LITERATURE + LECTURES

The Holocaust Museum Houston presents the lecture Under Some Circumstances: How We Learned to Stop Worrying about Protecting Jim Crow to Seek Justice for the Holocaust, Tuesday,  July 5, 2011 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM, in the museum's Albert and Ethel Herzstein Theater.

Dr. Graham Cox (pictured) has examined the bureaucratic struggle between the U.S. State Department, the unheralded Herbert C. Pell – President Roosevelt’s appointee as American representative on the United Nations War Crimes Commission – and the battle among the Allies over the creation of a legal protocol to prosecute Nazi officials following the close of World War II. Pell sought justice for the Holocaust, fighting to extend the little understood legal category of “crimes against humanity” to include atrocities based upon racial, religious and political persecution committed by a nation against its own citizens. Pell challenged the long-held view that any nation could treat its own nationals as it wished without fear of intervention from the international community. Pell believed that the enormity of the Holocaust superseded any concerns about sovereignty. American policymakers held otherwise, and in the end fashioned a legal protocol that linked “crimes against humanity” with “aggressive war” and “conspiracy” to protect American sovereignty.

Cox will review that battle in this free public lecture.

Cox is a faculty member at the University of Texas-Pan American. He received his doctorate from the University of Houston. His dissertation was titled “What Irony! Herbert C. Pell, Crimes Against Humanity and the Negro Problem.”