by Gerald Horne
Also influencing the likes of Pickens were news items that suggested that China—seeking aid to repel Japan—was interested in allying with the Jim Crow United States. Surely U.S. Negroes looked askance when a noncitizen Chinese merchant in Phoenix, Arizona, helped to fund an effort by less than affluent Euro-Americans who were seeking to evict two Negro families who were renters from a racially restricted tract.78 Nor were Negroes assuaged when in 1930 they were obliged to sue a Chinese restaurant in Boston for barring them on Jim Crow grounds.79
Augusta, Georgia, boasted of a Negro population of about 26,000 and a mere 250 Chinese, who mostly lived and did business among Negroes: somehow they were recognized as “white” and attended this favored group’s churches and schools.80 However, since a statute in North Carolina sought to bar marriages between Chinese and Negroes, it was reasonable to infer that Asians were responding to societal cues when seeking to uphold Jim Crow.81 Nevertheless, those of Japanese origin—unlike their Chinese counterparts in North America—had developed a well-merited reputation for flouting the dictates of Jim Crow.
Still, U.S. Negroes often were able to distinguish between the plunder of China and the rather frequent adherence of Chinese Americans to Jim Crow norms. Thus, African Americans were reported to have played a key role in backing “Hands Off China” gatherings, designed to forestall imperial plunder.82 In complementary fashion, the Chinese Students Club of Colorado College informed the NAACP about its staunch opposition to racism.83
Still, on balance pro-Japan attitudes predominated over pro-China ones among Negroes during this era. The Associated Negro Press mirrored this attitude when it cited without comment the vitriolic attitude of Admiral Nobumasa Suetsugu of Japan, who spoke angrily of “driving whites from Asia.”84 Also reported without condemnation were the words of Vice Admiral Sankichi Takahashi of Japan, who assailed the “sense of superiority” he saw in U.S. attitudes toward his nation.85 Muriel Adams, billed by the ANP as “the Jane Addams of London,” agreed that “Japan’s aggression in China is the result of the refusal of white Occidental nations to accord her racial equality,” referring to the abortive racial equality proposal at Versailles and how that empowered “militarists” and discredited “liberals.”86
Mittie Maude Lena Gordon thought she espied another cleavage in Black America besides pro-Japan and pro-China sentiments. She told Senator Bilbo that there were “two classes of Afro-Americans in this country”: “the intelligentsia” (for example, NAACP leaders and members) and the “dissatisfied, race conscious, depressed and heartbroken, humble and law abiding simple minded class,” which had “never been satisfied in America” and “always have desired a nation of our own.” They were “forced to live in condemned and tumbled down shacks packed in like sardines in a box without any water or other sanitary conditions, . . . infested with bugs, mice and rats.” These were the ones clamoring to emigrate to West Africa—though she was sufficiently tactful not to tell the Dixiecrat leader that these were also the ones who, she surmised, were potentially pro-Tokyo.87
Repeatedly, Gordon emphasized that economic misery was driving Negroes to consider resettlement. “We are the poorest people in the country,” she told Bilbo; “our membership is composed of those on direct relief,” a level of desperation that simultaneously may have made them susceptible to Tokyo’s blandishments.88
However, as Gordon sought to manipulate Bilbo—and vice versa—her opinion of her ability to execute this tricky task may have been shaken if she had been able to read the missives from the legislator’s staunchest supporters. Belle Steiner of Spring Hill, Alabama, had contemplated world war as early as September 1939 and counseled Senator Bilbo that if such a conflict occurred, “please see that the Negroes are called first. The last war they called the white boys & this country has too many Negroes,” which explained why “the white men can’t get any jobs.”89
Kathryn Mitchell of Chicago instructed the Mississippi lawmaker that advocating resettlement while tensions with Japan were rising was playing with fire. “Look how many times the Japs [sic] have asked your race,” she told him, “to leave its country? Have you left, no!” Yet, “we were born here in America and have as much right to remain here as all the other races here who do not belong here”—though she undermined her case by referring to the “Chinese” and “Japanese” as being part of the latter category.90 Still, the wider point was that if Negroes could be expelled from North America, perhaps that was a precedent for Euro-Americans to be ousted from the Philippines and a good deal of Asia, a feat that seemingly was on the horizon.
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Even before the assault on Pearl Harbor, currying favor among U.S. Negroes was paying dividends for Tokyo. As Japanese textile exporters began to challenge their U.S. competitors, African Americans did not express any particular objection. Earl Constantine of the National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers assailed Japan, alleging that it was displacing his constituency. But a Negro journalist was nonplussed; the challenge “will have little, if any effect, on colored workers, as there is only one factory in the cotton industry which employs Negroes,” and that one was in Durham, North Carolina.91
How could the United States muster the national cohesion to confront effectively a formidable Japan when Tokyo had established a firm foothold among U.S. Negroes? This was the seemingly insuperable dilemma that the toxic combination of Jim Crow and U.S. imperialism had created.
4
White Supremacy Loses “Face”
In the period preceding the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, pro-Tokyo and anti–white supremacist sentiments were merging. A survey of leading Black Nationalists of this era suggests why.
Before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, William Pickens reprimanded a Los Angeles radio station for referring to Japanese as “Ethiopians.” He observed that U.S. Negroes were also “often referred to loosely as ‘Ethiopians,’” suggestive of how African Americans, Japanese, and Ethiopians had been conflated, facilitating a de facto alliance among the three.1
This was manifested in groups among U.S. Negroes that included “Ethiopia” in their name but were designed, at least in part, to back Tokyo. Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi, a preeminent reactionary, charged that the “Zoot Suit Rapists” (Mexican Americans, Filipino Americans, and others in Los Angeles falsely accused of various offenses and then beaten in the streets, just as the war was raging) were actually Negroes with “cohorts in the Black Dragon Society.”2 All U.S. “minorities” were being conflated with the antagonist in Tokyo; all were viewed as variants of “Ethiopians,” nationals of a nation that somehow had for the longest time managed to elude European colonialism before being brought to heel.
Congressman Rankin was reflecting the unassailable point that pro-Tokyo Negroes often included “Ethiopia” in the title of their organizations, a direct legacy of the tumult of the 1930s when, it was thought, Japan and Addis Ababa were yoked in an alliance.
One such organization was the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME), whose leaders were later charged with what amounted to sedition in the early 1940s.3 Mittie Maude Lena Gordon was a leader of the PME, which was organized in 1932 purportedly for the purpose of migration to Liberia (at this juncture, “Ethiopia” was often deployed as a synecdoche for the continent as a whole). In some ways it was the twentieth-century version of the American Colonization Society, which too was intrigued with the idea of dispatching U.S. Negroes en masse to Africa. As noted, they were not above allying with Senator Bilbo’s “voluntary resettlement” bill. Gordon was “permanent president,” elected on 24 February 1933. Her paternal grandfather, John Merrill, was described as a “white man” and her paternal grandmother, Ann Merrill, was a slave of Merrill’s and, reportedly, a “full blooded Cherokee.” When freed, she married a man known as Henderson and lived in Webster Parish, Louisiana. Gordon’s mother was said to be a “black African woman whose father was brought to this country when four years old and became a slave.”
Gordon’s spouse and com
rade, William Gordon, worked as a farmhand in both cotton and corn, then in the orange groves of Florida, until age eighteen. Then he became a railway worker. By 1927 he had opened a delicatessen in Chicago and a restaurant by 1934.
David James Logan, another PME member, was similarly peripatetic, seeing enough of the republic to be convinced that Jim Crow was not merely regional nor an isolated phenomenon: he was born in Texas and was also a U.S. military veteran, having fought in the Spanish-American War of 1898, where the fate of the Philippines was at stake. Yet another of Gordon’s close comrades, Seon Jones, was born in the British Caribbean, then moved to the Canal Zone, then enlisted in the British military by 1917 and served in Europe. Then it was back to Panama, then Cuba and the United States, where he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
It was in 1930 that Gordon went to a UNIA meeting in Chicago and met De Guzman, whom she knew as Takis. She thought he was Japanese, as did many others. She also met a man known as “Mr. Leong,” whom she thought to be a “Chinaman,” and Mr. “Lotario,” a Filipino. Takis asked her to assist in founding the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, but she told him he was knocking on an open door since she was already moving in that direction after she ascertained that the UNIA seemed unable to accomplish her goal: dispatching Negroes back to Africa. Takis, in turn, also wanted Negroes to leave the United States, but purportedly his words were “we’re going to take your people to Manchuria.” Gordon said she disagreed. “I never joined the Peace Movement of the Eastern World,” she said, but this remark was made in court when she was facing prison time for being affiliated with the PMEW. She also conceded that “Takis was at my home many times” and that she appealed to the Japanese consul in Chicago for aid in returning to Africa. By December 1932 the PME was a going concern and the perception that the group received backing from Japan did not appreciably harm its prospects in Black America.
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George Johnson was born in Cairo, Illinois, a hotbed of pro-Tokyo sentiment among Negroes. His father was R. Johnson-Bey, whose surname was often carried by those with ties to the Moorish Science Temple (MST), which too was pro-Japan. Johnson said he worked with pro-Tokyo forces to seize control of the MST; this included receiving funds from Japan. He also said that Gordon was funded by similar sources. One of these pro-Tokyo agents was reported to have said, “We will have war. . . . We want you to have enough members by 1944 to overthrow the government.” Chandler Owen, a former colleague of union leader A. Philip Randolph and no friend of the PME or PMEW, charged that Gordon, Johnson, and the rest thought “the Negroes should stop killing each other and kill the white people.”
The U.S. government thought that at its height the Peace Movement of Ethiopia had “membership” that ranged “between 3 and 4 million,” though this seems extraordinarily high and might be a better indicator of the hysteria engendered among the authorities at the thought of being in the midst of pro-Tokyo Negroes. Branches were said to sited in Chicago and Galesburg, Illinois; Gary; Baltimore; Phoenix; Long, Mississippi; Gould, Arkansas; Mathersville, Mississippi; Bamboo, Mississippi; Dunleath, Mississippi; St. Louis; Pittsburgh; Pulatka, Florida; and Center, Mississippi. Gordon taught members that an African of slave ancestry cannot become a citizen of the United States, per the infamous Dred Scott decision by the high court of 1857 and, thus, resettlement and/or alignment with Tokyo should be pursued.
Though Gordon denied as much after being indicted, in the prelude to the Pacific War, Wellington Chavis, a druggist, said that he attended PME meetings and heard Gordon make fervent pro-Tokyo statements, all of which were greeted by the audience with “vigorous applause.” The authorities charged that before the war, Gordon had urged on this conflict, terming it a “god-send” since “through it black folks shall be free all over the world[,] that is why we have worked so hard for these . . . years.” Moreover, she was said to have remarked, “Germany is not our enemy, the preacher is our enemy. She is tearing down the western gates in order that we may return to our land.”
Gordon did not neglect Tokyo; apparently in her files was an undated letter to General Sadao Araki of the Japanese military from the PME that said, “We wish a secret alliance with the Japanese government. . . . This war is between the white man and the Japanese and we are not included.”
According to a press account, Gordon regarded Senator Bilbo as the “‘Great White Father’ of the Negro,” though apparently his anti-Tokyo sentiments did not overly concern her. At the same time, Bilbo’s white supremacist constituency should have questioned him more sharply about his upholding their cause in light of his collaboration with Black Nationalists whose sworn mission—ostensibly—was to dismantle their enterprise.
In one example among many, Johnson, the prison convict who testified against Gordon, was said to have voluntarily returned to prison after breaking parole since, according to a journalist, he “feared for his life when he accepted sums of money from a Japanese agent and then refused to aid the movement.” Supposedly he got five hundred dollars. Gordon was said to have approached him in 1933 since he was the son of Johnson-Bey, a leader of the Moorish Science Temple. Reportedly, Gordon and her spouse introduced him to De Guzman.4 Gordon angrily sought to rebut these damaging allegations, as she adopted prematurely the post-1945 line: that she had nothing to do with Japan and everything to do with Africa.5
Though the PME was centered in Chicago, there was also a pocket of strength in New York City. In Harlem at 113 Lennox Avenue meetings were held counseling that Negroes should not join the U.S. military, meetings that possibly included a young Malcolm Little. In the audience at one meeting, according to the authorities, was a “colored man wearing the uniform and distinctive insignia of the United States Army.”6 James Thornhill of the PME was said to have uttered seditious remarks at one of these Harlem meetings:
Black Men of America, wake up, you [have] no part in this so-called Democracy. The white man brought you to this country in 1619, not to Christianize you but to enslave you. This thing called Christianity is not worth a damn. I am not a Christian, we should be Mohammeds or Moslems, not Christians. . . . This so-called white man means you no good.7
Thornhill was not unknown to the New York City police. He was arrested for “unlawful entry” in 1921 on the complaint of a friend (supposedly he purloined a coat). Thornhill also said, “I was convicted for picketing stores in Harlem for jobs,” a sacred cause for Negroes of various ideological persuasions in the 1930s.8 Born in the Virgin Islands, Thornhill had been an intermittent street speaker in Harlem for some years, spreading to denizens there his explosive message. Perhaps his birth in the Caribbean explains his harshness toward Winston Churchill; one of his principal messages was that he “wouldn’t die for a damn Englishman.”9
Thornhill’s dyspeptically testy view of the British politician was not peculiar. In part because of the influx of Africans from the colonized Caribbean, U.S. Negroes had come to look askance at London and wondered why there should be nonchalance about this empire ruling Hong Kong, Singapore, and India and fierce opposition to Tokyo supplanting this decrepit power. When the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the British was unveiled in Harlem before the Pacific War, one Negro commentator was furious. “To the best of my knowledge,” said Sid Thompson, “nothing like this happened when Ethiopia was at war with Italy. Forgetting the base intolerance of the British for the colored peoples of their colonies, their segregation laws in South Africa, their denial of the right of native Africans to own and inherit the land of their forefathers, these people have the temerity to ask aid from hard pressed colored people in America.”10
Again, it would be an error to think that pro-Tokyo sentiment was centered exclusively among a fringe of Black Nationalists. This supposed “fringe” had touched a deep and raw sentiment centered among numerous U.S. Negroes. Even the eminent Rayford Logan, one of the premier intellectuals among U.S. Negroes,11 admitted that the one epitaph he envisioned on his tombstone was “The white man’s distress is the black man’
s gain!” For “the first time in history, during the last world war one dark race—thank God—the Japanese found opportunity for equality”; this perforce impacted the essential nemesis of African Americans: white supremacy.12
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As indicated by the testimony of George Johnson, the Moorish Science Temple was in some ways the seedbed of both pro-Tokyo sentiment and Black Nationalism generally. The MST preceded the Peace Movement of Ethiopia and the precursor of the Nation of Islam: many Black Nationalist groups and the ideology generally were marked by the MST. One U.S. source asserted that the MST was founded in 1913 and that “Japanese infiltration” commenced “following the mysterious death of Noble Drew Ali,” the presumed founder, and the not coincidental arrival of the Japanese operative Satokata Takahashi on these shores.13
Another U.S. source said that the Moorish Science Temple was founded in 1915 by the man known variously as Timothy Drew and Noble Drew Ali, who died in Chicago in 1929. According to MST teachings, U.S. Negroes were descended from the Moors and thus were Islamic and “Asiatic,” the purported North African roots notwithstanding. At its height, the MST was said to have sixty-nine branches. Its members were said to believe Tokyo’s assertion that “there would a war between the United States and Japan” and that when this occurred, the “colored or dark races are to hang together.” The authorities thought that “one of the duties” of the MST was “to try to get all colored members not to join the military forces of this country” and that in case war erupted, “and all the white men were in the Army, that there would be enough colored young men left to cause a revolution in this country and take over things here while the soldiers were away in the foreign service.”14
Like some leaders of the PME, Charles Kirkman-Bey of the MST, who was born in North Dakota, claimed Cherokee ancestry.15 Another source claimed that Kirkman-Bey was born in South Dakota and that his father was a “full blooded Sioux Indian, while his mother was a ‘Moroccan.’” He was said to have studied in Cairo, Egypt, for six years and also attended “Delhi University.” Though he was said to be proficient in spoken Arabic, the FBI claimed that he was “unable to hold an intelligent conversation in Arabic when challenged to do so.” His comrade, Cash C. Bates-Bey, according to the FBI, was “known to have been a close associate of Major Satokata Takahashi, Japanese organizer among the Negroes.” There were “rumors” of Negroes’ “promised removal to ‘safety zones’ when the bombing of the United States begins.” This would be necessary since, as one MST believer in Flint, Michigan, asserted, “Japanese are good fighters. . . . I have heard that the sky would be dark with airplanes and it would be at night, that it would be dark with airplanes of our brothers.” Naturally, Negroes were urged to “arm themselves.” Kirkman-Bey was slated to rule the United States, it was said, after Japan’s triumph. “When this occurs, the position of the white man and the Negro will be reversed,” which was a mighty incentive for some; this would also mean that the new “millennium will have arrived.” The MST was seen as being part of the assumed Islamic onslaught said to be engineered by Tokyo: “agitation of the Mohammedan race was instituted by Japan as early as 1904,” said the FBI; there was “no indication that agitation among American Negroes . . . originated in the Middle East”; indeed, “indications are all to the contrary—that infiltration came directly from Japan.”16
