When you think of Thomas Jefferson High School (TJHS) alums, you automatically think of the school’s cultural association with producing alums who became world-renowned jazz musicians, bandleaders, and composers. In this cover story, written to commemorate the 110th birthday of the South Los Angeles high school, the focus will center on the alums who left important geopolitical fingerprints on the history of mankind. These fingerprints that still impact the world we live in today.
. Woody Strode, Class of 1932, and Adolf Hitler, 1933 – 1945
In 1936, Adolf Hitler had his eyes on world domination, and the Olympics became a way to showcase a new Germany through a series of German cultural events tied to the Games. Four years earlier, at Jefferson High, Woody Strode had just completed his senior year. He had no idea that four years later, a painting of his body would end up in the studio of a Nazi German filmmaker.
During the 1936 Olympics, Nazi Germany invested over $100 million into the Berlin Olympics. They attempted to show the world that Germany had returned as a world power. A Jefferson High School alumnus threatened the narrative of flowing Nazi propaganda orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels. His name was Woody Strode.
According to Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s filmmaker, in her self-titled memoir (1987), Woody Strode was a threat to the Nazi propaganda machine. Riefenstahl co-opted Woody Strode’s exact physical dimensions to serve as a visual blueprint for their “Aryan” ideal. Because Strode was of African American and Native American descent, the Nazi regime completely erased his racial identity while using his torso as the supreme standard of human anatomy.
Praising the Images: Riefenstahl described how Hitler was shown the initial photographs that Riefenstahl took of Strode’s physical structure. Deeply impressed by the majestic muscular definition, Hitler considered it the absolute zenith of physical form. However, when the Nazis learned of an exhibit featuring Strode and other non-Aryan athletes in Berlin during the 1936 Olympics, Hitler quietly and secretly shut it down.
Sending Riefenstahl to America: Adolf Hitler backed and funded Riefenstahl’s work and supported her projects. Riefenstahl traveled to the United States in 1938 to market her Nazi film to Hollywood studios. Adolf Hitler gave her verbal permission to track down Strode and film him if the opportunity presented itself.
Geopolitical Impact on the World: Fascinated by images of Woody Strode’s physique (1936), along with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels broadcasting claims of German physical superiority, followed by the rapid and shocking collapse of France and Western Europe via Blitzkrieg in 1940, American troops and the broader public began fearing that the German army was a scientifically and physically superior juggernaut. The myth of the unstoppable German soldier created a genuine worry among U.S. military strategists about an impending inferiority complex or defeatist attitude among inexperienced American draftees preparing to fight the German military.
Dr. Ralph Bunche, Class of 1922, and the Desert Fox
While attending Thomas Jefferson High School, most alumni remember hearing about Dr. Ralph Bunche’s work as a United Nations pioneer, Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Civil Rights advocate, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2008, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) quietly released a fifty-one-page digital file on Thomas Jefferson High School alumnus Dr. Ralph Bunche. According to the file, Dr. Bunche was part of America’s first major intelligence agency, known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which eventually became the CIA.
During World War II, Dr. Bunche worked for the OSS and provided intelligence on African geography and tribal developments, analyzing which African tribes would favor the United States and which would favor the Germans, and how to use this information to push the German army out of North Africa. During World War II, Dr. Bunche served as Chief of the Africa Section. His academic background made him one of the United States government’s premier experts on Africa during World War II, helping the U.S. in its efforts against German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, aka “The Desert Fox,” through the use of military manuals and intelligence materials, including photos he developed for the Pentagon.
His work was so compelling that he was transferred to the State Department in 1944, the same year Rommel, an individual Bunche had to implement in his strategic analysis reports, was pushed out of Africa. With the assistance of Bunche and returning to Germany, Rommel was forced to commit suicide after becoming implicated in the events surrounding the attempt to kill Adolf Hitler.
Direct Geopolitical Impact on the World – WWII: Bunche’s manuals and intelligence work assisted the U.S. Army in its campaign against “ the evil Axis ” forces in North Africa and helped provide the staging area needed to invade Sicily and the Italian mainland. Before directly challenging Nazi Germany in Europe, according to the National Army Museum, Winston Churchill did not want to directly fight Germany at the outset of this strategy; he wanted Allied forces to gain battlefield experience by fighting in North Africa. From North Africa, Allied forces entered Italy through Sicily.
The irony of this was that America’s entrance into Italy would ultimately have an impact on Dr. Bunche’s childhood community South Central L.A. The United States military worked out arrangements involving the Italian Mafia in connection with the Allied campaign in Sicily. Mafia figures helped facilitate movement and local cooperation as Allied forces traversed the country. In exchange, Sicilian organized crime networks were later positioned to participate in the development of what became known as the French Connection, a drug-smuggling operation that flooded portions of the East and West Coasts with heroin.
The West Coast impact included South Central Los Angeles neighborhoods on the east side and urban Black communities farther north in the Bay Area, according to records associated with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), a former federal narcotics agency that fought drug distribution from 1930 to 1968.
Geopolitical Impact on the World – Middle East: According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Bunche warned the world that the refugee problem had to be addressed before there could be a lasting peace. He emphasized the need to address the displacement of Arabs by Israel and the larger refugee crisis created by the conflict. That region remains engulfed in conflict today, reflecting the consequences Bunche warned could follow if these foundational problems were not resolved. He was ignored, and al-Qaeda cited the support the United States has with Israel in the Middle East as one of their grievances, according to the 1998 Fatwa. A religious decree released in 1998 by Osama Bin Laden.
Alvin Ailey, Class of 1948, and the Cold War, 1945 – 1989
Alvin Ailey and his work became a bridge for global diplomacy. The Cold War was not defined primarily by direct, mass warfare between the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead, the two nations existed as global adversaries, and among their weapons were culture, the arts, ideology, and competing visions of what society should represent.
During the Cold War, the world became a chessboard, according to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski; both gentlemen were advisers to U.S. Presidents. A global chessboard on which the United States and the Soviet Union attempted to sell themselves, their political systems, and their cultural values to Third World countries around the world. The Soviet Union repeatedly criticized the United States over the suppression of African Americans and the limited civil rights afforded to Black Americans. This presented the United States with a serious problem as it attempted to portray itself internationally as the leader of democracy and freedom.
To counter those accusations, the State Department contacted Alvin Ailey’s dance group and sent the company on an international tour, including performances connected to the Soviet world. Ailey was able to create dance themes that subliminally portrayed the struggles, experiences, resilience, and cultural lives of African Americans in the United States.
Many Russian audiences were familiar with the broader racial issues occurring in America and understood the messages being communicated through Ailey’s work. After Ailey’s dance group completed its ballet-style performance in the Soviet Union, the response was extraordinary. There were reportedly 33 curtain calls. Russian audience members refused to leave the theater, demonstrating the enormous cultural impact that Ailey and his dancers were able to achieve in a country that was one of America’s principal geopolitical adversaries during the Cold War.
Through dance, culture, and the lived experiences of African Americans, Alvin Ailey’s work became part of a much larger geopolitical struggle over how the United States presented itself to the world and how people around the world understood American democracy, race, culture, and freedom.
The United States used Ailey to sell the world an image that “we are not a bad country, we treat our African Americans as equals, and we have this African American dance company traveling all over the world to represent us.” What the United States did not realize was that Ailey’s choreographed movements were a tool of subversion, a secret message to oppressed people of the world that we are not happy. Prior to his tour of spreading cultural diplomacy through his dance company, Ailey was approached by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, and they warned him not to engage in homosexual activities or he l would be dealt with upon his return. They forgot to mention to avoid choreography rooted in the Black cultural experience, blues, and spirituals that embody both the struggles and the resilience of African Americans. Thomas Jefferson High was a school filled with magnificent brilliance.
