Earnest Sevier Cox

Earnest Sevier Cox (January 24, 1880 – April 26, 1966), was an American Methodist preacher, political activist and white supremacist. He is best known for his political campaigning for stricter segregation between blacks and whites in the United States through tougher anti-miscegenation laws, for his advocacy for "repatriation" of African Americans to Africa, and for his book White America. He is also noted for having mediated collaboration between white southern segregationists and African-American separatist organizations such as UNIA and the Peace Movement of Ethiopia to advocate for repatriation legislation, and for having been a personal friend of black racial separatist Marcus Garvey. During his studies in Chicago he became a vocal proponent of white supremacy and black inferiority, and of the view that blacks and whites could never peacefully coexist. He began traveling to give public lectures. He worked in the diamond mines in South Africa and later traveled north through Rhodesia, Belgian Congo and German East Africa, north to Egypt. In his writings he extolled the German colonies he considered to have high "racial patriotism". Cox thanked Grant by acting as a political organizer on Grant's behalf, a role that Grant was unable to personally undertake since public political involvement was incompatible with his reputation as a prominent New York patrician.

Publication of White America

In 1923, unable to find a publisher, Cox published the book White America himself. The book argued that race mixing would result in the downfall of "White civilization" and proposed the removal of all people of African descent from the American continent. It was later reissued, funded by Wickliffe Draper. In this book which has been described as a "crude retelling"

The book won positive attention from several important academics and intellectuals in the period, and Cox was invited to Harvard to speak about it by Harry Laughlin the prominent eugenicist. Laughlin's journal "the Eugenical News" stated that "the removal of Negroes would make Cox a greater savior of his country than George Washington". The book was also incorporated into the biology curriculum at the University of Virginia. It was less well received by anthropologists, and Melville Herskovits reviewed it in the journal Social Forces and described it as "fallacious in its assumptions, incompetent in its handling and loose in its logic".

Repatriation activism and friendship with Marcus Garvey In 1924, Grant suggested that Cox attend a lecture of Jamaican American racial activist Marcus Garvey, whose organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), shared Grant and Cox' passion for racial purity and considered repatriation of African Americans to the African continent to be the only way to salvation of their respective races. In 1924 Cox attended as the only white man, a lecture by Garvey, and after that the two began collaborating, working jointly lobbying legislative measures that would promote the migration of American Blacks to Africa. In 1936 Cox visited Grant who was by then confined to bed by illness, but who nonetheless agreed to create a $10,000 endowment to fund lobby activities in congress for repatriation and deportation legislation. Grant did not live to make good on his promise, but his friend Wickliffe Draper did it for him and also funded additional printings of Cox' book.

The bill failed however, partly due to the outbreak of World War II, which re-focused the attention of national legislation and rendered it impossible to count on the participation of Britain and France in the repatriation efforts. Among the recipients was Dr. Johann von Leers, a Nazi fugitive living in Argentina.

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education and the ensuing de-segregation of the American public school system, Cox published Unending Hate, in which he argued that the Bill of Rights was in essence a tribal document, only meant to extend rights to those of "Saxon stock", not to members of other races, and that in forcing Southern Whites to mingle with Blacks in the school system, the bill of rights was being prostituted.

As the most prominent surviving nordicist of the generation of the 1920s, Cox became a respected figure on the racialist far-right of the 1950s and '60s. In 1960 he wrote a letter to George Lincoln Rockwell the founder of the Virginia-based American Nazi Party sending them the address he gave in the Teutoburger forest meeting, and stating that he was in "fundamental sympathy" with most of their ideas.