In the early 1940s during World War II, there was a fairly widespread belief among white southerners in the United States that black southerners were in league with Hitler and or with the Japanese. This was on one hand it spoke to the anxieties that were going on in that place in time; whites afraid of people they weren't treating well. But also an echo of earlier conspiracy theories, stories that had been told in the antebellum era about the alleged conspiracies plotting slave revolts.