As with Twilight Zone and Star Trek, the best EC stories had social consciousness as an under-pinning. Shock SuspenStories #5 (July 1952) features just such a tale, titled simply “Hate!”. Written (of course) by William Gaines Jr and Al Feldstein, it features a jew-hating neighborhood in America and focuses on John Smith, the “protagonist”.
John goes along with his neighbors, inflicting increasing harassment on their latest Jewish neighbors, ultimately climaxing with the haters lighting the house on fire in an attempt to scare them out. The victims try to flee the fire, but ultimately die.
Then comes the twist: John’s mother happens to be visiting and drops the bombshell in front of everyone that John was adopted from Jewish parents.
What follows is a beautiful and painful montage of isolation, dawning wisdom, and increasing violence against John and culminates with a narration that could have come straight from Rod Serling’s mouth:
Apparently Shocking Suspenstories had many moral tales such as this one and always as the second story in the magazine. It is amazing to see the same message that was essentially told in American History X repeated here fifty years prior… and it is sad to see that basically seventy years later we still have all of these same problems.