by Gerald Horne
The MST branch in Hartford hosted frequent visits by Japanese business visitors, the last one taking place reputedly in 1939.17 It was said that “Japanese race propaganda among Negroes” was rife, and the MST was a prime transmission belt. At several meetings, fervent thanks were rendered publicly to the emperor of Japan himself.18 The authorities believed that the MST was not only “highly anti-Semitic and subversive” but also “claims to be subsidized by the Japanese government [from] whom they received regular funds”; evidently the MST believed that “‘the Japs have the U.S. surrounded’ and that a large number of Japanese agents are employed here.” The reporting FBI agent, however, doubted what he had found: since “the ability to keep a secret is not usually found in the Negro temperament, I presume there is an intelligent leadership back of the movement”; it was hard to believe that some MST members had been able to keep this pro-Tokyo conspiracy under wraps for so long. Signaling the need for affirmative action, it was determined that it would be “necessary to use a Negro investigator for further assignment in checking on this society.”19 After the war, there was a felt need by U.S. elites to integrate Negroes at various levels of society, notably as an incentive to reject foreign powers like Japan.
The Moorish Science Temple, it was thought, was located at the intersection where most of the pro-Tokyo Negroes interacted. Understatedly, the FBI argued that the MST “shows strong traces of Japanese influence” and had held meetings “at the homes of Japanese nationals.” The ubiquitous De Guzman was present at times and was thought to be among “instructors of this society,” who “have in the past been largely Japanese and Filipinos” and had ties to the PMEW and the “pro-Japanese Temple of Islam in Detroit.”20 Ultimately, a search of the home of Walter Jones Bey, of the MST in Flint, revealed a “large picture” of Tokyo’s infamous General “Tojo in uniform,” which he supposedly received from a “female member,” though he had a “son in the U.S. Army” at a time when war had been declared against Japan.21 MST members would have agreed with the contemporaneous words of Japan’s Okakura Tenshin, who argued that “the spell of white prestige must be completely broken that we may learn our own possibilities and resources.”22
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The U.S. military thought it worthwhile to investigate this phenomenon and acknowledged that pro-Tokyo attitudes among U.S. Negroes were fueled by “some local law enforcement agents in the South [who] not only welcome the slightest excuse but actually seek the opportunity to shoot down Negroes.” Hence, “subversive elements are sponsoring the Ethiopian-Japanese Association and the Negro-Moorish-American organization, their slogan being that Japan is champion of the colored races and why should the colored race fight another for the benefit of the white race?” Also of concern was that “colored associations have a proclivity for building up hidden caches of ball ammunition, in vague anticipation of the time when they will have to defend themselves against interracial abuse”—though others thought that this arming was in gleeful anticipation of a Japanese invasion of the United States.23
The U.S. military, which by definition had to be concerned if Tokyo had broad influence among Negroes, asserted that in 1935 Japanese agents were sent to “Arabia and Egypt to prepare themselves as propagandists to work in the Mohammedan countries” and that “the Koran and holy books were printed in Japan.” Helping to foment Islam, directed from North Africa and the vicinity, among U.S. Negroes would provide a kind of shield to deflect what was thought to be the interrelated Christianity and white supremacy that undergirded the U.S. and European antagonists alike. Japan got further traction by “using as much as possible front officials of Negro or West Indian extraction”; the latter, with ties to London, were thought to be notably effective. Thus, by 1929 there were said to be over 18,000 “East Indians in Jamaica alone” serving to feed an already extensive anti-London atmosphere. Tellingly, the Jamaica Progressive Alliance had assumed ties to the Ethiopian Pacific Movement. There were even more “East Indians” in Trinidad and British Guiana, colonies that were also sending migrants to Harlem. “Negroes from the British West Indies are at present the most frequent agitators against the whites.” One of the leaders of the Ethiopian Pacific Movement had stated auspiciously, echoing the words of the young Malcolm Little, “If they give me a gun and send me to Asia or Africa, I will use my own discretion.” Typically, the Communist Party was blamed for propagating presumed sedition that “lends itself very well to exploitation by the Japanese.”24
There were a slew of “Japanese-Negro Front organizations,” it was reported, including the Emmanuel Gospel Mission of San Francisco, with suspected ties to the “Japanese Buddhist Church.” As early as 1922 it was said to be preaching to “Negroes, Hawaiians, Mexicans and Hindus the doctrine of the necessity of a union of all colored races against the whites. The Afro-Asiatic League organized in 1919 also advocated a racial war.” Then there was the UNIA, an “inspiration and ally to the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World and to the Ethiopian Pacific Movement,” the leading forces in the proliferating galaxy of pro-Tokyo forces. The UNIA was said to be seeking to “get jobs for Negroes in national defense industries.” EPM leaders argued that after the defeat of the United States, the nation “will be turned over to the Negro.” The EPM leader Robert Jordan “claimed membership in the Black Dragon Society” of Japan.25
Reputedly, there were “definitely anti-Semitic . . . branches” of these groups in “Detroit and Chicago and a very significant branch in Washington, D.C. which is reported to include numerous Negroes in government service.” The Allah Temple of Islam, which had been “started in Detroit in 1928,” made a “claim that the origin of the Negro is in Asia, rather than in Africa,” bringing it closer to Tokyo. It was “very active,” and “one branch of the Islam Movement, called the Nation of Islam is a military organization.” The PMEW had as a “parent organization and [was] a probable affiliate of the League of Asiatic Nations organized in Peiping, China about February 1933.”26
Though the UNIA, the Allah Temple of Islam, the EPM, the MST, and the PMEW were the major organizational forces surveyed, the fact is that in some ways they were simply the tip of a nationalist iceberg. In Buffalo, for example, there was what was described as a “highly race conscious” group that highlighted the “Mohameddan religion and the Arabic language,” both of which were taught; and Negroes were “encouraged to discard their ‘slave’ names and adopt Arabic names.” This was the Addynu Allehe-Universal Arabic Association, not the ATOI.27 In other words, these groups in many ways were capitalizing on a hunger among U.S. Negroes for alternatives to the status quo as much as they were helping to instill this attitude in the marrow of U.S. Negroes.
The prototype of the pro-Tokyo Negro may have been embodied by the man often known as Robert Jordan. A former UNIA member, he left his native Jamaica in 1914 headed to Asia; in 1918 he worked for a company known as the Japan Mail Steamship Company, the largest of its genre on the island. Described as “small but handsome,” by 1935 he was a leader of the Ethiopian Pacific Movement, attracting hundreds regularly to his meetings in Harlem.28
At times referred to as Leonard Robert Jordan, he was also thought to resemble a Japanese national, perhaps because of his close and binding association with Tokyo. One of his EPM comrades was cited for the proposition that “I will fight for Japan with every drop of my blood and I wouldn’t ask for a penny, for I realize that when the war is over I will be rightly paid and looked upon not as an inferior but looked upon as an equal man of the Japanese people and the dark people in the world.”29
It was not just the U.S. military that worriedly surveyed how and why Tokyo had sunk roots among U.S. Negroes. After an exhaustive survey, the Associated Negro Press, a consortium of Negro journals, noted that “even before the first World War, the Japanese Foreign Office groped for a method of contacting Negroes in the United States.” As reported by the ANP, when Du Bois organized a Pan African Congress in 1919, it was opposed by the major powers except for Japan, which greeted i
t with “fervent satisfaction.” In Dixie, it was reported, “these Nipponese agents invariably began with an oily tirade against all white races,” then spoke “freely of the eventual rise of darker peoples.” These agents were “better versed in discriminatory laws of the southland than most Negroes and could interject with marvelous accuracy the phobias and ranting of Tillman, Vardaman, Cole Blease, Thomas Dixon and Heflin of Alabama” (leading Dixiecrats). Then there were “colored agents”: “Japan’s black allies in large seacoast cities of the black belt” who “established themselves as fortune-tellers, seers, clairvoyants, spiritualists, voodoists, palmists, phrenologists, tea-leaf and coffee ground readers. A few turbaned East Indian mystics have been revealed as well educated Negroes or West Indians with a knowledge of Arabic or a smattering of some Oriental dialect,” all of which was enhanced by “their ‘foreign’ hauteur and aloofness.” The fact that many of these individuals were affluent—because of putative Tokyo subsidies—heightened their allure. They became the “focus of attention and mysterious admiration” as a result. It was not just Islam that was put forward as an alternative to Christianity and part of Tokyo’s magnetism: “usually the figure of a Buddha occupies a position of prominence in the parlor or reception room” of these individuals, many of whom tended to “prey on superstition.” Hence, “in the event of a full and successful invasion of our borders from the southwest, her illiterate followers in the black belt were expected to rise with such vigor that a temporary diversion would facilitate more rapid movement of the invader.”30
One analyst blamed Marcus Garvey and the UNIA—not the MST—for the proliferation of pro-Tokyo sentiment among U.S. Negroes. According to Leon Taylor, Garvey “went along with full knowledge and approval of the Imperial Japanese Government” of these various initiatives. The UNIA was the “controlling body” and at the top of this group was a “secret oligarchy” of “West Indian[s]” with grievances against London. Then after his “departure Japanese spies took full control of the organized mass through their paid Filipino and radical Negro-West Indian henchmen,” all tied to Satokata Takahashi. This former officer in the Japanese military “himself photographed and diagrammed many sections of the United States in company of various Negro women, of whom he was exceptionally fond.” He was notably active “along the Canadian border,” where he “plotted and mapped extensive approaches . . . around the Sault Saint Marie locks.” He was not above the effort to “lavish gifts of cash” upon unwitting Negroes, which, said this waspish analyst, “won for him innumerable naïve, Negro, feminine companions.” An unnamed Negro woman from Cleveland was reported to be a top agent of Tokyo.31
Tokyo weighed in during the 1920s when a high-level directive mandated that “the captains of all ocean going Japanese passenger ships” should “afford American Negro tourists preference in every way,” a startling contrast with U.S. vessels, which routinely subjected Negroes to a debilitating Jim Crow. Thus, Taylor concluded, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Cincinnati remained the “inland strongholds of those secret organizations while New York, Jersey City and Roanoke afford hiding places for the eastern aggregations.”32
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This book’s emphasis on U.S. Negroes should not obscure the point that a number of Euro-Americans engaged in espionage on Tokyo’s behalf. Still, a wartime source reported that in Seattle, hotels owned by those of Japanese ancestry, many of them close to shipyards where African American workers were arriving in droves from Texas and Louisiana to toil, were more willing to serve Negro customers than those owned by Euro-Americans. Apparently, brothels owned by those of Japanese origin, in contrast to those controlled by Euro-Americans, also were more willing to entertain U.S. Negroes.33
In retrospect it is difficult to ascertain whether Jim Crow advocates were more upset with Japanese and Japanese Americans supposedly residing or opening businesses close to critical infrastructure or their overtures to U.S. Negroes. The U.S. military concluded that “by accident or design virtually always their communities”—meaning those of Japanese origin—“were adjacent to very vital shore installations, war plants, etc. . . . throughout the Santa Maria Valley” in California. In the county of Santa Barbara, including “the cities of Santa Maria and Guadalupe, every facility, air field, bridge, telephone and power line or other facility of importance was flanked by Japanese. They even surrounded the oil fields”; this was “more than coincidence.” There was no attempt to ponder how bigotry against U.S. Negroes facilitated the latter aligning with Tokyo, thus making it more likely that the challenge to national security sketched was actually plausible.34
This penetration of the U.S. Negro community by Tokyo helps to explicate why Congressman Martin Dies asserted before the bombing of Pearl Harbor that potential Japanese espionage in this country was “greater than the Germans ever dreamed of having in the Low Countries.” In the San Francisco Bay area, which had a substantial complement of both Negroes and those of Japanese origin, the situation was “critical,” he said.35 Earlier, President Roosevelt was informed in a secret message that “for years suspected espionage activities” by Tokyo in the United States had been occurring.36
Congressman Dies may have had in mind a pre–Pearl Harbor incident when Japanese sailors from a tanker in Hawaii reportedly ascended the tower of a local hotel and were observed taking pictures of the harbor and nearby fortifications. Other sailors supposedly were taking measurements of the dock at Hilo. The secretary of the navy was then informed of what were thought to be worrisome statistics:
On the island of Hawaii, which is ungarrisoned [sic], only 10% of the military male citizens are white Americans, that is 887 out of 8287; while there are 2774 military male citizens of Japanese [origin]. In addition there are 2886 alien Japanese males of military age and 8688 Filipinos. A comparison for white Americans of military age to all other citizens of military age reduces the ratio from 10% to 4%.
Tokyo was also monitoring San Francisco closely, as Congressman Dies suggested. “Many of the visiting Japanese naval personnel have close relatives among the local Japanese residents” and there were “active Japanese agents in Hilo.”37 Amidst the hyperventilating, there was not a pause to consider that if the national security situation were as frightening as suggested, then why exacerbate it by tormenting and terrorizing U.S. Negroes, making it simpler for them to ally with Tokyo? Admittedly, however, this concern gained momentum after the war.
It is comprehensible nevertheless why the otherwise jittery Congressman Dies arrived at such a conclusion. In the early 1940s the FBI was told about a “prominent Negro real estate dealer” in an unnamed city who recounted how a fellow Negro arrived at his house with a machine gun and insisted that he take it, telling him bluntly, “You had better take it because the time is coming that you will need it,” in light of Negro disgust with white racism combined with sympathy for Tokyo’s racial appeals. The real estate dealer also said that he would estimate that 75 percent of the homes of Negroes in Washington had some sort of firearm. In Detroit, along with East St. Louis, the de facto capital of pro-Tokyo sentiment among Negroes, as some saw it (St. Louis would have dissented), the FBI was told that “racial tension was great as it ever was,” with the expectation that “niggers would be shot by the hundreds” in the next “riot.” Revealingly, it was reported, “there are some Negroes that were at one time members of the Communist Party in this country and these Negroes spread the propaganda that should Japan win this war the Negroes would fare better under the Japanese than under the American Government.”38 Of course, another way to view this latter comment is as a ham-handed attempt to link the wartime foe with the assumed postwar antagonist.
Whatever the case, the point remained that Tokyo continued to believe that its trump card was the alienation of U.S. Negroes from their homeland and their concomitant attraction to Tokyo. To that end, Richard Wright’s trailblazing novel Native Son was translated into Japanese only nine months after it was published in the United States in 1940. The translation was by
a leading member of the Communist Party in Japan, indicative of how sympathy for U.S. Negroes crossed ideological borders in Tokyo, making it that much more profound.39
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By December 1941 what had been predicted for years was at hand: Japan and the United States were at war. Days later, Walter White of the NAACP uttered what came to be regarded as conventional wisdom in liberal circles, wisdom that would animate and propel an ongoing push to erode Jim Crow: “Unless there is a more drastic readjustment of racial attitudes the United Nations [U.S. allies] cannot win this war.”40 “Each day until the Japanese are defeated,” White warned, “the white prestige is being lessened in the world.” Perhaps it was a “far cry from Abraham Lincoln to Singapore,” but nonetheless, “there is a close[r] link to the tragedy of the Pacific than most people think.” For just as the United States during the Civil War had to move toward abolishing slavery as a tool of survival, the United States now had to ban Jim Crow for similar reasons. Robert Sproul, president of the University of California–Berkeley, who appeared on the dais with White, concurred and also adopted a rhetorical tack that was to become increasingly more popular: he analogized Jim Crow to Berlin’s policies. “Nazism unfortunately is not the exclusive possession of the German people. It exists among people in the United States who think ghettos are all right so long as they are confined to the Negroes.”41 A drumbeat of attack against Jim Crow erupted in a manner rarely seen, underlining how the Pacific War transformed the republic. Herbert Agar, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, urged action immediately on Jim Crow, since “all over Asia,” Tokyo was advancing with the cry, “Look what the Americans are doing to their Negroes”—is this what they intend for you?42 Tellingly, NAACP leader Walter White, when visiting the Philippines during the war, found that Japanese occupation forces had briefed islanders thoroughly about contemporary racist episodes in Los Angeles.43
