by Gerald Horne
Facing the Rising Sun
Facing the Rising Sun
African Americans, Japan, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity
Gerald Horne
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2018 by New York University
All rights reserved
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ISBN: 978-1-4798-4859-1
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Contents
Introduction
1. Japan Rises/Negroes Cheer
2. Harlem, Addis Ababa—and Tokyo
3. Japan Establishes a Foothold in Black America
4. White Supremacy Loses “Face”
5. Pro-Tokyo Negroes Convicted and Imprisoned
6. Japanese Americans Interned, U.S. Negroes Next?
7. “Brown Americans” Fight “Brown Japanese” in the Pacific War?
8. Aftermath
Notes
Index
About the Author
Introduction
The man who would become Malcolm X was dissembling.
He was in Manhattan during World War II and was being interrogated by the authorities about the possibility of being conscripted by the military, a prospect he surely wanted to avoid. He knew that Army intelligence in Harlem was quite sensitive about the possibility of inadvertently drafting pro-Tokyo Negroes. So, he said, “I started noising around that I was frantic to join” the “Japanese Army.” Yes, he enthused, “I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill up crackers!” At that point “the psychiatrist’s blue pencil dropped and his professional manner fell off in all directions.”1
His dissembling had to be taken seriously for at least two reasons: in preceding decades, Japan had made aggressive overtures to win over the beleaguered U.S. Negro community and the Japanese military had made startling advances in the Asia-Pacific theater. Moreover, Malcolm Little was hardly singular in his reluctance to join the war-torn military. By late 1943, African Americans accounted for a whopping 35 percent of the nation’s delinquent registrants, and between 1941 and 1946, thousands of Black men were imprisoned for not complying with the Selective Service Act.2
It may have been asking too much to expect persecuted U.S. Negroes to unquestioningly throw in their lot with the nation that had pulverized them. In short, pro-Tokyo sentiment was perceived as widespread among U.S. Negroes; this perception was propelled by guilty fear that this oppressed group would seize the moment of war for retribution and retaliation. Even the staid NAACP leader Walter White felt constrained to deny the “astounding and disturbing statement” that “actual proof was available to support the fact that the NAACP was receiving considerable subsidy from the Japanese government.”3 If White had been more forthcoming, however, he would have admitted that he had termed Yasuichi Hikida “my very good friend”; this “friend” had attended Columbia University and was widely thought to be one of Tokyo’s chief U.S. agents.4 He lived in Harlem, wrote an unpublished biography of the Negro hero Toussaint L’Ouverture of Haiti, and had one of the finest collections of books on African Americans in private hands.5
Walter Karig, who had made the initial inquiry about Tokyo-NAACP ties that White was forced to deny, provided a tepid affirmation: “I have no knowledge that the NAACP is receiving ‘substantial’ or any other kind of subsidy from the Japanese,” he wrote.6
Disturbing events in Illinois would have confirmed his most febrile fears. It was on or about 7 December 1941 when Willie “Pretty Stockyard” Cole rushed through the front door of Nelson Sykes’s Brass Rail Saloon at 329 East 47th Street in Chicago, yelling frantically, “The colored folks have bombed Pearl Harbor! The colored folks have bombed Pearl Harbor!” In reply an inebriated “Broke” Hunter, standing at the end of the bar, interrupted Willie’s screaming with his own, shouting, “I know the white folks are going to give me a steady job now.” He was interrupted in turn by “Fat” Clark proclaiming, “Amen. . . . I recall my father tellin’ me how much overtime money colored people made during the last big war.” The more elevated Dempsey Travis, in assessing these excited responses, calmly declared that “some Blacks experienced a vicarious pleasure from the thought that ‘Charlie’ was getting his ass kicked by some ‘colored’ people.” He recollected that in South Chicago there was a group “known as ‘the Moors’ who were actually pro-Japanese”—and they were hardly alone.7
The attitude glimpsed by Travis was not unique. In January 1942 a meeting of U.S. Negro leaders voted 36–5, with 15 abstaining, that their community was not 100 percent behind the war against Japan. A 1942 poll found that 18 percent of Black New Yorkers said they would be better off under the Japanese; an additional 31 percent declared that their treatment would be the same; and only 28 percent said it would be worse.8 An undated U.S. military investigation (that was likely conducted during the height of the Pacific War) found that “between eighty and ninety percent of the American colored population who had any views on the subject, at all, were pro-Japanese.”9
The young Brooklyn pianist Randy Weston recalled later that after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, “the Americans”—meaning Euro-Americans in the United States—“were so shook up they panicked, and since they needed all the workers they could get for the war effort, for the first time they allowed blacks to work in the defense plants. . . . Before that, all black folks were allowed to do was sweep floors and be servants, they weren’t even allowed to drive a truck.” Now, however, they could “make some steady money,” providing further incentive for African Americans to be thankful to Tokyo. Subsequently, this illustrious keyboardist observed that during the war “my brother-in-law had told me about how the Japanese snipers” in Okinawa “wouldn’t mess with the brothers,” meaning African Americans like himself.10
In Washington, D.C., Elmer Carroll was judged to be a draft dodger after war erupted. Carroll, according to a journalist, said he was a “brother to the Japs and refused to fight against them,” despite authorities’ efforts to convince him that the “Moslems” (the religious grouping to which he presumably belonged) were a “fighting people and had been so for thousands of years,” and thus he should have no hesitation to join the U.S. military.11 Months later, in Kansas City, a reporter described “a group of turbaned ‘Moslems’” who “were jailed” for evading conscription. “All of those arrested gave ages approaching 100, contending this made them immune to draft registration.”12 New Orleans witnessed a “draft evasion riot” in which twenty-one Negroes were arrested. The defendants, said to be members of the International Reassemble of the Church of Freedom League, contended that military service was contrary to their faith. Ethelbert Anself Boraster, age forty, a native of Belize, was depicted as “general messenger” or leader of the group.13 Numerous Euro-American men were also seeking deferments from military service, all of which was potentially compromising to national security.14
***
W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and other Negro leader
s may have had conflicts among themselves, but all looked to Tokyo as evidence that modernity was not solely the province of those of European descent and that the very predicates of white supremacy were senseless.15 However, what was striking about pro-Tokyo sentiment among African Americans was that it cut sharply across class lines: it was prevalent in the intellectual salons of Harlem, the plants of East St. Louis, and the fields of the Missouri boot-heel, stretching south into Arkansas and Mississippi.
Du Bois, the “father of Pan-Africanism,” saw the beginning of the end of white supremacy in Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 since, as he wrote, “The Negro problem in America is but a local phase of a world problem,”16 and as the world changed, even the staunchest Jim Crow advocate would be compelled to retreat. A few years later, Du Bois argued that “the fight of the Japanese for equal rights is similar to the fight the Negroes are making for their rights.”17
Booker T. Washington expressed a view shared widely among U.S. Negro leaders when he told a Japanese journalist in 1912,
Speaking for the masses of my own race in this country I think I am safe in saying that there is no other race outside of America whose fortunes the Negro peoples of this country have followed with greater interest or admiration. . . . In no other part of the world have the Japanese people a larger number of admirers and well-wishers than among the black people of the United States.18
Besieged African Americans felt the need to look abroad for succor and support, following the sage advice of Du Bois and Washington alike. On 2 July 1917 gangs of Euro-American men roamed through East St. Louis and systematically beat, shot, hanged, and immolated African Americans.19 Homes were torched. Some victims were lynched from telephone poles, left to sway in the breeze.20 However, there was a new dynamic at play not necessarily contemplated by the lynch mobs. Le Roy Bundy, charged with spearheading the defense of the besieged African Americans in this industrial town, later joined Marcus Garvey’s organization, quickly becoming “Knight Commander of the Distinguished Order of Ethiopia” and then Garvey’s “First Assistant.” During the 1917 unrest, Bundy was accused of being “commander” of a well-armed “Negro army.”21 Soon East St. Louis was to become the de facto capital of pro-Tokyo sentiment in the United States, and those with past ties to Garvey served as chief lieutenants.
In short, Tokyo catered to U.S. Negroes, knowing well how Jim Crow had wounded them. Reportedly, it was during the early 1920s that the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo ordered that all captains of oceangoing Japanese passenger ships afford African Americans preference in every way connected with their travel.22
The Negro musician Buck Clayton was struck by this preference when he arrived in Japan during the interwar years. The Negroes “were the only ones allowed to disembark. All the white passengers had to remain aboard while the ship was in dock,” he marveled, “while we Blacks were allowed to go ashore and have a ball.”23 Of course, even the U.S. authorities knew that in Oregon “Japanese hotels” were sites where “Negroes have been permitted to sleep at the same time being disallowed in white hotels.”24 The Negro journalist Lucius Harper obligingly noted that “the black man” was accorded “equal privileges in many of the cafes and hotels under [Japanese and Japanese American] ownership.”25 Negroes accustomed to Jim Crow penalties, especially and onerously when traveling, were justifiably impressed by this turn of events.
Sensing the direction of political winds, the U.S. military aviation strategist William “Billy” Mitchell wrote in “confidential” terms of the “Pacific Problem.” The “policy of the United States and in fact of all the white countries having their shores washed by the waters of the Pacific Ocean, is to keep their soil, their institutions and their manner of living free from the ownership, the domination and the customs of the Orientals.” For “eventually in their search for existence the white and yellow races will be brought into armed conflict to determine which shall prevail.” Thus, he continued menacingly, “we are faced with a problem much greater than it appears on the surface, that of maintaining not only the political supremacy but also the very existence of the white race.” “The rumblings of this coming strife,” he concluded, “have ceased to be inaudible whispers but are the loud protests of the Japanese people, the vanguard of the Asiatics, over the exclusion laws, the land laws and their unequal treatment at the hands of our citizens.”26
Pro-Tokyo sentiment among African Americans represented a severe challenge to U.S. national security as constructed by the likes of Mitchell. As historian John Dower has argued, though Germany is what comes to mind when many in the United States think about racism in World War II, it was Tokyo that “stirred the deepest recesses of white [supremacy] and provoked a response bordering on the apocalyptic.”27
***
The African American dancer T. C. Dunson had achieved a measure of success in Singapore, but was forced to escape when Japanese forces invaded the British colony in 1942. Writing from New Orleans later that year, Dunson recalled that he was playing mah-jong when he heard massive explosions: “[I] thought it was an earthquake,” he said, as panic descended on the city. The Japanese military “said they had come to liberate the Asiatics from the ‘white devils,’” invoking rhetoric that had become increasingly popular among Black Nationalists, in New Orleans not least. He was agog to see that some of the previously preening European colonizers were so shocked by the “strain” of this abrupt turn of events that they “went insane.”
But even this hardly prepared him for what he was to witness next. As he scanned the skies one morning, it seemed as if the heavens were raining men: he saw “bodies of [dead] British soldiers on parachutes. They were nothing but bloody masses of clothes and pulp,” tossed from planes by Japanese military men, determined to impress upon one and all in the most shocking fashion that a new order had descended.28
Dunson may have known that New Orleans was one of the many centers of pro-Tokyo sentiment among U.S. Negroes. Presumably he described this ghastly sight to his fellow Negroes in New Orleans, serving to undermine further the magic of white supremacy, which ultimately depended upon the notion that the alleged “ruling race” was born to dominate. Beyond the shores of the Crescent City, the ugly sights of Singapore had left an impressive imprint upon Africans.
What was troubling to Washington was that Black Nationalist sentiment could act as a transmission belt propelling pro-Tokyo sentiment more generally, potentially jeopardizing important global alliances. When Marcus Garvey—the Jamaican who came to embody Black Nationalism—died just as world war had descended on Europe, A. J. Maphike, in faraway South Africa, told the left-leaning Guardian in Cape Town that this was an “irreparable loss to the African races [sic]” and mentioned that his sixteen-year-old son was named after the Jamaican leader.29 About eighteen months later, when Singapore fell to Japanese invaders, hundreds of Africans met in this same city and, according to the reporter present, were “deluded into believing that the Japanese may bring them freedom from colour bars” and “may even wish for a Japanese victory.”30 Ahmed Kathrada was to become a leader of South African Communists and one of Nelson Mandela’s closest comrades. As Japanese troops began their invasion of Singapore, he confessed unashamedly that he “derive[d] great satisfaction from every blow struck by Japanese against the British in Asia.”31
The Communist leader I. O. Horvitch conceded reluctantly that there was a “fairly widespread . . . belief that Japan will come to South Africa and free the Non-Europeans [sic].”32 Like their U.S. counterparts, Communists in South Africa strained to undermine the appeal of Japan among those of African descent,33 suggestive of the magnetic attraction of Tokyo. Understandably, the consensus among the leadership of the racist regime in Pretoria during this fraught time was that their greatest fear was an invasion by Japanese forces accompanied by a hearty welcome from Africans.34 The shaken South African leader Jan Smuts said that he would consider the theretofore unthinkable—arming Africans—to thwart a Japanese invasion,35 a monumental decision th
at potentially could imperil white supremacy, and that was precisely the import of the “threat” from Tokyo.
The threat to white supremacy was felt in the United States as well, as exemplified in the federal charges brought against a supposed front group of Japan. In U.S. v. Pacific Movement of the Eastern World (1943), prosecutors asserted that “at the instigation of the Black Dragon Society of Japan,” an organization of Nipponese ultra-patriots, the alleged “front” group had been organized in “chapters or units” in Chicago, East St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Detroit, Gary; Shaw and Greenville, Mississippi; Tulsa, Muskogee, and Boynton, Oklahoma, and elsewhere, notably in Dixie. The group had been incorporated as early as 1934, but it was just one of many pro-Tokyo organizations that had sunk roots among U.S. Negroes and were accused of storing weapons in anticipation of a Japanese invasion.36
The federal prosecutor recalled a chilling episode from a few years earlier, when “to an alarming extent the colored people [were] accumulating arms and ammunition” in downstate Illinois, not far from Cairo. “The white folks were lined up [on] one side of the road,” he recounted, “and the colored folks on the other and they all had high powered rifles.” The “darkies in my hometown,” he recalled, “picked out the farms they were going to take over when the invasion by Japan occurred.” Speaking for the prosecutorial team, H. Grady Vien cautioned, “this is a very secretive matter” that should “not” be “discuss[ed]” with “anyone at all.”37
Due south, in Grenada, Mississippi, was the headquarters of what was described as a statewide “secret Negro organization formed to ‘end white rule over Negro farmers,’” which had led to “the death of two white plantation owners at the hands of Negro sharecroppers.” The National Federation of Colored Farmers was blamed, because hundreds of Negroes had attended its convention in Memphis shortly before this bloody episode. It was unclear whether this incident was driven by the rise of pro-Tokyo militancy among Negroes.38 In October 1942 the FBI office in Memphis stated carefully that there was “no indication of organized sabotage among Negro citizens” and that “Negro leaders were emphatic in their denial of foreign underground activities.”39 Left unsaid was whether there was “sabotage” that was not “organized” or “underground activities” not directly tied to “foreign” sources.
