by Gerald Horne
After Washington placed inordinate pressure on the Negro press after December 1941, Negro journalists often turned with a vengeance against pro-Tokyo forces that had previously been countenanced. An organ of the Negro press was quite concerned with the alleged “‘Yellow Peril’ [which] has spread to the black belts of America,” describing the discovery in Cleveland of “a network of Japanese spies who during the past ten years have been preying consistently”; ditto for “the Negro populations in . . . Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Baltimore, Canton, Akron, St. Louis and Detroit.” The target of concern was the PMEW, which supposedly was designed to “transport Negroes to Japan,” where “they would be treated as equals, get better jobs and be permitted to marry Japanese women.”85
Pro-Tokyo sentiment was subtle, perhaps unintended, suggesting that it was permeating among U.S. Negroes. When the hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” described as the “Negro National Anthem,” proclaimed, “Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, / Let us march on till victory is won,” it is probable that a salute to Japan was not the explicit purpose. Still, lyricist James Weldon Johnson had visited Tokyo and, like other NAACP leaders, was impressed by what he saw.86 It was Johnson who contended that Japan was “perhaps the greatest hope for the colored races of the world,” a line that mirrored Tokyo’s precisely.87 When one of the leading Negro businesses in the nation, North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, used “Facing the Rising Sun” as the title of its report to policyholders, most likely it was a coincidence that this was congruent with prevailing pro-Tokyo sentiment.88
Of course, in today’s atmosphere, it is less troublesome and simpler to be accused of being a “coincidence theorist” than a “conspiracy theorist.” In light of U.S. Negroes’ fascination with Japan and their invoking of this island state in order to discredit the essence of white supremacy, it should not be forgotten that African Americans were well aware that the rising sun was Japan’s key symbol.
The United States was in a titanic struggle with Japan and its allies, and national unity and singleness of purpose were mandatory; at least, that was the dominant thinking of the era. The widespread pro-Tokyo sentiment among U.S. Negroes, propelled as it was by almost casual brutalization, was corrosive to the war effort and in retrospect could have spelled an outcome different than what occurred in August 1945. Surely, the wiser among us realized that this kind of brutalization must be halted, if only for reasons of national security. Certainly understanding of this complicated process has been hampered by the fact that, reportedly, an estimated 70 percent of wartime records in Japan were destroyed.89
The original drafts and memoranda detailing the ouster of Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States were destroyed during the war too, which, for purposes here, is even more unfortunate, since they may have been revelatory about this community’s ties to U.S. Negroes.90
It is easier, as a partial result, to describe these Black Nationalists organizationally, which is the bent in this book. Still, ideologically, it is fair to say that these groups prioritized “race” over class and gender, even when they had a religious orientation. They viewed Euro-Americans with grave skepticism; some even described them as devils. Some privileged Africa, others saw themselves as “Asiatic,” and still others thought it would be worthwhile to carve out a homeland in North America. Few foresaw their redemption emerging in the United States as then constituted.
To reiterate, the argument in this book is that just as historians have pointed to the global correlation of forces—the Cold War, for example—in explicating how and why Jim Crow retreated, a similar argument can be made about the Pacific War.91 Even before the surrender ceremony on the battleship Missouri, the United States was moving toward eroding restrictions on voting by African Americans.92 Generally, the argument about the impact of World War II stresses the sacrifice of Negro soldiers and their reluctance to return to the status quo ante (though this was not the first time such a sacrifice occurred) and the national revulsion after Nazi atrocities were exposed. This is not inaccurate—but the point in these pages is that the Pacific War and Japan’s challenge merit more attention in analyses of the war’s impact,93 particularly when one considers what one scholar terms the “new paradigm,” which “grants that Japan had a chance to win the Pacific War.”94 A fortiori, this prospect would have been even more likely if pro-Tokyo plotting by African Americans had gained more traction than it did.
The Negro publisher Carl Murphy was aware of the impact of the war on the fate of U.S. Negroes. “I have heard several persons declare that racial antagonisms are increasing,” he wrote in April 1942, “but I know what reforms the necessities of war can bring. I am satisfied that this war means nought but good for all of us. Out of the Civil War we got emancipation. During World War I we moved a million colored people out of the South. Out of World War II I predict will evolve a second emancipation.”95 “This war will be of transcendental moment to all darker races,” affirmed another important Negro publisher, Claude A. Barnett: “We do not wish to make it a war of color,” he wrote, referring to Tokyo’s inflamed rhetoric, “but circumstances seem to be doing that for us.”96
The authorities were well aware of the catalytic role of the Negro press, which they perceived as subversive.97 In 1943 Barnett complained bitterly to the attorney general about his federal agency “interfering with the mail addressed” to him; perhaps sarcastically, he told Francis Biddle that he didn’t mind if his mail was opened, as long as it was delivered on time.98
That is, a long-term problem presented by both slavery and Jim Crow is that, in alienating a substantial percentage of the U.S. population, U.S. rulers made those oppressed quite susceptible to the blandishments of real and imagined antagonists of Washington, to the detriment of national security.99 By August 1945 this long-term trend had arrived at a crucial turning point. Finally, during the Cold War the edifice of oppression began to crumble—but I argue here that the seeds for this epochal trend were watered vigorously during the Pacific War, when so many Negroes expressed solidarity with Japan at a time when it was engaged in a death match with the United States.
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After the defeat of Japan, many of the Black Nationalists who previously had proclaimed from the rooftops that they were “Asiatic” switched seamlessly to declaiming that actually they were not only “African” but more “African” than thou. The pro-Tokyo proclamations of NAACP leaders like William Pickens were also conveniently forgotten. This too was part of the ironic evolution of the man once known as Malcolm Little, but more than this, it was part of the evolution of a people once known as U.S. Negroes who were desperately seeking global leverage to countenance the unfavorable domestic balance of forces they were compelled to confront.
This leads to a final note: Readers should be aware that if I had been alive during the Pacific War, I would probably have clashed ideologically and otherwise with the leading African American characters in this book. This is due in no small measure to the fact that Black Nationalists chose to collaborate with white supremacists to oust African Americans from the United States. In the 1930s Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi sponsored a bill to this effect, which was endorsed by leading Garveyites and other nationalists, who petitioned energetically to ensure that his measure was passed.100 “I have been instructed by Mr. Marcus Garvey of London,” wrote C. C. Edwards, a colleague of the Jamaican from North Carolina, “to petition for the passage of the bill” demanding “repatriation to Africa.”101
As a result, when Garvey died, Senator Bilbo—who could fairly be called the “prime minister of Jim Crow”—was sorrowful: “I regret more than I am able to say,” he told a colleague of the Jamaican activist, “the sad passing of Marcus Garvey.”102 G. E. Harris of the Garvey Club of UNIA in New York City called Senator Bilbo a “good friend.”103 Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, a premier Black Nationalist, hailed the Dixiecrat as “one of the best propagandists we have ever read,” embodying the “spirit of Jefferson, Madis
on, Henry Clay, Lincoln,” and others, which she intended as a compliment.104
Garvey’s widow, Amy Jacques Garvey, who exclaimed that she was a “stern believer in Race Integrity,” was also “sincerely interested in the success of the Repatriation Bill,” since “tension between the races is growing wors[e].” Like others, she thought that the migration of Jewish people to Palestine then unfolding was to be emulated by U.S. Negroes migrating “from Gambia to Nigeria.”105 “The Whites and Blacks who realize the need of separation,” wrote J. R. Stewart, Garvey’s Cleveland comrade, “must fight side by side until victory is ours.”106 Stewart was simply echoing the mandate of Garvey himself, who had told Senator Bilbo in 1938 that “we shall do all that is necessary on our part in helping you” with this bill,107 a measure that he “wholeheartedly support[ed].”108
Mittie Maude Lena Gordon of Chicago, a leader in this “resettlement” movement, told Bilbo in late 1939 that “we have held open air meetings throughout the summer,” though the “opposition was great. . . . I have made two trips to St. Louis,” then a de facto capital of the movement. Certainly, I wholly understand why there was a desire to flee the United States. Gordon said then of her hometown that “there are 109,000 families on relief, underfed, dying in a land of plenty,” as “we have suffered seven years in this Depression and it grows worse each year”; thus, “our hearts are broken, our eyes are filled with tears.” This eagerness to abandon the United States was heightened by a like wish to “escape the white man’s war,” then erupting in Europe, since “it is not our war.”109 Because of the “starvation and death we are facing,” she asserted, she planned to contact the American Colonization Society—thought to have been a relic of the nineteenth century—for assistance and pledged that “we shall do our best to bring a million people to Washington for the next session” to press for the bill’s passage.110 Carlos Cooks, a New York–based ideological soulmate of Gordon, informed Bilbo that his hearty band was “ready with speakers to swing into action at any moment” on behalf of this bill.111
Bilbo had his detractors, of course. J. A. Rogers, the popular columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, captured the sentiment of many Negroes when he hailed those who blocked Bilbo’s attempt to speak in Harlem and termed those who “flirt with him” the “lunatic fringe.” Garvey’s “biggest mistake,” he reminded those with short memories, was “his flirting with the Klan” years earlier, and now this gross blunder was being repeated.112 Rogers was reacting to the invitation extended by Carlos Cooks of the UNIA’s Advance Division in New York City, which had invited the Dixiecrat to “come to Harlem and speak to a Negro audience” in order to “commemorate the birthday of that great father of African colonization, the Hon. Marcus Garvey,” a gesture driven by the assertion that “thousands of inquiries from interested Negroes” had been expressed in support of repatriation.113
The Bilbo supporters in Harlem may not have recognized that some of Bilbo’s Jim Crow defenders thought that after momentum for “voluntary” resettlement had gained strength, it should then be made—it was stressed—“OBLIGATORY,” which would have meant “DENATIONALIZATION OF NEGROES, including MULATTOES” and then “in certain cases sterilization” of the remaining population.114 Writing—appropriately—from the Hotel Robert E. Lee in San Antonio, F. L. Scofield thought that Jim Crow advocates should “start this ‘Back to Africa Movement’ by the repeal of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments as the 18th [pro-alcohol prohibition] was repealed when Public Opinion demanded it”; this—along with the “weapon of divine power”—was needed to “offset this minority Negro vote.”115 When Wyatt Dougherty of the Educational and Benevolent Society of People of African Descent requested a “broadening of your Proposed Bill” by “adding a feature of giving fifty-dollars per month pension for life to all persons who accept the [Bilbo] Plan and leave the United States for Africa,” the Mississippi senator was curiously quiescent, perhaps surmising that this amendment sounded dangerously close to a reparative measure.116
Yet when Senator Bilbo spoke in Congress on his bill, sitting prominently in the Senate gallery was Gordon, described by a journalist as a “portly mulatto from Chicago”; moreover, she had brought “some 300 of her followers who mostly are on relief (as she is)” along with her.117
These Harlemites and Chicagoans seemed unaware that, as Washington insider Joseph Alsop observed in 1938, “Germany’s race consciousness” was “lauded by Bilbo in [a] harangue to [the] Senate” on his resettlement bill, which did not bode well for U.S. Negroes.118 By 1944, as the fate of the planet hung in the balance, Bilbo addressed a joint session of the Mississippi legislature, where he seemed to hail Berlin’s fighting prowess while—prematurely—denigrating Moscow’s.119 Likewise, though a triumph for the pro-Tokyo Negroes would have unsettled the fate of those like Bilbo, it was this leading Dixiecrat who congratulated the pro-Japan seditionist he called “Captain James Thornhill,” telling him to “keep up the good work.”120
Segregationists had difficulty reconciling their more than latent pro-Berlin sentiments with their lack of sympathy for Germany’s ally in Tokyo. “Hitler was guilty when he hooked up with the Japanese,” wrote Joseph Edgar of Arlington, Virginia, bitterly; “like the rumblings of a volcano getting ready to spring into activity, the violations of the Divine Law of Race Segregation continue.”121
Unsurprisingly, the Harlem Communist leader Ben Davis shed no tears when Garvey expired. He proclaimed that “it is to the eternal shame and utter bankruptcy of Marcus Garvey, discredited Negro stooge for the pro-fascist [Neville] Chamberlain government,” that the Jamaican “wants the Negro to become partners with a lyncher, a defiler of the Negro people”; in Bilbo’s copy of Davis’s article, these phrases were all underlined, probably by Bilbo himself, the target of this radical’s invective.122
More than likely, I would have supported the United Nations—that is, the Moscow-Washington-London alliance. However, that leads to a more profound point: history is not merely a story of “good guys” versus “bad guys.” At times—as here—those supportive of the fundamentally flawed cause that was the pro-Tokyo stance during the Pacific War can nonetheless contribute to a more saintly cause: the agonized retreat of Jim Crow. Similarly, after the conclusion of the war, the so-called good guys—the European colonial powers—rushed to reestablish their misguided misrule in Indochina, Indonesia, and other tortured sites, heightening the agony of millions. Likewise, as I suggest in the following pages, many of these Black Nationalists were quite hostile to the sovereign aspirations of China, blinded as they were by the stunning light emitted by the Rising Sun—but by the 1970s, they had reversed field and were in thrall to Mao Zedong. I hope this book contributes to a more complicated reassessment of U.S. history.
Actually, the fraught matter of how race was reworked transcends the Pacific War. As I have argued elsewhere, the formation of the United States in the late eighteenth century marked a formal departure from the European practice that designated religion as a fundamental axis of society.123 That is the good news. The bad news is that “race” became the axis of society. In the twentieth century, the rise of socialism sought to demark class as the axis of society, and this potent trend helped to erode the more egregious aspects of Jim Crow. However, it needs to be stressed that Tokyo’s attempt to batter white supremacy also contributed to a helter-skelter retreat from the more noxious elements of Jim Crow. However, why this retreat was necessary to the global position of U.S. imperialism was not explained adequately, leading to mass uprisings against the new racial order in Little Rock in 1957, Mississippi in the 1960s, Boston in the 1970s, Yonkers almost thirty years ago, and other conflicted sites too numerous to mention. Part of the purpose of this book is to contribute to the discussion of why Jim Crow retreated when it did so as to forestall the recrudescence of even more conflicted sites.
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In 1995 the civil rights icon James Meredith, who was a one-man battering ram against Jim Crow when he enrolled as a student at t
he University of Mississippi in 1962, returned to Japan, where he had resided in 1957 at Tachikawa Air Force Base.124 In 1960, he wrote, “I returned to America inspired by my experience in Japan,” determined to “break the System of White Supremacy in Mississippi and the South.” Like African Americans in previous decades, he too thought that Japan’s very existence was a refutation of the rudiments of white supremacy, providing a lesson well worth studying. Yet even in the final decade of the twentieth century, when Tokyo-Washington relations seemed to have normalized, Meredith felt “certain that when World War Three takes place in the future, our enemy will be Japan.”125 I hope he is wrong—about a cataclysmic war with Japan as antagonist—and I trust that the following pages will provide material to forestall such a catastrophe.
1
Japan Rises/Negroes Cheer
Relations between the United States and Japan began effectively in the 1850s, but by the 1860s Japan had undergone one of the most astonishing turnarounds in world history. The Meiji Restoration placed the island state on the road to capitalism, then imperialism, which had become clear at least by the 1890s and Tokyo’s military assault on China. The United States, which had grown accustomed to bowling over peoples not defined as “white,” beginning with indigenes of the Americas and Africans, found it difficult not to view Japan through a similarly distorted lens. A template was established by the post-U.S. Civil War journey to Japan by former President Ulysses S. Grant, who found it difficult not to view Japan through the prism of the brutal race relations of Dixie.1 Yet anticipating the journey of the cigar-chomping, whiskey-guzzling politico, U.S. Negroes had preceded him in traveling to Japan and seeking to establish ties there.2
