14,000 members in the Negro Industrial Clerical Alliance. We are out to get jobs for them.”
‘JEWS NOT WHITE EITHER’
In glib anthropological terms Hamid attempted to prove that the “Jews are no more whites than we Negroes are. They come from Jerusalem.”
“Jerusalem,” he said, “is not in Palestine but in Abyssinia. That’s where the Jews originally came from. Their lineal descendants are the Abyssinians, who are black.
“The reason the Jews look white today is that, for economic reasons, they amalgamated with the whites wherever they came into Europe. The Jews of Europe are not the real Jews. Go to Abyssinia if you would find real Yehudim.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
