by Gerald Horne
The moderate Negro leader Gordon Hancock reminded one and all that “the stage for the Pearl Harbor debacle was not set in Tokyo but in Paris in 1918,” when Japan’s demarche on racial equality was defeated.44 The linkage between Versailles and Pearl Harbor was made repeatedly by U.S. Negroes as they sought to impress upon Jim Crow advocates that their philosophy was downright dangerous.45
Hancock too compared Jim Crow defenders to Nazis, arguing that “American fascists seem more determined to defeat the aspirations of the Negro than the ambitions of the Japanese.” Alluding to a spate of racist conflicts, he suggested that “whereas riots and lynchings followed victory in the First World War, they are preceding victory in the second.” He warned pointedly, “this nation cannot watch Germans and Japanese and Negroes all at the same time.”46 Hancock argued that the “reign of terror in Europe is mirrored in the south of the United States. The resurgence of Ku Klux Klanism and the recent attempt to organize a League to Preserve White Supremacy” and the “recent outbreak of lynching” were compromising the war effort and playing into the hands of Berlin—and Tokyo.47 By 1944 the NAACP felt compelled to berate Admiral William Halsey after he referred to Japanese as “yellow monkeys,” a descriptor (albeit with a differing color) often applied to U.S. Negroes and seemingly designed to allow them to sympathize with Tokyo.48
Other anti–Jim Crow advocates took another tack, as did a commentator for the Associated Negro Press, who thought that “white supremacy” had lost “face in Asia” as a result of the rapid retreat of the United States and Britain in the Asia-Pacific basin by early 1942. “Face,” a magical potion, it was said, “is vital anywhere to white supremacy,” in order to compel those not defined as “white” to instinctually respond to the racist diktat. This loss of “face” was “more perturbing to its balance than territorial and material losses over there,” meaning the Asia-Pacific. “Lost ground can be recaptured, yielded territory may be restored but ‘lost face’ is lost. What next? Anglo-Americans pulling Japanese in rickshaws?”49
Something similarly shocking was then unfolding. “If the Japs [sic] seize Madagascar and get a foothold for an attack on South Africa,” wrote one Negro journalist, “General Smuts will arm the Negroes,” as it might be “necessary to abolish racial discrimination and arm the Africans in the event of a crisis”; this would be a “great achievement, perhaps the greatest for Africans since European colonization.”50 General Smuts “declared that he would see that all colored persons were armed before permitting Japanese conquest of South Africa.”51
Frank Marshall Davis, who went on to play a leading role in shaping Hawaii and its impact on the United States as a whole, including the mentoring of a future U.S. president,52 observed in November 1943 that it is a “cockeyed society that grants gains to a racial group only when that society itself is in jeopardy, but that is the fact.” Like Hancock and others, he recognized that “the major argument against long drawn out hostilities is the rising tide of American fascism. It is growing stronger daily.”53
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There was a tendency, particularly among white supremacists, to see the Pacific War specifically as an exemplar of beleaguered “whites” arrayed against all others, with the seemingly eternal “Negro Question” made all the more complex as a result. E. H. Pitts of the Eugenics Society of Sacramento told Senator Bilbo that the ongoing “injection of a Filipino problem, a Hindustani problem,” and the like would eventually create a “more complex problem” and “intensify our Negro problem.” He was reminded of what occurred a few decades earlier when, he wrote, the Quebecois “practically refused conscription in World War I and cynically boasted that the British Canadians would bleed white on the battlefields and leave Canada to them”; this, he noted, “ought to be a warning.”54 In other words, like other Bilbo correspondents, he fretted that Negroes would escape conscription and thus gain strength, no matter the postwar dispensation. Bilbo replied bluntly, “I am in favor of keeping our Oriental, Mongolian friends in Asia and of sending all that we happen to have in this country home [via] the shortest route.”55 He chose to retain a news report declaiming, “end of world racial barriers urged by Chinese spokesmen.”56
Joseph Edgar told an editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that “the Chinaman should stay to himself, the Japanese to himself, the black man to himself.”57 Bilbo then told a local union leader, “I am still determined to send the Negroes back to Africa. It is their only chance.”58 Left unsaid was that this latter option was also perceived as a way to strengthen white supremacy.
At times it seemed that Senator Bilbo, Jim Crow’s most vigorous defender, was as hostile to Tokyo as he was to Negroes, referring to Japanese as “these little yellow devils,”59 while his fellow Mississippian Mary Polk referred to them as “yellow varmints.”60 Preparing “the war machine” in order to “exterminate the Japs” was his fondest wish in early 1942.61 The “damnable, atrocious, hellacious Japs” was his mildest assessment in early 1944.62 Doubtlessly, Bilbo paid close attention when a soldier just back from the southwest Pacific argued that there was “no such thing as a trustworthy Jap,” for “over there we talked to Japanese prisoners who said they’d been educated at schools like the University of Southern California, Stanford, University of California, Hollywood High School”; it was concluded, “We’ve ceased to regard them as human.”63 Assuredly, this anti-Nipponese bloviating dovetailed neatly with the republic’s wartime priorities, though the senator’s Negro constituents would have been justified in wondering what this raving portended for themselves, which also could have strengthened preexisting pro-Tokyo proclivities.
Yet neither Senator Bilbo nor his most deranged constituents examined critically how he could be simultaneously so hostile to Tokyo, yet so solicitous of pro-Tokyo Negroes like Mittie Maude Lena Gordon. Moreover, this view of the Japanese as nonhuman meshed easily with a similar view of the Negro. This confluence—with perverse irony—may have made this Asian foe seem even more formidable, as one of Bilbo’s constituents argued, when the issue was broached of interning Japanese Americans in the Delta. “They will live on rice,” said this resident of Cleveland, Mississippi. “They will work. They will save” and “the next thing you know they will own your land and your neighbor’s land. . . . You will have Japanese neighbors but you will not have Japanese cotton pickers, choppers, servants.” This constituent did not stop there. “When the war is over and the hatchet is buried, the Japs who are here will belong to that highly privileged class, ‘a strong minority’ and you [whites] are but of the under-privileged majority.” There were problems enough “with the Negroes”; “let the Japanese come in and we will have the eternal triangle,” already manifest in the Pacific basin. This would incite a process that would mean “you and I had [to] pack our grips for we cannot compete much better than they.”64
Homer Brett, also of Mississippi, warned that Tokyo’s diabolical plan was “to organize, regiment and arm the brown and yellow millions of Asia under their leadership” in order to “subjugate the white races.” Yes, that could mean an ultimate showdown between Berlin and Tokyo—but where would that leave Uncle Sam in the meantime? He recalled that Kaiser Wilhelm himself “pointed out the Yellow Peril years before it was apparent to statesmen.” Japanese, he explained, possessed a “fanatical belief in their racial superiority, a bitter hatred of all whites and incredible bestiality” besides—most of which Negroes had claimed were traits of white supremacists. He worried that “the Japanese have a potent weapon,” that is, “the racial aversion of the black and brown to the white which always exists.”65 He warned that racism should not allow for an underestimation of Japanese capability. The problem Jim Crow advocates hardly envisioned then was how to contain racism after the war ended and target solely African Americans while ignoring the lessons of recent history?
Evidently, anti-Tokyo and anti-Negro sentiments were reinforcing each other, and those in the vanguard of this trend apparently did not realize that this was contributing to
a devolution of white supremacy as the more sober-minded came to recognize that “race wars” were not an optimal mode to preserve the status quo. Even Senator Bilbo found it difficult to ignore what Thorne Lane of Panama City told him as Singapore was falling: “times have changed since” the legislator formulated resettlement, and now “the country is at war and until that’s over I suppose all attention should be directed toward victory”; in other words, “segregation of the Negro must be suspended for the duration” of the war.66 Few dared to suspect that this “suspension” could be extended indefinitely, while moderate Negroes likewise had difficulty in realizing after the war that some envisioned a suspension—not necessarily a termination—of Jim Crow.
5
Pro-Tokyo Negroes Convicted and Imprisoned
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the skittish U.S. authorities began a massive crackdown on Negroes expressing pro-Tokyo sentiment. Certainly it was true that many of those detained had engaged in fire-breathing, flame-throwing verbiage. Surely it is accurate to say that those arrested were pro-Tokyo, though this was hard to disengage from their enervating alienation from the United States itself; many sincerely believed that, given lynching and other horrors, their fate could hardly deteriorate with a Japanese victory. Yes, many of the detained did discourage enlistment in the U.S. armed forces, though this was in the face of previous poorly kept promises that the destiny of Negroes would improve if they would just make another blood sacrifice.
Still, the arrests and convictions did not necessarily squelch the kind of thinking exhibited by these defendants. To a degree, much of this thinking was driven underground and rematerialized in the 1950s in, for example, the Nation of Islam. Black Nationalists were then distant from a now defeated Tokyo, though the profession of “Asiatic” origin lingered like the beard that continues to grow on the face of a corpse. Ironically, a good deal of this “Asian” orientation among U.S. Negroes was to reappear after the entente between Washington and “Red China” in the 1970s.1 Oddly, this “Maoist” posture persisted despite the fact that, unlike Tokyo, Beijing then was collaborating with the United States across the globe.2 It was almost as if African Americans were engaging in wish fulfillment, willing China—despite massive evidence to the contrary—to play the role of pre-1945 Japan, indicative of the powerful hold Tokyo continued to exert on the Black Imagination.
Gordon Hancock argued that this spate of arrests of pro-Tokyo Negroes was indicative of a larger organic problem: “at his best,” he wrote, “the Negro is often treated as a seditionist and conspirator”; hence, “it is not surprising then that a few should eventually react as seditionist.”3 In other words, Jim Crow had backfired wildly and badly and some of its victims had chosen to enact the seditionist role U.S. rulers had expected in light of the latter’s atrocious malfeasance; as had been the case historically, the beleaguered Negro was once more seeking to embrace the sworn foe of Washington—Tokyo in this case—just as in the nineteenth century they had embraced London.4
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In December 1942 at the mouth of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, a massive roundup of Negroes took place. The twenty-one men were accused of being opposed to military service and counseling others likewise. Before Judge A. J. Caillouet the defendants argued that Negroes were actually “Hebrews” and thus barred from waging war abroad. Their leader proclaimed, “Negroes don’t have to go to war. You are Jews,” while “all those who are masquerading as Jews are not Jews.” The leader, Ethelbert A. Boraster, was also known as Frank Anselm, Kid Anselm, and Frankie Anselm.5
The NAACP was informed contemporaneously that Boraster “preached that Negroes were the direct descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” and therefore were ineligible for military service.6 Interestingly, his stance meant that he and his comrades were analogous to those described as Muslim, who were also being arrested for dodging the draft.
The New Orleans sweep was not an isolated event. In New York City that same month, the press reported that leaders of “the so-called Ethiopia Pacific Movement” were detained. They were said to have “aimed at a coalition of Africa and Japan in planning a ‘world empire for the dark races.’” Five leaders were arrested—four Negroes and one defined as “white.” They were “indicted on sedition charges,” according to the press; those charged were Robert Jordan, listed as president; Lester Holness, secretary; the Reverend Ralph Green; James Thornhill; and the man denoted as “white,” Joseph Hartrey.7 Again, fomenting “insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny” in the “armed forces” was the accusation; they were said to have sought to “obstruct recruiting” and “enlistment” in the U.S. military; their pro-Tokyo statements and, in some cases, actions were the evidence.8
On 18 February 1942 Lester Eugene Holness was arrested at his Harlem home at 14 West 119th Street by the FBI. “They searched the premises without a search warrant,” he said, dismayed; they were seeking a “short wave and radio set and code book” said to be his way to communicate with his Tokyo supervisors. “Finding none,” said Holness, they still arrested him and confiscated “all papers, personal and private they could find.”9
The indictment of the five defendants charged that they “would willfully cause and attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, [and] mutiny” in the U.S. armed forces. They were said to “obtain audiences” to “solicit contributions” for their sedition and “would make speeches designed to mislead and to corrupt the patriotic, loyal and law abiding colored population of Greater New York and particularly the community known as Harlem.” There they demanded that “Colored United States soldiers should not fight the Japanese”; instead, they contended that “you should learn Japanese so that you will be able to engage the Japanese in conversation when they come to this country” since “the little brown man from the East in a very short time will rule the world.” Their advice to Negro soldiers? “Go back to your outfit and start a whispering campaign” to undermine the U.S. war effort.10
By January 1943 a jury of three Negroes and nine defined as “white,” after deliberating over three hours, found the defendants guilty of sedition and conspiracy. It appears that the jury was moved particularly by words attributed to Jordan, who purportedly stated that “we are going to knock out Pearl Harbor again and then we are coming into Vera Cruz and then into Arizona.” After the prosecutor cited these remarks, Jordan replied wanly, “I speak very broken English.” He also denied threatening murder, while Holness denied having given a party in February 1942 celebrating the fall of Singapore to Japanese forces.11
Jordan, who may have been the pro-Nippon Negro most conversant with Japan, was at times referred to as the “Harlem Mikado” and supposedly was the advocate of the so-called BB Plan, pursuant to which Negroes who became Buddhists, a faith with deep roots in Japan, would win Japanese citizenship, visit, and presumably reside in Japan and study there too, including the sciences; all of this was known to the FBI.12
On 14 January 1943 the New York City defendants were convicted. James Thornhill, for example, was sent to prison for eight years for conspiracy to cause and attempt to cause subordination, disloyalty, and mutiny and to obstruct enlistment and recruiting to the U.S. military. Pointed to specifically were remarks he was said to have uttered at a PME meeting on 4 July 1942.13 Holness received a seven-year sentence; Best received four years; Jordan received ten years and a $5,000 fine.14
In an unrelated case in the metropolitan area, Carlos Cooks, described as “lean and hatchet faced,” and whose roots were in the Caribbean but who went on to become a leading Black Nationalist in Harlem, was sentenced for pro-Tokyo sentiment in August 1942.15
The PME was not isolated in lofting the pro-Tokyo banner in New York City. In Brooklyn in 1943 William Briggs-Bey of the Moorish Science Temple declared that “we have been warned by the Japan Government that soon a starvation will take place in Europe” and Europeans will flood the United States taking jobs of Negroes. But Negroes need not fear, since Briggs-Bey assured that “I, myself . . . w
ill leave for Tokyo . . . as soon as I can raise $1000” to confer with the comrades there. The FBI took note of this story too.16
In neighboring Newark, New Jersey, seven members of the “House of Israel” were arrested. Their leader—Askew Thomas, alias Brother Reuben Israel, alias “Hot Dogs”—was formerly associated with the PMEW and Takis, and thus had been involved in military drills of his followers for purposes viewed as not necessarily benign.17
