Facing the Rising Sun

by Gerald Horne

  De Guzman worked as a dishwasher in New York City, where he “bumped into a colored man” and heard about the PMEW. This was in 1932. Earlier he had attended a UNIA gathering, where he spoke with a “Japanese Consul in San Francisco” named “Takahashi,” who told him to “speak pro-Japanese to the colored people and tell them the Japanese people are going to drive every white nation of people away” and then “the dark people will be free”; this man “said he was a member of the Black Dragon Society.” Then, said De Guzman, “we went into different sections of Chicago to organize the Pacific Movement” and from there to St. Louis, where informal headquarters were established at a “Japanese restaurant on the corner of Market and Jefferson Street.”2

  As early as 1932, the PMEW had been noticed by the Negro publisher Claude A. Barnett. Though Barnett routinely hired writers, the PMEW audaciously contacted him to see whether he would write for it. Its weekly magazine, Oriental African Digest, was headquartered in Chicago; De Guzman and a colleague, Robin Stokes, said their purpose was “establishing a greater friendliness and a deeper understanding among the darker races of mankind at home and abroad.”3 Barnett characterized the PMEW then as “a group of Japanese, Chinese and Filipinos with a following chiefly of Negroes,” which was not altogether mistaken.4

  In 1933 a PMEW-affiliated newsletter in Chicago entitled Pacific Topics, edited by Ashima Takis, hailed “the awakening of the East, the origin of the Pacific Movement”; stressed the “influence of Islam”; and asserted that there was “no sense of continental rivalry among Asiatics as there was among Europeans,” since “all Asiatic nations rejoiced over the victories of Japan over Russia.” For good measure, an editorial lambasted the United States over the Scottsboro case, the nine Black youths facing execution over false allegations of sexual molestation of two white women.5 The PMEW’s motto recalled that of the UNIA: “One God, One Aim and One Destiny.” The first article of the organization’s constitution stated that “the colors of this organization shall be anyone who possesses Negro blood, despite. . . . straight hair, blue, brown or gray eyes and white skin.”6 This initiative broadened the base for the PMEW and also acknowledged that in the United States, because of the machinations of the “one-drop” rule, there were many defined as “Negro” who were not necessarily dark-skinned.7 This capacious definition also opened the door for “race traitors” defecting from the otherwise hallowed halls of “whiteness.”

  General Lee Butler, the man who became the recognized leader of the PMEW in the St. Louis area, attended his first PMEW meeting in 1933. Butler was born in 1902 in Coahoma, Mississippi, and was married with six children. Migrating from the hellhole that was Mississippi to East St. Louis brought no surcease in bigotry, for his new hometown was the site in 1917 of one of the bloodiest and most startling pogroms to be visited upon U.S. Negroes to that point. By the time he joined the PMEW in 1934, he told the FBI, the group had a thousand members in the city; he thought it was an outgrowth of the UNIA, as did many others. He argued that the PMEW became a part of the Ethiopian World Federation in 1937. By 1940 Butler became the leader of a “revived” PMEW after the EWF fell by the wayside; this was ratified at a convention held at 1505 Hoover Street in East St. Louis “attended by about 30 members.” By 1942 one of the group’s leaders, David D. Erwin, reputedly announced that St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago “would be bombed” by Tokyo.8

  Henry Hall, with roots in Arkansas, was a railway worker who had been part of the PMEW since 1933. “What’s the button on your coat with the red, black and green stripes?” a prosecutor asked him in 1942. Answer: “UNIA.” He had joined in 1924. “I joined the UNIA before the Pacific Movement ever came to East St. Louis,” he said. “Which one do you like the best?” asked the prosecutor. “The UNIA,” he said—but since it was the PMEW in the crosshairs, this may have been simply a tactical response. He was also a member of the Baptist Church—presumably joining before his other two contested affiliations. The two—UNIA and PMEW—“sure don’t mix,” said Hall. “They wouldn’t meet in the same lodge hall if they had to starve. I tried to rent the hall once and they wouldn’t rent it to me”—that is, the PMEW would not rent to the UNIA, perhaps seeing it as competition or not sufficiently pro-Tokyo to be taken seriously.9

  It may not have been accidental that East St. Louis was the locus of PMEW strength, for the tumult of 1917, when Negroes were slaughtered en masse, left a deep psychological and political scar. William Baker of neighboring Edwardsville and a worker at the Mid West Rubber Reclaiming Company testified that Butler asked him to buy wholesale ammunition to prepare for a “race riot. He said [that during] the last race riot many of his people were killed and he didn’t want that same thing to happen again.”10 Lula Livingston, a married PMEW member with two children, was told by Butler that “the white people going to start a riot against the black people. . . . He said an Italian told him the white people throughout the State and throughout the United States was going to jump on the colored people because they was hot with them, they was mad with them” and thus, the Negroes had to organize.11

  Charles T. Nash was an undertaker in East St. Louis and claimed to be a UNIA not a PMEW member. “I belong to a gun club in Cairo,” Illinois, he said in part because in 1917 in East St. Louis “I lost everything I had in that riot.” Negroes were “burned and thrown into the streets.” This did not seem to concern the prosecutor interrogating him, who instead told him, “The Japanese had in mind that they might cause a revolution in the United States by getting the colored people to rise up against the white people.” Thus, Nash was asked, “Do you think you would live in the United States under white rule than any place else under Japanese rule?” He was also asked, “If these is some dissatisfaction on the part of the colored people do you think that would be any reason for the colored people rising up and starting a revolution in these times?”12

  Unfortunately, many of these Negroes had experienced sorrow and pain as a result of other brutal episodes, antiseptically denoted as “race riots.” Thomas Albert Watkins had lived in Memphis, though he was born in San Antonio. This thirty-three-year-old married man and father of two children moved to East St. Louis, where he was queried about “where I could get several rifles” in a prelude to a war that would eventuate with the “British isles [to be ruled] by Germany and America and China was to be ruled by the Japs and this country by the Negroes.” Yet what was firing his imagination was the “riot in Elaine, Arkansas some years back,” an infamous 1919 massacre.13 Contrary to Watkins’s recollection, prosecutors there argued that the “riot” was actually a devilish plot by Negroes to murder their Euro-American antagonists.14

  Lula Livingston, who had joined the PMEW in 1934 and had taken Spanish lessons from De Guzman, said she wanted to go to South America permanently. She hailed from Melwood, Arkansas, not far from Elaine.15 Artie Mays, a steelworker and PMEW member, was born and had resided in Little Rock, Arkansas, before arriving in East St. Louis. Unsurprisingly, he owned a “45 pistol and a shot gun” of the “pump” variety—and a sign of the “conquering Lion of Judah,” Ethiopia. He also owned a book entitled Japanese Over Asia.16

  The Elaine massacre was also on the mind of William Pickens, notably when he condemned the “anti-Japanese feeling” in the U.S. press. The United States was assailing Japan in a one-sided fashion, he thought, while forgetting Arkansas, where a “white mob was chasing Negroes,” then “began shooting,” after which a mob member was killed and a Negro was charged with murder. Was not this akin to China, where Chinese, he said, were aiming at Japanese, “Americans were killed,” and Tokyo was then denounced?17

  Frank Mart was born in Alabama in 1867 and had been in East St. Louis since 1905 but also had ties to Mississippi, New Orleans, and Jonesboro, Arkansas. Married three times, he said that he had “maybe eighteen or twenty” children, “maybe more.” He joined the PMEW in 1933, when its first meetings were at the “UNIA hall.” He owned Swiss rifles and was asked by the prosecutor, “Didn’t you kn
ow those guns were used in riots down in Arkansas?,” a possible reference to the notorious 1919 conflagration in Elaine. Another query was, “How about the Negroes ruling North America and the United States?” and “Do you think the white people should rule the United States?”18 Presumably, the correct answer to the latter rhetorical query was “yes.”

  Coordination with Japan was viewed as a sure way to blunt the scourge of white supremacy, according to a number of Negroes. E. M. Johnson, a PMEW member who had served as treasurer, had lived in East St. Louis for thirty-three years and worked as a contractor, doing plastering, painting, and carpentry. By the time he testified in 1943 he was seventy-four years old. When asked about the “cloth of black in the windows” placed by the PMEW, Johnson conceded that “if the Japanese came over here,” the homes of those with such a banner “would not be destroyed.”19 He was also asked about a regional gathering of the PMEW in his hometown with “400 or 500” present; a Japanese speaker at the meeting “invited the colored people to come to Japan and said if you do come you will . . . receive just as good treatment as the white man,” an extraordinarily enticing proposition.20

  Pink Brown, a PMEW member from East St. Louis who knew De Guzman, was told that “when the Japs bomb St. Louis and come over and invade us for us to put it [black cloth] in the window and they would know if I did that I was a member of the Pacific Movement.”21

  PMEW member Eugene Moore had lived in Unity, Illinois, since 1927, though he was born in Mississippi. He was deemed to be a major general in the PMEW’s military unit, which was said to have fifteen or twenty members. They “sometimes drilled every night.” He owned a shotgun and pistol. “One Jap lived there in Unity,” he testified. “He is farming right across the field on a white man’s place. . . . He just moved there from Villa Ridge.”22

  The federal case against the PMEW in the early 1940s was not the first time the organization’s members had faced legal repercussions. By September 1934 members of the PMEW were serving jail sentences for unlawful assembly in Caruthersville, Missouri. Their attorney had been attacked while defending them in nearby Steele, Missouri. He had denied that his clients were seeking to “unite the Negro race in one body with the Japanese race and all the dark races of the world.” His clients, he cautioned, should also not be confused with “the Original Independent Benevolent Afro-Pacific Movement of the World,” which was said to be in conflict with the PMEW.23

  This attorney had to tread carefully; he had been physically assaulted, as were his clients, who, according to another source, were thought to be part of this Afro-Pacific Movement, a Negro organization with many members in St. Louis, not to mention numerous hamlets in an area often called “Little Dixie.” In Blytheville, Arkansas, those who sought to interrupt the gathering of this group were met by armed Negroes. Revealingly, found at their gatherings was correspondence from Liberia, Haiti—and Japan. Apparently, there were scores (if not hundreds) of members in this group. The authorities claimed that they seized a “Communist handbook,” perhaps indicating that the left was seeking to influence these Negroes, along with a “call to arms” to “all black, brown and yellow men” as to how to proceed when the time arrived to enforce their “demands.” Also, it was reported, “Negro residents were eager to join this movement” and “numerous Negro clergymen” were said to be cooperating.24

  This region was due south of East St. Louis, the locus of pro-Tokyo sentiment. The well-dressed David Erwin, the PMEW leader in this site of the infamous 1917 pogrom, had global ties, which was of no small concern to prosecutors.25 In July 1935 he wrote to a correspondent that “I arrive[d] safe in Mexico on . . . important . . . business. . . . will explain details by word of mouth.”26 “I sailed at noon Nov. 16 [1935] and landed in Southampton” for an international meeting. “Japan, China and everybody is here,” he wrote, though Harold Moody, a local human rights leader, who “has a white wife,” was “not at the meeting. I was in Marcus Garvey’s office” too, he noted proudly, while adding cryptically, “I can’t say any more.”27

  In late November 1935 Erwin went to England to participate in what was called the Round Table Conference, “which consisted of Dark and Coloured Representatives of the world,” where he “made known the conditions of the 15 million scattered sons and daughters of the black race in America.” The meeting was at 47 Doughty Street in London, though a Nigerian address was also listed. It was a “grave fact,” it was said, “that slavery in its worst form still exists in the United States,” not to mention segregation. This statement was signed by “Wham Po Koo,” chairman, and W. E. Akaje Macaulay, international secretary.28

  The Supreme Executive Council of the PMEW met in East St. Louis in September 1938 with delegates from Mississippi and Oklahoma, in addition to the St. Louis metropolitan region. Mississippi boasted of “having the largest membership.” There was discussion of “colonization” in South America, apparently a follow-up to ongoing Japanese migration to Brazil. The recently deceased “International President” was listed as W. P. Schiwhangato of Nanking, China, who was succeeded by W. Yicklung, while “Dr. Takeda is International Vice President.” Reportedly a “gigantic mass meeting” was held to mark the occasion. “There are units of our great organization in Mexico, Africa, India, Australia, China and Japan,” it was said. Japan was singled out as “the ‘CHAMPION’ of all Dark and Colored Races. Victory of all Dark and Colored peoples started in Japan” (capitals in original).29

  After this meeting, General Lee Butler, another top PMEW leader, seemed to be energized. “If we must die,” he instructed the Reverend F. R. Baker of Okmulgee, Oklahoma, “let us die fighting for our rites [sic].” And, he added, do not stop “until every black man and woman [is] free” and “out from under the white.” In fact, he continued, “on my job today” at the “Midwest Rubber Company of East St. Louis, I was question[ed] about the [PMEW].” This “white gentleman is named Ollie McCoy, the President of the CIO union”; he asked “why you colored peoples have to go and join . . . with the Japanese.”30 Butler’s answer has not survived. But one can surmise that the essence of his response would have expressed skepticism about the viability of the class project that the CIO represented, in light of the history of the Euro-American working class, which had not distinguished itself in its penchant for class solidarity, leaving Butler with the option of pursuing a “race” project.

  Like most PMEW members in East St. Louis, Butler was a member of the working class. “I farmed and worked on a dairy in Mississippi” before migrating northward, he said, and then worked for the American Rope Factory, Hill-Thomas Lime and Cement, the American Steel Company, and then a rubber company. He worked at the latter from late 1928 to early 1943, but there were repetitive echoes of 1917: “my life was threatened out there” by “the committee on the fourth shift when I entered the plant.” This led directly to his joining the PMEW in 1934, which met every Monday and Wednesday evening. “When I joined,” he testified, “it was for the betterment of the conditions of the Negroes,” that is, “equal rights and justice.” His view was that the PMEW was “working for equal opportunities and against lynchings and burning of human[s] . . . alive,” as had occurred in 1917. Yes, he was well armed, but the explanation was innocent: he “wanted to shoot wild geese” and “wild game” and hunt for ducks. Yes, the PMEW “was an outgrowth of” and “advocated the same policies and purposes as the UNIA.” As for pro-Tokyo statements he made under interrogation, this was all due to duress, he explained. They had passwords; one was “Gaza,” another was “good morning” in Amharic, a major language of Ethiopia.31

  Erwin was in touch with De Guzman, the Filipino who—he said—served as Tokyo’s liaison with U.S. Negroes. De Guzman reportedly delivered “about 65” guns to Erwin and he delivered funds to him too. De Guzman also said that his promiscuous use of aliases was a product of his earlier association with the UNIA, designed to “create the impression of different persons from different towns.” He confessed to a personal acquaintance
with Garvey himself, though his central UNIA contact was “Madam Demena,” a “national organizer” of the group. She was “Porto Rican” with “brown skin.” It was through the UNIA, he said, that he met “Doctor Takeda,” a “Japanese newspaper publisher,” in 1925, who proved valuable in his political work. He also knew “Mr. Yicklung,” a “Korean, a member of some radical society in Asia.” But his prized contact seemed to be Erwin, who was tasked to “organize colored people of every country” in a “secret” fashion.32

  It was Madam Demena, said De Guzman, who convinced him to pass as Japanese, though Takahashi paid him to be “pro-Japanese.” He was told by “Takahashi” that “the Japanese people are going to invade this country and they going to trick the white folks, going to split them.” His Japanese interlocutor also said that “we used to have an alliance with Europe,” London more specifically, but “we believe that England has lost her influence and we are going to join with the other white nations in Europe because we wouldn’t want to let the white people in Europe get together and they will be able to whip us, but as long as we can keep the white people in Europe divided, we can perform there and have one group fighting the other group, then we can accomplish our object in Asia.” The aim: “drive the white power in Asia out.” At the University of Tokyo there was a “black race of people . . . being trained to go all over the world and preach to all the dark races the gospel of . . . Africa for the Africans.” He also said that “there are now many Japanese in every city in the United States who were disguised as priests, lecturers and propagandists, in a prelude to the “fight” against the United States. The 1924 immigration exclusion bill was the casus belli. It was a “national insult and the American people are going to pay for it.” He said that Tokyo “had prepared for this war against the white powers ever since the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese war.”