From ‘Racist Trees’ to ‘Nazi Town USA’

American racism history, well-explored in two new PBS documentaries

Racist Trees may not be an accurate title, but it certainly gets right to the point. 

You may remember this as a minor culture war kerfuffle of a few years ago, one that got heavily mocked by Tucker Carlson and other right-wing cultural commentators: The allegation that the trees, in Palm Springs, California, were racist. 

If one puts it that way, yes, it sounds ridiculous. But the truth was, trees were planted in Palm Springs, at some point in the 1950s, for the express purpose of walling off a community of African-Americans, called Crossley Tract, from a new golf course. And then, more than 60 years later, an ultimately successful effort was mounted to address this injustice and knock those trees down. 

Furthermore, this is an extremely familiar story in 20th-century American history- even in places like Palm Springs, known as a particularly liberal enclave, in one of the nation’s bluest states, with long histories of both LGBTQ inclusivity and a huge presence of showbiz types. 

Racist Trees, directed by Sara Newens and Mina T. Son, tells this story and does it well. The film, which debuted this week on PBS’ Independent Lens, succinctly and skillfully shows how this happened, while also conveying a strong sense of place about Palm Springs, a truly unique place. 

But what’s not unique is this type of story. Something like this happened in just about every city in the country- decades ago, decisions were made, about real estate, the locations of highways, overpasses, and other barriers. And, with varying degrees of intentionality, racism had a lot to do with those decisions, in ways that still affect life today in profound ways. 

The film goes into the long history, including a live dispute over when exactly the trees were planted. We hear from both the people calling for the trees to go and the others who want them to stay, and the latter group has some people with good intentions, and others not so much (one message board poster goes ahead and worries that the trees are the only thing standing in the way of their homes from being “ransacked.” (This all happened a few years ago, with the trees coming down in 2018, but that type of long lead time is far from rare when it comes to documentary production.)

The 2020 post-George Floyd reckoning has led to a wave of documentaries looking at racism in America, and I’ve found most of the better ones, finding regionally specific, sometimes esoteric stories about the prejudices of the past and how they are felt today. I’ve found films like Racist Trees, as well as Raoul Peck’s similar Silver Dollar Road last year, are much more effective than docs like Netflix’s Ibram X. Kendi rehash Stamped From the Beginning, which try to shoehorn in just about the entire history in 90 minutes. 

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And speaking of new PBS documentaries about ugly racism in American history, The American Experience this week debuted Nazi Town USA, which tells the story of the German American Bund, a group of German-American Nazi sympathizers during their strongest period of activity in the 1930s before the U.S. entered the war. 

Many of you may have seen A Night at the Garden, an Oscar-nominated short film by Marshall Curry that came out in 2017 and featured seven minutes of footage from a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939. Nazi Town, USA, directed by Peter Yost — with  Curry credited as a consulting producer — features that footage but goes into more depth about what came before and after. 

It’s pretty chilling stuff, including summer camps that were run by the Bund in northern New Jersey, among other places. This was a unique moment, not long before the Nazis were America’s enemies when these Nazis carried American and Nazi flags at the same time. 

 Once the war started, these noxious schmucks fell out of favor — it didn’t help that Bund leader Fritz Kuhn was embezzling from the organization to fund his travels with his mistresses, and he was jailed. The American energy turned squarely against the Nazis soon after, with the opposition of many of the Bund types pivoting to the America First Committee and Charles Lindbergh- and the foulest American racists have continued to use “America First” as part of their messaging ever since.

Both Racist Trees and Nazi Town, USA, are available on local PBS stations, and also the PBS Roku/Apple TV app.