by Gerald Horne
***
As if he were sending a signal, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the United States disembarked on Japanese shores on 14 July 1853, he was “guarded” “by a couple of tall jet-black Negroes, completely armed.”3 Perhaps this was a signal that if formidable Africans could be subjugated by Euro-Americans, Japanese could hardly resist. These connections did not go unnoticed among U.S. Negroes, who carefully watched Japan’s attempts to maintain autonomy and independence in a world dominated by those defined as “white.” Perhaps the periodical that contained the most information on Japan was the organ of the African Methodist Episcopal faith, the Christian Recorder, published in Philadelphia and founded in the pivotal year 1852.4
Arriving in Japan near that same time, the U.S. poet, literary critic, translator, and diplomat Bayard Taylor was struck by the “mild, effeminate-featured Japanese” he encountered. Emerging from a society obsessed with color, Taylor was keen to note that those he met had a “complexion” that was “dark olive, but not too dark,” with a “ruddy tinge on the lips and cheeks.” Anticipating trends that were to emerge full-blown in the twenty-first century, Taylor detected “their dislike to the Chinese” in their midst, and almost immediately was displeased with the “cunning and duplicity of the people with whom we had to deal.”5
Townsend Harris, one of the first U.S. diplomats to alight in Japan, took a position on miscegenation there that was not dissimilar to mainstream U.S. thinking at home. “The children of Europeans by native women are a queer race—always warmhearted and hospitable,” he wrote with undue optimism: “they are never more happy than when showing their hospitality to white persons. They resemble our Negroes in the love of stilted, considering magniloquence and eloquence as synonyms. They always try to secure the hand of a white for their daughters.”6 Equating Japanese with Negroes—a “nonwhite” people who had been subjugated—did not bode well for Tokyo-Washington relations.
Just after the U.S. Civil War concluded in 1865, Secretary of State William Seward purportedly asked for “intelligence” and “advice” concerning a recent dispatch from Japanese diplomats. He referred to the Japanese as “dark complexioned barbarian[s],” linking this rising power with Africans and Native Americans. But even then a difference was slowly emerging, distinguishing these mighty Asians, as it was felt that “you see at once that he is a man you cannot trifle with” or “he will get the better of you.”7
This sage advice was not followed consistently. As early as 1875, the United States was moving to curb immigration of Japanese nationals to its shores.8 By 1892 the U.S. high court ruled that Washington could refuse entry to those of Japanese origin.9 By 1893 Dr. H. Saburo Hayashi was warning prospective Japanese migrants that they would be “hated and mistreated by Americans,” explaining that “Japanese are also suffering from racial discrimination,” not unlike the Negroes, with whom they were frequently grouped. By 1894 it was adjudged that those of Japanese origin could be barred from naturalization.10
All this exacerbated tensions when Washington and Tokyo began to cross swords in late nineteenth-century Hawaii, which culminated in a U.S. takeover of the archipelago and an attempt to relegate those of Japanese origin to second-class status.11 This clash was part of a larger regional confrontation that included the U.S. overthrow of the doddering Spanish empire in the Philippines. It was here that the conflation of all those not deemed to be “white” accelerated, a process that reached an ironic efflorescence when Tokyo recruited Filipinos to be their primary agents among African Americans. This process was facilitated when almost immediately with the onset of the U.S. war in the Philippines, “Pan-Asianism” began to take root in Japan, and those of this persuasion began to smuggle weapons to islanders fighting the invaders.12 Tokyo began to back resistance fighters in the Philippines almost to the very day of the first landing of U.S. troops.13
When Filipinos were grouped alongside U.S. Negroes, it was a simple step to include Japanese within the same rubric. Unsurprisingly, Thomas Edison, one of the early cineastes, deployed Negroes to play Filipinos in reenactments of the 1898 war.14 As the United States sought to subdue Filipino resistance, a chord was struck early on that was to resonate in Japan. As early as 1899 an analyst declared that “what takes place in the South concerning the treatment of Negroes is known in the Philippines”; islanders were “told of America’s treatment of the black population and are made to feel it is better to die fighting than become subject to a nation where [the] colored man is lynched and burned alive indiscriminately.”15
The conflation reached new heights—or depths—when Senator John Morgan of Alabama sought to deport a sizeable portion of the U.S. Negro population to the Philippines. The legislator felt that Filipinos accepted U.S. Negroes more readily than did their “white” counterparts in Dixie, which may have been true.16 Strikingly, the militant Negro journalist T. Thomas Fortune also sought to engineer a mass migration of African Americans to the archipelago.17 Like so many other plans to oust U.S. Negroes, this one too emerged stillborn.18
Nevertheless, given the role that some Filipinos were to play as agents for Tokyo among African Americans, it is worth noting that Fortune was not alone in noticing that Washington frequently dispatched Dixiecrats to Manila to administer its newest colony.19 Many of these colonial viceroys had served the so-called Confederate States of America faithfully, giving rise to the notion that the United States had exported racial contradictions to Manila and, with the adroit aid of nearby Tokyo, was preparing the ground for a “global race war.”20 Rebels in the islands did not hesitate to play upon these tensions when they made special appeals to Negro soldiers stationed in the Philippines to join the insurgency: they noted specifically the rise of lynching in Dixie.21 Apparently such appeals swayed the U.S. Negro David Fagen, who was among the soldiers who defected to the side of the rebels.22
Fagen is an exemplar; his taking up arms against the United States in the archipelago was a precursor of the Japanese-Filipino-Negro axis that was to emerge full-blown by the 1930s. (Intriguingly, a large group of these Negro soldiers—members of a military band—visited Yokohama in 1900.) He was twenty-four years old when he enlisted in the U.S. military in 1895 and became one of 30,000 U.S. soldiers sent to the Philippines by the end of the century. After defecting, Fagen proudly served as a lieutenant in the Philippine revolutionary army under General Urbano Lucano, then rose to the rank of captain under Brigadier General Jose Alejandrino and fought against his former U.S. regiment at least eight times, causing his former comrades to post a heavy reward for his capture, dead or alive. Fagen was a harbinger of the pro-Tokyo Black Nationalism that emerged: General Alejandrino asserted that Fagen’s most outstanding characteristic was his mortal hatred of those defined as “white.” The general did not allow Fagen to guard Euro-American prisoners after he felt compelled to kill a number that he was tasked to guard; he claimed that he did so after they attempted an escape, but was investigated by his Filipino comrades because of his reputation for animus toward those who hailed from his erstwhile homeland. Fagen spoke Tagalog, a local language, allowing him to integrate more effectively into the society there. Fagen and his new comrades sought arms and ammunition from Tokyo. His new comrades included other U.S. Negroes, since dozens deserted from U.S. forces between 1899 and 1902 and about twelve joined the insurgency. Of the 6,000 Negro soldiers who served during this brutal conflict, about 1,200 chose not to return home, but instead continued to reside in the Philippines, where they formed businesses and families alike. The Negroes who served there also had the highest desertion rates of African American troops since the formal organization of racially segregated regiments during the 1860s.23
In response, during the war in the Philippines, islanders tended to specifically target Euro-American soldiers for attack while exercising restraint when confronting their U.S. Negro counterparts.24
Part of the problem for Washington was difficulty in determining who precisely should be expelled from North America. For e
xample, Senator Anselm McLaurin of Mississippi wanted only “mulattoes” to go, while keeping “our genuine black Negroes here.”25 Assuredly, such malevolent intentions did not go unnoticed. In Boston one contemporaneous commentator leapt to the conclusion that was slowly dawning: that the dastardly plight to which U.S. Negroes were consigned would be the destiny of Filipinos and others in the region. “Do our people see no parallel in all this?” asked Winslow Warren.26
Strikingly, Frank Erb of Pennsylvania, then embroiled in combat in the islands, referred to his murderous activity as “this nigger-fighting business”; the epithet used to designate U.S. Negroes was applied to Filipinos almost effortlessly.27 Naturally, the kind of atrocities visited upon Filipino combatants by U.S. soldiers did not leave African American military men unaffected: they were not exempted from attack at the hands of their erstwhile Euro-American comrades. Those assaulted demanded redress, but as one Euro-American officer concluded, if their demands were to be met, “it is likely that the eight guards from the Southern States would resign in a body.”28 Complicating matters further was the assertion in 1906 that “the Negro troops now being sent to the Philippines will be used exclusively in the island of Mindanao against the Moros, as experience has taught the government that [the] presence of colored troops in the other islands of the archipelago has had an undesirable effect on the natives.”29 On the other hand, given the rise in Islamic sentiments among African Americans that was to flourish in the 1930s and form the backbone of pro-Tokyo stances, sending these armed men solely to the southernmost part of the archipelago, where Moros tended to reside (and Muslims were prevalent), may have been unwise.
As the United States moved westward from the North American mainland and encountered peoples not defined as “white,” inexorably they began to treat them in the despicable manner that mimicked how “nonwhites” were treated at home. This policy boomeranged and served to drive Negroes, Japanese, and Filipinos closer together.
Other Asians took notice too. The more muscular U.S. presence in the region did not escape alert attention. In 1899 a Korean editorialist, noting that the United States and its European allies had “invaded the African continent, enslaving black people or working them to death and stealing all the land,” wondered whether the Asia-Pacific region was next on the list.30
A resonant response to this query was sent in 1905. Escalating global tensions had doubtlessly led Fortune, among others, to conclude that there were signs that the battle of the color line was not to be fought by the Negroes alone, a conclusion made portentously as Japan was in the midst of battering its larger Euro-Asian rival, Russia, during their epochal war in 1905.31
For it was then that Japan indicated further its entrance onto the stage of world powers by resolutely subduing Russia. A number of African Americans, including W. E. B. Du Bois, welcomed this victory as if Negroes were responsible.32 “Japan has produced her Oyama [Iwao],” wrote one Negro journalist, referring to the victorious commander, “and Africa has produced her Hannibal. The two are twins.” Once more an attempt was being made to conflate Africans and Asians—or Japanese more precisely—in a way that would ultimately produce the classic Black Nationalist trope, the “Asiatic Black Man.” “What the Japanese have done,” the journalist continued, “the Negro can do.” Forget Booker T. Washington, the accommodating Negro leader, and look to the militancy of Tokyo instead, was the advice rendered. “Free Thought, civilized, educated Atheistic Africa, the companion of Free Thought, Atheistic Japan, what a theme!” “Our movement is in line also with the International Socialist Labor Movement and also with the European Revolutionary Movement. As for the United States, the Negro owes it nothing. The debt is the other way.”33
Apparently, U.S. Negroes were taking such careful notice of the Tokyo-St. Petersburg war that one Negro reporter was moved to assert, “If the Negro paid as much attention to shaping his own destiny as he does the ‘Jap’ war, he would find less obstacles heaped up against him!”34
Rather quickly, U.S. Negroes began to recognize more than ever that white supremacy was unprincipled to the extent that Washington sought to make limited accommodations for Tokyo and those of Japanese origin, though they could hardly be defined as “white.” In addition to unveiling the frailties of this racialized ideology of power, U.S. Negroes also began to think that the better part of wisdom was to ally with a rising Japan in order to undermine white supremacy. Months after the Japanese victory over Russia, a Negro journalist in Indiana noticed that “when a Japanese marries a white girl, there may be a whisper of surprise and all is over.” Yet when a “Negro obeys the same call of Cupid, it is miscegenation and society is up in arms,” primed for a lynching, even though “the Negro . . . case may be whiter than the aforesaid Jap [sic]. Why the difference?”35 Why indeed? The question of power was one answer; white supremacy was quite willing to yield in the face of a well-armed Tokyo. On the other hand, by 1911, news that a “colored girl and Japanese marry” was not seen as threatening by the white supremacists, though arguably it augured an alliance that could threaten white supremacy.36
That was the conclusion drawn contemporaneously by a Negro writer in Topeka. “Uncle Sam says he loves the Little Yellow Men and will see that they get justice” and “we would [pray] to God that he would say the same things about the Negroes. But [he] has a reason for saying he loves the Japs, for Japan has a navy and a large standing army.” This was comforting in that “we are glad to know that Japan has called a halt on Uncle Sam and his great American White God.” So intimidated was Uncle Sam by the sight of a martial Japan that “he will call some of the states rights law into question,” for example, the segregation of students of Japanese origin in California schools. “We are watching this case carefully,” it was reported, “and the results will be either advantageous to the Negroes and Japanese”—the two disparate communities now yoked—“or disastrous to the United States,” their mutual foe. “This question of white men dominating will soon come to an end,” in any case. “He must expect to place himself on equal footing with all mankind,” a conclusion that seemed wildly optimistic at the time.37
Perhaps this Topeka scribe was an oracle, but this epochal result was hard to envision without massive bloodletting. Thus, it was not just in Kansas but in Indiana too that interest in California school desegregation was piqued. A victory for Tokyo in that case “could be construed to justify federal intervention in states where the Negro is denied the processes of law.” Thus, if desegregation benefiting those of Japanese ancestry prevailed in San Francisco, it “will have rendered all of us a priceless service and our millions of Afro-Americans will rise up.”38
One Negro observer argued that “as California would treat the Japanese she would also treat Negroes.” The Negro press repeatedly cautioned readers to resist any inclination to join the anti-Tokyo movement, for this trend only reinforced the idea of the United States as a “white” nation to the detriment of all who did not fit this exclusive category.39 The eminent Negro scholar Oliver Cromwell Cox found it curious that
the politicians in the South, who advocate the interests of a ruling class that has fairly well subdued white labor through the widespread exploitation of black workers, should deem it advisable to take the side of the workingmen of California in their struggle against their employers’ desire to exploit [Asian] labor. And yet it is probably the weight of the Southern vote in Congress which made it possible for California to put over the national policy of anti-Orientalism.40
Such musings compelled a Negro writer in 1907 to ask starkly, “What may result if the persecution of the Negroes continues” as Japan rises? “Japan is not a nation to be lightly dealt with. . . . She could seize and hold the Philippines and Sandwich Islands and give San Francisco more than an earthquake.” Worse for Washington, “in a certain contingency Great Britain is an ally of Japan,” not the United States. Thus, if the United States wages war against Japan, conceivably “Britain would arm our southern Negroes as she did the I
ndians. Who can doubt which side the Negroes would take”—certainly not Washington’s—“and who could blame them?” London would say, “Boys, if we win this fight, you shall have Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, including Louisiana, Arkansas and maybe Texas and Porto Rico and we will protect you as a British dependency and while we are about it, we may as well take possession of the Panama Canal.”41
In short, the rise of Tokyo did not just have an impact on Washington, it complicated the global correlation of forces as a whole, opening possibilities theretofore unimaginable. Negro opinion was buoyed by the reality that in Japan itself there was searching concern about the question of immigration exclusion and school segregation. This concern contributed immeasurably to the Pan-Asian discourse, which too was propelled by the victory over Russia.42
Of course, concern was also expressed about the possibility of job competition between Japanese workers and those of African origin, notably in Texas. One Indianan wrote, “Japs are fast displacing the laborers of our race as domestic servants, laundrymen, yardboys, stablemen . . . working for half what the Negro laborer has been getting for the same kind of work.”43 This was part of a “Japanese colony in Texas” that comprised “1000 acres”; tellingly, this colony was initiated as war was launched against Russia “and reached its climax in the early part of 1907 when great numbers of Japanese entered Texas.”44
Ultimately, U.S. rulers would come to see this labor influx as part of a larger strategy on Tokyo’s part to place compatriots in sensitive regions, for example, San Antonio, but this was hardly perceived in 1907. By 1909, one Negro journalist was reporting happily that “after taking a careful inventory of his colored citizen material—the Jap, the Chinese, the Indian, the Filipino and the Negro—‘Uncle Sam’ is reaching the conclusion that the Negro offers the best returns for the labor.”45 This may have been a premature conclusion at best, for a few years later it was reported that “Jap waiters succeed Negroes” in being “employed on the Great Northern Railway dining cars”; indeed, it was said, “there are many more Japs en route from Seattle to take their places.”46
