by Gerald Horne
In 1933 De Guzman spoke at a UNIA meeting, conveying a similar message as was told to him about Tokyo’s ambitious plans for conquest. He got to know Erwin and gained access to Erwin’s office, where De Guzman “went through the files” and found “letters from Japanese” where “they congratulated Mr. Erwin for the work he is doing.” The letters were in English: “some came from San Francisco” and “some came from Hawaii.” Erwin told Negroes to buy guns; “anything Mr. Erwin or Mr. Butler said to the colored people, 99 out of 100” did so. He recalled meetings of “about 700 or 800 people” of the PMEW with “standing room” only. These were “secretive” meetings with the message being clear: “they will die for the Japanese.”33
There may have been opportunism and folk religion involved in the popularity of the PMEW in East St. Louis. PMEW member William Officer called himself the “funeral director” of the city. Since at that time Negroes were generally consigned to handle the cadavers of other Negroes, a funeral director could build a successful business and become a stalwart of the middle class. “I knew it [the PMEW] was a racket,” he confessed, “but I didn’t dare raise my voice against it because some of the people told me you couldn’t get to heaven if you didn’t belong to the Pacific Movement.” A related church of the PMEW provided degrees, including one called “Lion of Juda[h],” confirming the tie to Ethiopia: “they gave me a little lion on a black piece of cloth and I threw it away,” he told prosecutors. With a nose for business, he conceded that “what I was after was bodies,” and a pro-Tokyo movement among Negroes in East St. Louis was guaranteed to produce a treasure trove of cadavers. Anyway, as “National Secretary for the Funeral Directors,” he traveled “26,000 miles a year and I am out of town four or five days a week” and could not be expected to be expert on the details of the PMEW, his membership notwithstanding.34 Of course, his cavalier, almost flippant testimony was likely designed to convince prosecutors that he was no threat—even if he had been collaborating with pro-Tokyo Negroes.
George Floore may have been as opportunistic as Officer seemed to be. “My nickname is Sport,” said this hotel worker and PMEW member. “I was selling sausage and I knew the organization [PMEW] had quite a few members and I thought my presence there with my name on it I could get quite a bit of business.” Of course, one cannot rule out that this “opportunism” was a ruse to avoid the appearance of being in sympathy with PMEW goals when being interrogated by prosecutors. Even Floore conceded that the group’s purpose was to “stop lynchings and burnings and try to get better living conditions,” goals to which he did not object.35
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An essential element of the agenda of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (sometimes called the Ethiopian Peace Movement), which also was tied to Tokyo, was the notion of repatriating U.S. Negroes to Africa, with Liberia being the likely site. Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, their leader, was described as a “mulatto woman . . . about 50 years old” as of 1939, who “succeeded in establishing local branches in several parts of the country,” mostly from “the old Garvey movement.” She was in close touch with Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, the reactionary legislator who also backed the idea of deporting Negroes en masse. Apparently, the Liberian authorities were in favor of “selective” migration but not a “mass” migration.36 As early as 1931 Gordon was listed as president of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia and was endorsed not only by Bilbo but by his ideological comrade, Earnest Sevier Cox.37 Gordon’s group should be distinguished from the Ethiopian World Federation, which was broader in membership and not as stridently pro-Tokyo as the PME.38
Senator Bilbo was told that in December 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon and her pro-resettlement comrades met in Chicago. They discussed the “limitations” endured by Negroes in the United States, and she asked how many would join a “Back-to-Africa” movement. “Her audience,” it was said, “in one voice cried out, ‘We would be glad to go.’” The very next morning thirty-five card tables were brought to the hall where they had assembled and seventy volunteers were tasked to aid in the recording of names for a petition to that effect. “The hall was kept open night and day for three months,” it was reported. “Sub-stations were opened elsewhere in Chicago and in nearby Indiana”; “in eight months’ time, 400,000 names” were recorded, and by 14 November 1933 these were dispatched to the White House. “Within a period of five years,” it was asserted, “approximately 2,350,000 Negro names” were duly recorded backing resettlement.39
Senator Bilbo and those who backed him analogized their deportation proposal to the settlement of “Jews in Palestine.”40 By August 1941 the legislator was seeking to speak in New York City under the auspices of the UNIA and the African Patriotic League in “celebration of the anniversary of the late Marcus Garvey.” Scores of organizations protested, but a number could be easily scorned as being, supposedly, “Communist fronts.”41 Yet press mogul Claude A. Barnett most likely echoed the settled opinion of most Negroes when he wrote that Bilbo’s plan was “laughed at here by national legislators and Negroes alike,” though some had been “lured by a former follower of Marcus Garvey.”42
In any case, reportedly Liberia was involved in discreet negotiations with Japan. In early 1937 Shimjiro Akimota of Tokyo went to Monrovia on a “secret diplomatic mission” resulting in a “commercial agreement,” according to a Negro journalist.43 Near that same time, Japan was reported to have started a steamship service to the Congo, which would connect this sprawling region with “West and South African ports as well as these places within the Far East.”44
The Addis regime, cornered by Rome in any case, utilized “racial” appeals to attract U.S. Negroes, which in turn dovetailed with Tokyo’s initiatives in the United States. Malaku Bayen, a close relative of His Imperial Majesty of Ethiopia, informed Claude Barnett of the Associated Negro Press, one of the key opinion molders among U.S. Negroes, that “my country will not get very far with the help that is rendered by the white man for the development of the country,” but “we could obtain all the help that we need from the United States and the West Indies.” He wanted Barnett’s aid in “carefully select[ing] young men and women [with] definite training” with the “possibility of obtaining a position in the service of the Ethiopian government.” It was true that “our Government is employing white foreigners in various departments and that these white men have gone on year after year, doing as little as they can for us.” Thus, he insisted, Addis desired a “superior type of well qualified black men, who are not fortune hunters and who have race consciousness.”45 To that end, he wanted to “acquaint American Negroes with the happenings in Ethiopia through the Negro press.”46
Barnett required little prompting. A savvy businessman with wide global interests that his news service’s press coverage helped to sustain, he also maintained close ties to Tuskegee Institute. Thus, he told a key administrator there that Addis would “welcome Colored Americans,” especially “engineers and scientifically trained men,” particularly since they were “suspicious of the whites in their country”—but not the Japanese. Addis “offers the grandest opportunities for American Negroes,” he thought.47
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Part of the propaganda outreach by Tokyo to U.S. Negroes involved feting them in Japan, gaining adherents who could prove useful in times of war. At times, this did not work out well, most famously in the case of Langston Hughes, whose 1930s journey to Japan ended disastrously—for both sides—in mutually bitter recriminations.48 However, Hughes was firmly in the embrace of the organized left, including close ties to the Communist Party, which had proven immune to Tokyo’s charms. This could also be said of Paul Robeson, who excoriated Japanese aggression in China in no uncertain terms. “There is no such thing as an indivisible racial unity,” he charged hotly; “the struggle is a class one.” This approach, however, was not widely accepted, even among U.S. Negroes, who tended to frame their dilemma in the context of white supremacy. Robeson and his comrades were of the view that “any person and especially a Ne
gro, who can possibly be in favor of the present Japanese attack on China is obviously on the side of fascism.”49
More typical was the approach to Japan of W. E. B. Du Bois, who echoed Pickens—and a broad swathe of U.S. Negro opinion—in rationalizing Japanese depredations in China.50 Du Bois was touched by the hospitality heaped upon him during his 1936 journey to Japan.51 Akin to the ecumenical approach that united left and right in Tokyo against persecution of Negroes, the conservative George Schuyler, like the progressive Du Bois, was also feted on visiting Japan and wrote several pro-Nippon articles upon his return.52
Claude A. Barnett, the affluent Negro publisher in Chicago, told the Japanese consul general in Manhattan in 1934 that “we are much interested in the positive evidence of new social and economic conditions, given shape by the Japanese,” particularly since the “American Negro” had a “natural interest in other peoples whose color might be a bar to their fullest and freest expression”; thus, “twelve million Negroes in the United States” chose to “demand fair play for the Japanese.” Hence, he wrote, “we are suggesting the possibility of an outstanding Negro citizen being invited to Japan,” notably their pro-Tokyo correspondent, William Pickens, who “has written for us for 14 years.”53
Besides headliners like Schuyler, Hughes, and Du Bois, a steady stream of U.S. Negroes were sailing across the Pacific to Japan. Some of these were trumpeting what was thought to be the rise of the “colored” against the “white,” as suggested—or at least it was thought—by the invasion of Ethiopia and Japan’s presumed support for Addis Ababa. Consider Dr. Willis N. Huggins, born in Selma, Alabama, circa 1886, and who went on to graduate from Columbia and Northwestern, then received a doctorate from Fordham University in 1929. He was fluent in French, German, Italian, and Arabic, but as early as 1911 he planned a career in Addis. To that end he worked with W. H. Ellis, a rare Black Wall Streeter who worked closely with Ethiopian elites. Huggins was slated to become minister of education in Ethiopia, but instead he chose to lecture on African history at the University of Tokyo by 1938.54 The leading Negro sprinter Eddie Tolan was offered a job as track coach at this same university, at a time when African Americans were barred generally from prestigious U.S. institutions of higher education.55 His fellow sprinter Ralph Metcalfe was lionized in Japan, particularly after setting a new record for the two-hundred-meter sprint in Manchuria; hundreds of thousands watched him run there and in Japan.56 Still, during the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, Japanese athletes complained that, like Negroes, they were barred from certain restaurants.57
Also arriving in Japan in 1935 were three Negro schoolteachers from Simmons Elementary School and Vashon High School in St. Louis, a city that, with its neighbor, East St. Louis, was probably the citadel of pro-Tokyo feelings among Negroes. Expressing the attitude of all three, one of the group wrote, “I found the Japanese the most kindly, courteous people I have ever known. . . . I was utterly unprepared for the profound feeling they showed. . . . I was prepared to find racial prejudice in Japan,” an understandable premonition given where she resided. Instead, “if there was any prejudice it was shown against the white man. The Japanese bitterly resent white America’s treatment of Japanese,” but “they treated us as brothers and sisters.”58 The trio—Alice McGee, Isabel Dickson, and L. M. Turner—were ecstatic about Japan. Such attitudes propelled the wartime notion that U.S. Negroes might not be worse off if Tokyo prevailed. The headline in the Negro press was evocative: “Japanese men, women weep when told of American Negro [and] are kindest, most friendly people.”59
By way of contrast, Kenso Nushida, of Japanese origin, was signed to play with a semi-professional baseball team in Sacramento, though, as one Negro reporter put it, African Americans “no matter how good are not given a chance in organized baseball.”60
Tellingly, the widow of Sufi Abdul Hamid, a notorious Black Nationalist in Harlem, was born in Panama, lived in Jamaica, and visited Japan at length, perhaps because her paternal grandfather was said to be Japanese.61 Dorothy Hamid, also known as Madame Fu Fattam, was known as the “Negro-Chinese seer” and, along with her spouse, formed the Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility, which was Buddhist in conception and looked toward Japan—and Tibet and India—for inspiration.62 Retrospectively, it is difficult to discern whether or not this trend was driven by the contemporaneous rise of Japan.63
Negro artists and musicians were finding opportunities in Asia—including Japanese-occupied China—at a time when the Great Depression and normalized bigotry were limiting them in the United States. Nora Holt, a famed Negro chanteuse, performed in Shanghai for eight months beginning in August 1932.64 Teddy Weatherford, a Negro booking agent in Los Angeles, found Holt’s experience to be normative and indicative of opportunities in all of Asia.65
Euro-Americans were also not unaffected by these tours by U.S. Negroes. Channing Tobias, who was to serve as a leading NAACP official, visited Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nanking, and Soochow near the same time of Du Bois’s journey. There he encountered “Southern white friends from America,” including “Texas, Virginia and Mississippi,” who despite their inured and ossified racist folkways were charmingly amiable. “How sad it was that racial prejudice back home” magically disappeared abroad. This disappearance was particularly noticeable in the “French Concession” in Shanghai, though “all the peoples of the Orient are tremendously interested in the Negro problem in America.”66
And it could have been added that the reality of a rising Japan—in China not least—sobered otherwise inebriated Euro-Americans drunk on the bile of white supremacy. Tobias, a leading NAACP official by 1954 at the time of Jim Crow’s official demise, also spent two weeks in Japan, and like his compatriots Pickens and Du Bois, he too was impressed with this island state. “Another outstanding observation,” he wrote with enthusiasm, “was that all of the government and business work of Japan is carried on by Japanese. In other countries of the East, Europeans are usually found in the government offices and leading business houses.”67
Tobias might also have noticed what struck Bishop Arthur J. Moore of Atlanta upon his return from Japan after flailing and failing as a missionary. “When you try to convert Orientals,” he observed, “they ask some embarrassing questions about how we treat the colored races, how we run business, distribute profits, and about our downright selfishness.”68 By May 1937 newspapers in northern China, where Japanese influence was substantial, were carrying details of the “atrocity” of lynching on the front page. The reaction there was that U.S. missionaries, according to the ANP, “ought to go to Mississippi instead of coming to China.”69
As for Pickens, he retained his title as chief defender of Tokyo among U.S. Negroes, though admittedly the competition had become stiffer as the 1930s plodded on. “How many of us are willing to help Mr. Roosevelt to oblige the British Empire by pulling its chestnuts out of the Asiatic fire?” Pickens proclaimed that “England is afraid that Japan’s success may stir up even India and make the domination of Asia by white Europeans impossible” since “Europeans feel, and truly so, that they could manage China much longer if China is not dominated by Japan.” In contrast to the situation in the North Atlantic nations, he said, in Japan “European, Asiatic, African are all just human beings.”70
“These Japanese,” he exclaimed, “are shooting holes in the ancient myth about ‘superior races’. For that reason, it may be better for China if Japan should win her objectives.”71 Of course, there were “jitters” in “white nations” about Japan’s ascendancy; “Well,” he scoffed, “who in the name of the Lord ought to be masters in the Orient if not the Japanese, or some other Oriental race?”72
Part of the problem of rebutting Pickens effectively was exposed in 1938 when it appeared that Moscow and Tokyo might clash again. In attacking the Soviet Union, Pickens fit comfortably within the national consensus, making it more difficult to reject his terming the Soviet Union “this fool nation” and “the aggressors”; he returned to the idea that “the whites w
ho have grown to fear the waxing power of Japan, have doubtless fed this Chinese jealousy” of Tokyo.73 In short, how could Tokyo be effectively blocked by Washington, as long as subduing Moscow seemed to be the top priority? As a result, anticommunism served usefully as a mask for pro-Tokyo sentiment.
Still, pro-Moscow sentiment at times manifested, despite the penalties resulting from such an attitude. After Japan’s aid to Ethiopia withered in the face of its anticommunist alliance with Italy, the moderate Negro journalist Gordon Hancock wrote that Moscow had assumed moral leadership in Africa.74 Paris and London chose to “grovel,” which was bad news for U.S. Negroes, since what fascism intended for Jews was a precedent for African Americans. But this kind of analysis, insofar as it highlighted Moscow favorably, did not fit the prevailing zeitgeist, allowing Japan once more to escape censure by U.S. Negroes.75
Other than those within the orbit of the Communist Party—and an occasional outlier like Hancock—those who might have rebutted Pickens were handicapped frequently because they often failed to reject colonialism, not to mention white supremacy. Pickens, on the other hand, asserted that “the Japanese in China have never yet placed Chinese in the same sub-human category into which all these European and American whites have put Chinese there: into segregated areas.” Somehow Tokyo was “pushing back . . . ten times their number of Chinese, in spite of all the secret and open aid given the Chinese by almost all the white nations” and it was this, he declared, that drove Japan into “alliance and sympathy” with Rome and Berlin.76 Hancock was one of the few who lamented the double standard that condemned the Japanese role in China but countenanced the colonization of the British in India, the Dutch in Indonesia, or U.S. forces in the Philippines.77
