Facing the Rising Sun

by Gerald Horne

  According to Williams, Erwin told him in early February 1942 that the Japanese military was set to “bomb Chicago, Detroit and St. Louis.” But what was striking was his testimony about his meeting with Butler at the latter’s home at 1925 Russell Avenue in East St. Louis. “There was a train loaded with soldiers coming over the highline bridge and Mr. Butler didn’t know whether the soldiers [were] black or white and made some remark that if that bridge was knocked out, them soldiers would be wrecked.” That is, “if 40 sticks of dynamite was stuck under that bridge that would knock the bridge off.” This was the evident plan. However, as the FBI closed in for arrests, minutes of meetings and other documents were burned; as he and Butler were heading frantically to St. Louis in order to hide stockpiled arms, they were stopped by the police. They pulled guns, he said, but were subdued in mid-September 1942.4

  Butler did not help his case when he spoke of PMEW “members in the army.” He had been a member since 1934 and said the group met every Monday and Wednesday evening. “When I joined,” he said, “it was for the betterment of the conditions of the Negroes,” that is, “equal rights and justice.” He downplayed the significance of Japan, not unexpected given the charges against him. His recollection of his 1942 arrest was dramatic. “Butler, get out of that car,” was the cry of a police officer who “called me a name” and threatened to shoot him. “They had a gun on me, one was on the side” and “the other at the back.” They “began to push me and threaten my life” and said “you are a damned liar, you God damned niggers never know nothing and you all stink” and, besides, “ain’t no God damned good.” He was told that “if I didn’t agree to what he [said],” then “I wouldn’t get out of the jail alive.” The fact that his adversary’s “hand [was] on the pistol” and “in shooting position” as he barked instructions made his words more persuasive. Butler was gobsmacked, recalling that “my life is just as sweet to me as other human beings and these men was going to kill me if I didn’t confess.” Still, he denied the dynamite story and the account of burning minutes and documents, but the authorities did not believe him.5

  The other defendant, David Erwin, also denied the accusations made against him. By 1943, this forty-three-year-old man born in Mississippi (as was Butler), had been in the St. Louis region since 1922, “with the exception of one year I was in Chicago.” Yes, he knew Takis and knew about the Brazil venture but knew nothing about guns, he said. Asked “Have you ever been mistaken for a Japanese before,” this African American answered promptly, “Yes sir.” It had happened in Mounds, Illinois; “the prosecuting attorney himself,” he added, “thought I was Japanese.”6 Neither the question nor the answer aided his parlous cause.

  But was any of this actually incriminating, particularly the Brazil angle? As early as 1931, when Japan was moving to attack China, the Negro press was reporting rhapsodically that “Japan builds thriving colony in Brazil for all races.”7 Just because U.S. Negroes had a hankering for Brazil, which happened to have a substantial population of Japanese extraction, was not in itself incriminating—though it proved to be damning in this case.

  Supposedly Butler said that if China prevailed, then U.S. Negroes too would lose; however, even more harmful to his case was Erwin’s alleged statement that “when you talk to the white people, pretend you are for them but never forget the Japanese is our friend.”8

  The grand jury and the trial produced page after page of testimony by Negroes affirming their allegiance to Tokyo, their fondness for firearms, and their alienation from the United States. Wolcie Gray, also known as “Wolsia Gray,” was an example. This seventy-five-year-old, married (though separated) East St. Louis resident, the father of eight children, worked as a carpenter. He was from Memphis, bordering Mississippi, with its own unique racist history, which may explicate why he joined the PMEW. “I can’t write” or read, he confessed. But as a witness, he bobbed and weaved systematically and deftly, seeking to evade direct prosecutorial queries, while providing adroit “non-denial denials.” Asked whether he would “rather join with the Japanese” than the United States in battle, he responded cagily, “I know the United States. All I have ever done in my life is through” the United States, as “that’s where I have been living.” He ducked and dodged further when he was asked about previous pro-Tokyo statements he was said to have made.9

  Thomas Albert Watkins, who also had lived in Memphis, said that “after the Japanese invaded us on November 24, 1942, they [U.S. Negroes] were assured of holding some dominating position.” “That’s the month of the invasion,” he said in September. “Everybody will be celebrating.” Watkins described himself as a “common laborer,” though it was reasonable to speculate that if his apparent dreams materialized, he would receive a decided promotion.10

  Pauline Verser had lived “all my life” in East St. Louis, excepting time spent in Mounds. Butler was her neighbor and told her that if she joined the PMEW, “you could leave the United States,” quite an enticement. “He said the Japanese was giving us the right God and we should serve their God,” not least since “all that wasn’t affiliated with the movement would be destroyed” by “the Japs.” But she was “sanctified” and found this hard to swallow.11

  The prosecutor, perhaps oversimplifying to better convict the defendants, referred to the PMEW simply as the “Japanese Movement.”12 Yet Forest Stancel, a PMEW member, insisted that “they talked about racial questions and about the white man not giving the colored man equal privileges” and, of course, “lynching,” common conversational fare among Negroes and hardly unique to those attracted to Tokyo.13

  Beatrice Branch, who had lived in Chicago and Brooklyn, Illinois, before arriving in East St. Louis, was born in Alabama. The prosecutor showed her a photograph of her spouse, K. D. Branch, in the full military regalia of the PMEW unit. Also pictured were Henry Hall, Roscoe Standifer, and Russell Clark. Why did Mr. Branch speak of Emperor Hirohito? Why did the couple retain copies of local newspapers with articles focused on Japanese leaders? Why were Japanese pamphlets in their home? She too was a PMEW member, but her terse and exceedingly vague responses did not seem to satisfy the prosecutor.14

  PMEW member John Bedford was among the well armed. He had known Butler since 1927 and did not hesitate to speak of his “16 gauge pump” shotgun and his “Winchester” repeating rifle—both for “hunting,” he assured, though the prosecutor seemed skeptical.15

  Howard Bayne, an agent with U.S. Naval Intelligence, was not only skeptical of these Negroes’ assertions, he was horrified by the sedition he found along the Missouri-Illinois border. There had been a suspicious fire on the “Federal Barge Line” near Cairo, and Bayne believed that the “vicious” PMEW might be responsible. He too had heard of the reputed impending Japanese invasion of 24 November and was outraged. He knew that Frank Mart of the PMEW had been quoted as saying that the “black man would rule the Western Hemisphere” and that he was not only a PMEW but a UNIA officer. He knew that both groups had “very strong organization in East St. Louis.” Mart had rifles that he planned to use on 24 November, he said—“45s, 22s, 30–30s and 41 or 43s”—and many bullets too. A “Mexican” had briefed Bayne about the strength of the PMEW, particularly in Cape Girardeau, along the Mississippi River. “I know a Japanese down there who made the statement he had pictures of all the bridges. He was a photographer”—a real shutterbug, suspiciously enough.16

  Harrison Fair, with roots in Arkansas, epitomized Bayne’s nightmare. This railway worker—a track layer—had joined the PMEW at the UNIA hall in East St. Louis at 16th and Wilford. He had served in World War I but had taken his expertise to the PMEW military unit, where he rose to the level of lieutenant colonel. “You know Harrison,” said the prosecutor with undue familiarity, “that a lot of the colored people have guns?” His forthright answer: “I reckon they have.”17

  Roscoe Standifer, a resident of East St. Louis with roots in Tupelo, Mississippi, had worked at Aluminum Ore Company since 1919. He was a captain in the PMEW mi
litary unit and owned a shotgun—for “hunting,” he said.18 Cuver Vernon Young of Macon, Mississippi, and East St. Louis had spent two years in the U.S. Navy, having joined at the tender age of fourteen. He owned three shotguns and a pistol and was asked pointedly whether Erwin had averred that “the Bible said the world should be ruled by Negroes.”19

  The defendants were convicted and the PMEW was routed, along with the notion that a corps of armed Negroes would assist an invading force from Tokyo. But as so often happens, the underlying motivations—including alienation from the United States, militancy, seeking allies abroad, and the like—did not perish. One reason why was that the bludgeoning of Negroes that had helped to instigate pro-Tokyo attitudes in the first instance did not die with the defendants’ imprisonment. In mid-September 1942 as a grand jury in East St. Louis was skewering the PMEW, due south in Alabama the NAACP was told that “one of the Colored Nurses from the Army Air Corps here in Tuskegee was beaten by a white policeman when she attempted to get on a bus to come back to Tuskegee. They not only beat her but fined her and put in jail.” The observer concluded disconsolately, “The race question is getting worse than ever down here.”20

  The same could be said of the situation beyond the confines of this college town. A few years later, the dam broke and a Negro woman, Rosa Parks, faced a more civilized fate than her 1942 counterpart, due in no small part to recognition that such maltreatment was harming the republic’s global image and undermining national security.

  ***

  Another reason why U.S. Negroes were inflamed to the point of attempting sedition was the mass internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals generally with, as they saw it, little outcry from Euro-Americans. This could be their fate too, thought many Negroes, and the sour reaction to this epochal event did little to build national unity or convince many Negroes that attaining first-class citizenship might be possible. In 1944 a Negro journalist summarized the stance of many African Americans: “One of the worst features of mass evacuation was that a particular minority was subjected to unusually harsh measures solely on the ground of race or ancestry,” which now meant that a “precedent is established” for already beset Negroes.21

  When the prominent hunter and author Frank Buck advocated the “complete annihilation” of all Japanese, who should be “slaughtered by poison gas” and other devious means in order to “save [the] ‘white’ race,” Negroes knew that they could well be next on the list for mass murder.22 The preexisting rhetorical barrage about the presumed commonalities of the “colored races” predisposed U.S. Negroes to sense they were next on the chopping block and, perhaps, they should preempt this potential fiasco by aligning with Tokyo; this was the context for the trial in East St. Louis.

  In retrospect, it is not easy to overestimate the hysteria that gripped Washington, notably in early 1942 with the fall of Singapore, when it seemed that the war was being lost and a radical reordering of race relations was in store. This is what propelled many African Americans to rally to Tokyo’s banner, while causing those like Buck to draw up ever more dire projections. Even Frank Marshall Davis, the African American intellectual known to be close to the Communist Party and, thus, generally resistant to Japan’s appeals, argued in February 1942 that “Japan is capitalizing upon resentment toward white supremacy to pave the way for absolute victory.” He thought that “‘white supremacy’ in the Orient is taking such a terrific drubbing from the little brown men of Japan that the Nazis may forget all about any spring offensive against Russia and instead launch a drive against India to beat their partners to this rich prize.” Other than ideological predilection, what restrained him from joining the pro-Tokyo bandwagon was that he “envisage[d] the Nazis turning on their Japanese partner just as Hitler turned on Stalin.”23

  Likewise, near the same time, a correspondent for the Negro press in Stockholm found that in Germany the “‘Communist Peril’ is being replaced by the ‘Yellow Peril’” as Berlin seeks “peace between the ‘white nations’ to enable them to start a joint crusade against Japan.” Citing pro-Nazi sources in Sweden, the commentator ascertained that “there still seems to be a difference of opinion as to whether Russia belongs to the ‘White Race’ or not.”24

  Closer to home, in Columbus, Ohio, a Negro journalist in February 1942 found a source who declared that the “Japanese inspired [the] free world’s darker races” to rebel against “white domination.”25 Ironic confirmation for this remark was found in South Africa, where Jan Smuts charged that Tokyo’s successes threatened white supremacy and, said an observer, “threatened the rule of white people in South Africa”; supposedly, “the Axis partners had granted Japan the French island of Madagascar as a jumping-ground against the eastern shores of South Africa.”26 It appeared that the Tokyo threat was impacting what came to be called apartheid in a manner similar to the way it was impacting Jim Crow.27

  ***

  Presumably, this news that was so dispiriting to white supremacy sheds light on why in 1942, the Negro press was forced to mull over federal guidelines proffered by the Office of Censorship.28

  In other words, the Negro press was a special force shaping Negro attitudes during the war vis-à-vis Tokyo and the related internment. The Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal was among those who felt that the Negro press was a reliable barometer of mass Negro opinion. He stressed that “the press defines the Negro group to the Negroes themselves. The individual Negro is invited to share in the sufferings, grievances and pretensions of the millions of Negroes outside the narrow community. This creates a feeling of strength and solidarity.”29 A number of these journals had subscribers abroad and foreign correspondents as well, and many of these journals were affiliated with the Associated Negro Press, which had a global network of correspondents. By 1940, for example, the circulation of the weekly Baltimore Afro-American was reportedly over 100,000.30

  As we have seen, many Negroes and numerous Negro newspapers were less than enthusiastic about the Pacific War, a sentiment that had not escaped the attention of Washington. In this inflaming context, mass internment was seen by many Negroes as both a desperate countermeasure and viciously angry retaliation against those seen as Tokyo’s proxy—a descriptor that could be easily applied to Negroes themselves. Thus, the prominent Negro columnist P. L. Prattis argued persuasively that “if Negroes spurn these Japanese Americans, Negroes will probably be the losers. Many whites do not want Japanese Americans and Negro Americans to be friends.” Before the mass incarceration, they would “take Japanese Americans to their homes and give them much more of an American’s chance than they give Negroes. Their aim, of course, is to keep all minorities divided with the Negro at the bottom of the horizontal [and vertical] scale.” While Euro-Americans often persecuted Japanese Americans, those who “live[d] with Negroes find themselves accepted as human beings and suffer no embarrassments socially or otherwise.”31

  Wallace Lee concurred. “Few Negroes join with what is evidently the majority of white Americans in their bitter hate and fear of the ‘Yellow Peril,’” he asserted. “Most Negroes feel that discrimination against the Japanese is based on color, much the same as prejudice against Negroes.” Of those Negroes polled, he wrote, “there was a “definite feeling of sympathy for Japanese Americans who have been victims of racial discrimination much akin to the treatment of Negroes in the South.” Indeed, the “majority” heartily disapproved of the internment.32

  Preexisting Negro sympathy for Japan, which had reached a crescendo during the Ethiopian conflict, merged with resentment against white supremacy that ensnared Tokyo and African Americans alike, then combined with overestimation of Japanese victories early in the war and horror at the internment, to create a hailstorm of pessimism by early 1942 about U.S. prospects for triumph. With coruscating sarcasm, Gordon Hancock rued how “we have heard little except contempt for the Japanese and their military ability” and how “the press of the nation had nothing but contempt for the ‘little yellow perils.’”33 Ha
ncock recalled speaking to Euro-Americans who expressed “unmitigated, bitter and unrestrained hatred” for Japanese, which was now backfiring erratically; “only the far-sightedness of Stalin,” said this Negro moderate, “whom we have abused and accused, has saved the critical situation.”34 Within a few years such an opinion would be virtually forbidden, even about the war that had saved civilization, making even more incomprehensible wartime alliances and their result, which, ironically, served to benefit those Negroes who had been pro-Tokyo.

  But it was the mass internment, more than other factors, that soured Negroes further about the motives and designs of those once referred to as the “ruling race.” Reflecting on past anti-Chinese immigration laws, then the valorization of these Asians during the war, another journalist opined that