by Gerald Horne
However, competition between Japanese and Negroes was not the main chord struck in the African American press. More typical was speculation about how “Japan should secretly employ the discharged and disgraced soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry,” Negro military men recently scandalized in South Texas, “to go through our Southern States and quietly organize the alienated Negroes to quietly meet at some place [on] our Pacific coast to join a Japanese army.” This, it was said with understatement, “would be a troublesome problem.” Anticipating how Japanese leverage was used to alleviate burdens on Negroes, the question was posed: “Could [this potential debacle] not be prevented by getting the Negro cause to be patriotic rather than alien? Only those who have the confidence of the Negroes know how intensely bitter they feel about their treatment. As we have given the Japanese cause to feel the same way, it would not take long for them and our Negroes to fraternize.”47 A few years later one African American intellectual was speculating that “Negroes have a good chance to join in with the Japanese and bring on a bloody war in this country.”48
By and large, the Negro press was controlled by the middle class; this influential stratum, often involved in bruising confrontations with white supremacy, was often most susceptible to the siren song of Tokyo. In Washington in 1908 the Prudence Crandall Association, named after a leading abolitionist, held a “Japanese tea,” to which a “number of Washington’s pretty and clever young misses” came “attired in Japanese costumes.” A purpose of this venture was raising funds “with which to purchase shoes for needy poor colored school children. With winter coming on there is many a poor barefooted colored boy and girl that must have shoes in order to attend school,” and it was felt that the specter of Tokyo would be sufficient for this stratum to donate to the less fortunate.49 This was becoming a trend. In Louisville, middle-class Negroes acted similarly: “the prettiest young misses and the handsomest young men of this city staged the Japanese opera ‘Mikado’” and, stunningly, “everyone looked [like] a real Japanese.”50
It may not have been accidental that the Negro middle class was seemingly flocking to Japan’s banner, for when Booker T. Washington, the reigning symbol of this stratum, journeyed to Seattle, a Negro reporter was struck by a “most unusual incident”: the “large and enthusiastic reception given him by four hundred Japanese residents,” including the “Japanese Imperial Consul” himself; as a token of their affection, it was decided by the Japanese present to present a scholarship to Tuskegee in their name.51
This in turn impressed many Negroes; one of their periodicals proclaimed that “the Japanese have made great advance toward the greater civilization within recent years. Double quick-time has been their gait. They seemingly are being impelled by some hidden force which deserts them neither night nor day.” Importantly, “the Japanese are a colored people and as such have felt the sting of discrimination,” that is, “they have felt the scalpel of criticism that the Negro race knows so well. Out of the common situation doubtless sympathy grows up,” which would be ultimately beneficial to African Americans.52
As it seemed that workers of Japanese origin were flooding into Texas, while middle-class Negroes were seeking to emulate their Japanese counterparts, rumors began to circulate of a secret defensive and offensive alliance between Mexico and Japan; Tokyo was purportedly preparing to land 150,000 soldiers on the west coast of Mexico, due south from San Diego. Part of the context were anti-Tokyo bills circulated in the California legislature, including one that barred Japanese employers from employing women defined as “white,” while a group called the Japanese and Korean Expulsion League was pushing even more aggressively in this direction, backed by the mayor of San Francisco and various unions. Once more the threat of war hung in the air.53
There was concern about Japanese bombardment of San Francisco and seizure of Manila; meanwhile—and not unrelated—a leading U.S. craniologist declared disdainfully that the “Japanese nation” contained a “slight tinge of Negrito from the islands of the Pacific.”54 Unsurprisingly, by 1912 one U.S. national was complaining that “there is no ‘scare’ which is worked harder or more regularly than the Japanese scare”; the “charge [is] repeatedly made that Japan is trying to bring on war with America at the earliest possible moment.”55
Suggestive of how the two Pacific nations were moving closer to war is the fact that as the idea of the “Yellow Peril” was taking hold in California, Ryutaro Nagai of Waseda University in Japan was declaiming at length about the “White Peril”: “Our American friends, who talk more about Freedom and Equality than most other nations, have nevertheless many hard things said of them by their own citizens in regard to their treatment of the Indians and Negroes.” It was difficult, he wrote “to parallel in any country in the East such savagery as the lynching and burning of Negroes. . . . Even the beggar and the outcast with white skin can be better accommodated than the most refined Indian gentleman.” Worse, this was not unique to one region; “practically the same attitude prevails in British South Africa, Canada and the United States. Asiatics can enter only with the greatest inconvenience.”56
As African Americans looked at their Deep South antagonists and then looked at Tokyo, they sensed nervousness among the former about the latter, which was emboldening to Negroes as a whole. For example, the Black journalist Nick Chiles chided the retrograde “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina, a leading politician who rarely passed up an opportunity to assail Negroes. Yet, wrote Chiles, “Japan has made her demand upon this country to prevent outrageous laws being enacted making their race inferior to the white man of this country and you, as United States Senator [are] acquiescing in this matter to such an extent that your mouth is shut and your ears deaf to the pleas of the whites in California.” Chiles did not have to say that a well-armed Japan made even the most resolute advocate of white supremacy more kittenish, thereby undermining a doctrine that was thought to be impervious to the sweet reason of militarization.57
Senator Tillman’s reticence was all the more remarkable since he did not hesitate to reprove Filipinos, who were dismissed as part of the presumably inferior “colored races,” while adding, “coming as I do from a State where this race question has been the cause of untold misery and woe,” he found that the “paramount issue” was the “race question.” It “may be likened to the ‘worm that dieth not.’”58 Yet somehow he found it advisable to be mute when discussing Tokyo, at least as Chiles saw it.
Meanwhile in the Philippines, a Pan-Oriental Society was formed in Manila headed by General Jose Alejandrino, who had distinguished himself in battle against U.S. forces. Reputedly, he spoke and wrote Japanese, was close to Tokyo, and foreshadowed the pre-1945 trend of Filipinos acting as Tokyo agents in U.S. Negro communities.59
A few days after Chiles’s accusation, Black Cleveland was signaling a renewed militancy that was thought to have emerged only after World War I. “The better class of colored people,” a reporter wrote in May 1913, “understand the principles of the Japanese question to be one directly affecting their own interests.” This perception was ratified further “at a big meeting of Japanese held last week in Tokio, Japan in which students played a prominent part,” at which “speeches were made denouncing the existence of color prejudice in the United States and the lynching of Negroes in the South was severely condemned. All the speakers agreed that the time had arrived when the Japanese must be given equal treatment,” while “aggressions of the whites in the world against the Colored races were condemned.”60
The more perspicacious in Washington may have then recognized that white supremacy had generated a formidable foe abroad that was not adverse to allying with the like-minded—that is, the Negroes—in the United States itself. As a Chicago journalist wrote, “the Jap resents with all his soul, with all of his might every wrong done him because of his race, his color or his conditions.” Negroes should do the same, and perhaps ally with Japan to that end.61 Another editorialist urged readers to stop using the term �
��Negro,” for, “as stated by an eminent Japanese diplomat it has an unquestioned influence in cutting us off from the thought, sympathy and co-operation of the millions of colored Africans, Asiatics and islanders of the Yonder world.”62 Therein one glimpses the seeds of the concept of the “Asiatic Black Man,” which was to emerge full-blown more than a decade later.
The advent of World War I in 1914 and the U.S. entry into this global conflict a few years later opened the door for further collaboration between U.S. Negroes and Tokyo, which may have occurred most dramatically on Texas’s border with Mexico when, it was reported, Japan may have been involved in the “Plan of San Diego,” a far-reaching effort to liquidate Euro-Americans in that region, reclaim territory that had been seized in the war of aggression against Mexico decades earlier, and to establish independent indigenous and African republics in its stead.63 Of course, as ever when discussing Tokyo plots in North America, guilt and nervous fear about the possibility that pulverized African Americans would align with the republic’s antagonists were instrumental in explaining belief in such elaborate conspiracies.
In some ways, World War I was a dress rehearsal indicative of how Washington’s adversaries could play upon the wounded feelings of U.S. Negroes to the detriment of U.S. national security. As early as 1914, Berlin paid a Negro dockworker, Ed Felton, almost $200 per week to place cigar bombs on ships carrying supplies to London. In Baltimore, a Felton comrade was paid to circulate packages containing germs. The plan was for Felton and his counterparts to travel to the port cities where horses were corralled before being loaded onto French and British transport ships. They were to journey to Newport News, Norfolk, and New York, poisoning horses all along the way. Then there was the alleged plot for Berlin to conquer the United States with the aid of Japan and Mexico, adumbrating the “Plan of San Diego.”64
The Jim Crow champion Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi had reason to pay close attention to the rise of Japan during this era. Weeks before the Bolshevik Revolution, for reasons that remain unclear, he told Japan’s emissary in Washington that he was unable to attend a dinner for “Viscount Ishii and the other members of the Japanese mission” then visiting the republic.65 Less than two years later, he took to the floor of the Senate and warned ominously about the rise of Japan. He thought that Japan’s growing incursion into China had a diabolical purpose: to “invade Europe,” as was done “under Genghis Khan.” The “whole world had better let China alone, and not teach her warfare,” since “Japan may find out that instead of her conquering China she had taught China to organize and wield the power to throw Japan into the Pacific Ocean.”66
At this juncture, however, there was another focus. As was to occur during World War II, the U.S. authorities believed that the Negro press was complicit, whether wittingly or not, in stirring unrest, making these various plots more likely to succeed. Even before November 1918, Brigadier General Lytle Brown was acerbic in complaining that “a great deal of dissatisfaction was caused among Negro troops during the World War by Negro agitators and newspapers”; of the latter, at least 250 were deemed culpable, which fundamentally meant an indictment of each and every publication.67 At a conference of Negro editors convened by Emmett J. Scott, once close to Booker T. Washington, “the existence of widespread unrest among colored people” was confirmed. Further, it was said, “this unrest may be due to the interposition of German agents.”68 Of course, the notion that maltreatment of Negroes was the Achilles’ heel of U.S. imperialism was not first discovered by Berlin, but assuredly, this phenomenon became painfully obvious in the wake of World War I, setting the path for Tokyo to emulate, which it had been doing in any case.
Fueling Japan’s crusade was the bitter disappointment that accompanied the failed attempt at the Versailles peace conference to install a proviso in the postwar dispensation mandating racial equality. There was bitter disappointment in Tokyo afterwards, but as Washington—and Canberra—saw things, domestic imperatives forbade this global initiative. This was a continuation of the long-term trend that conflated Japanese and Negroes, and also exposed the debilitating rigidity of white supremacy, which had difficulty in distinguishing among the powerful and powerless who were not defined as “white.”69 This inflexibility was reflected in the U.S. high court, which too had little difficulty in placing Japanese in a category that included Negroes, even though the martial prowess of the former suggested that this was an unwise course to pursue.70 Predictably, Marcus Garvey’s organization found it newsworthy when the high court chose to bar “the Japanese from American citizenship.”71 Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes did not assuage Japanese concern when, as one analyst put it, he called for a “conference of the white nations of the Pacific.”72
Correspondingly, a number of leading Japanese figures were coming to resent and reject as illegitimate what Konoe Fumimaro termed the “Anglo-American–centered peace.” That “the white people—and the Anglo-Saxon race in particular—generally abhor colored people is an apparent fact,” he argued, “blatantly observable in the U.S. treatment of the black population,” an atrocious maltreatment that could be extended to Japan.73
In retrospect, it is not easy to say whether Tokyo’s catering to African Americans was simply a deft diplomatic maneuver or a sincere sympathy for the oppressed. Most likely, at the elite level it was the former, while among the Japanese working class it was the latter, but the combination of the two gave the trend a rare power. Thus, in Japan there was a sincere appreciation for jazz, a music that emerged from U.S. Negro communities. As one analyst put it, there was a tendency in Japan to see this music as “asserting the basic affinity of the ‘colored races,’” and positing Japanese as the “yellow Negro.” Thus, when Fisk University sent a gospel group to Tokyo in 1920, they were received so warmly that one member of the delegation expressed a desire never to return to the United States.74
To assume that U.S. Negroes would remain unaware of the potential of suturing their domestic struggle to Japan’s global push for racial equality presupposes that those subjected to lynch law still had a sentimental attachment to those who perpetrated or acquiesced to such atrocities. Actually, in 1920 a perceptive Negro writer pointed out that Democratic presidential candidate James Cox said that if elected he would take the Irish question to the League of Nations. “If so,” said this commentator, “could we as a nation object to England taking the Negro and the Jap Question to the League?”75
William Pickens, who was to go on to play a leading role in the NAACP, was among those who repeatedly linked “the Negro and the Japan Question,” a linkage that was hard not to make, given the escalating anti-Asian bias in the Far West of the United States, which mirrored anti-Negro bias in Dixie.76 In Macon, Georgia, it was stated that “everywhere there is evidence that the people throughout the country are taking a lively interest in comparing colored Americans and Japanese and endeavoring to prophesy the attitude of the colored people should the United States and Japanese engage in war.”77
When U.S. Negroes heard that outrage was expressed in Japan about lynching, pro-Tokyo sentiments rose accordingly. The Negro press reported on the outrage in Tokyo following the immolation of a Negro man in Arkansas; Japanese observers called the murder an “indelible stain . . . on the name of America.” Further, it was said, “Who does not remember how quickly Rustam Bey, the Turkish Ambassador was forced to be recalled a few years ago because he compared the Negro lynchings here with Turkish massacre of the Armenians?” Thus, noted this Negro writer, “the Japanese people must be made to believe that America aims to subjugate them, segregate them, lynch and burn and mob them because they are colored,” that is, treat them as if they were Negroes. Hence, “this Japanese eleventh hour concern over Negro lynching in America is a premonition—a symptom of large significance to the student of world politics—a cue fraught with bigness and consequences.”78
Unsurprisingly, Marcus Garvey’s journal found it worthwhile to display a huge article and headline in 1922
trumpeting that “Japan holds mass meeting of protest against injustices to Negroes in America.”79 The formation of Garvey’s group, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, proceeding in the wake of Booker T. Washington’s premature death, was to signal a new, more concerted stage in pro-Tokyo sentiments among U.S. Negroes and Jamaican migrants to Harlem.
2
Harlem, Addis Ababa—and Tokyo
Among the most pro-Tokyo organizations to arise among U.S. Negroes was the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey. Since the UNIA had formidable outreach in the Western Hemisphere and in Africa, Garveyism may have been the most significant incubator of the pro-Tokyo groupings that emerged before 1945. Ironically, the UNIA was to clash with Ethiopia, one of the few noncolonized African nations, in the 1930s. Still, at least initially, Garvey’s group was to serve as a template for the Black Nationalist groupings that were to emerge in the 1930s, with varying levels of devotion to Addis Ababa and Tokyo and skepticism about the presumed beneficence of the leading North Atlantic powers, which included in their ranks the leading colonizers of Africa and the Caribbean. This chapter concerns, inter alia, the distinct possibility of a diplomatic alliance emerging in the 1930s between Ethiopia and Japan, and how this influenced Black Nationalists in the United States, particularly in their fondness toward Tokyo.
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As early as 1920, a small group of Negroes who allegedly styled themselves “Abyssinians” arrived at 209 East 35th Street in Chicago. One of the leaders produced a U.S. flag and deliberately set it afire. He then began to destroy a second flag in the same manner. Two Euro-American police officers remonstrated with the men but were intimidated by threats and a brandishing of pistols. Then a Negro cop and a sailor were shot, at which point a remaining group of Negroes obtained rifles from an automobile and killed a nearby clerk. In all, about twenty-five shots were fired during the fracas. This was a coming-out party for what was described as the “Back to Africa” movement, which had been in existence for at least two years. The group, the Star Order of Ethiopia and Ethiopian Missionaries to Abyssinia, was viewed as “an illegitimate offspring” of the UNIA. Helping to ignite this protest was a recent visit to the United States by an Ethiopian delegation and the presumed lack of satisfaction it obtained.1 This confrontation was a harbinger of the militancy that was to characterize overlapping pro-Ethiopia and pro-Japan organizations.
