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34 Luli Callinicos, Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Engeli Mountains (Cape Town: David Philip, 2005), 113.
35 A. Lerumo, Fifty Fighting Years: The Communist Party of South Africa, 1921–1971 (London: Inkululeko, 1987), 121. After the fall of Singapore, Washington contemplated utilizing Durban as a base from which to attack Japan since it was “the only port in the Indian Ocean which has facilities for supplying a large fleet,” making the South African metropolis a “distant base for Pacific operations.” The restiveness of the African majority complicated this plan. See Lincoln MacVeigh, Consul General, Pretoria, to Secretary of State, 2 November 1943, RG 59, Decimal File, 1940–1944, From: 848A.00 P.R./118 To: 848A.22/10–1944, Box 5122, General Records of the State Department, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.
36 U.S. v. Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, 27 January 1943, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Illinois, Record Group 21, Criminal Case File, Case No. 15840, Box 1, Folder 1, National Archives and Records Administration, Chicago (hereafter PMEW File).
37 U.S. v. PMEW, grand jury transcript, 22 September 1942, Box 3, PMEW file.
38 Release, ANP, August 1936, Reel 13, #634, Part I, Series A.
39 Release, ANP, October 1942, Reel 24, #1008, Part I, Series A.
40 Release, ANP, July 1943, Reel 26, #239, Part I, Series A.
41 Release, ANP, July 1943, Reel 26, #301, Part I, Series A.
42 “Defendant Heard at Trial of 2 on Sedition Charges,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 14 May 1943, 3A.
43 John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 173–74. See also Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese; and Gallichio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China.
44 Lt. Commander K. D. Ringle, U.S. Navy, to Chief of Naval Operations, 26 January 1942, Branch Intelligence Office, Eleventh Naval District, Los Angeles, Box 125, Herbert Hill Papers, Library of Congress. See also Ross Coen, Fu-Go: The Curious History of Japan’s Balloon Bomb Attack on America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
45 Release, ANP, February 1944, Reel 26, #848, Part I, Series A.
46 Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Neil R. McMillen, ed., Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997). See also Guy Lancaster, Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883–1924: Politics, Land, Labor and Criminality (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014).
47 See, e.g., Akinyele Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2013); and Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence.
48 Manny Lawson, “Some Survived,” manuscript, Box 2, Manny Lawson Papers, Clemson University, Clemson, SC.
49 See “Constitution of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia,” 1941, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. This paradigmatic organization exemplified many of the principles of its peers:
We freely coincide with Nationalistic principles laid down by the Hon. Marcus Garvey. We do not oppose any Nationalist Movement that stands for the betterment of its people. We believe in the GOD of our forefathers, the history, language & ISLAM Religion. . . . Mrs. M. M. L. Gordon, founder, . . . was designated to be Executive President permanently by an election held on February 24, 1933. . . . The Peace Movement of Ethiopia was founded December 7, 1932. . . . On the 15th day of November 1933 our signatories had grown to 400,000 . . . to move Congress to action to repatriate all of those who sign our petition to Liberia. . . . When our President was called to Washington by Senator [Theodore] Bilbo to arrange for the presentation of the bill [for repatriation] she carried with her 1,952,000 signatures. . . . On May 24th, 1933 representatives from Angola, Africa appeared in Senator Bilbo’s office and filed a membership of 250,000 that live in Africa to lobby for our coming.
The PME saw repatriation as a way for the United States to combat the Great Depression, in that “the removal of a half million of the poorest from a competitive labor market . . . would tend to relieve to that extent the condition and opportunities of the remainder.” See also Earnest Sevier Cox, Lincoln’s Negro Policy (Richmond: Byrd, 1938). This noted white supremacist termed this petition “the most extraordinary Negro racial document in the history of the nation.” As for “M. M. L. Gordon,” she was an “indomitable spirit.”
50 Sheldon Avery, Up from Washington: William Pickens and the Negro Struggle for Equality, 1900–1954 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989).
51 William Pickens to “My Dear Prattis,” 24 April 1934, Reel 6, #735, Part III, Subject Files on Black Americans, Series I: Race Relations, Barnett Papers.
52 Release, ANP, March 1939, Reel 18, Part I, Press Releases.
53 William Pickens, column, June 1940, Reel 20, #1136, Part I, Press Releases, Barnett Papers.
54 See, e.g., Yukiko Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013). There is a substantial literature on the persecution of those of European descent by Japanese forces, a reality that unavoidably influenced African Americans who had come to resent all those defined as “white.” See, e.g., Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder: Westview, 1996), xv. In his foreword to the Tanaka volume, the scholar John Dower writes of “Japanese brutality against ‘white’ prisoners,” which illuminates “the racial hatreds of World War II in Asia in their starkest form.” Allan Ryan, Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice, and Command Accountability (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012); Darlene Deibler Rose, Evidence Not Seen: A Woman’s Miraculous Faith in a Japanese Prison Camp during WWII (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988); John A. Glusman, Conduct under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941–1945 (New York: Viking, 2005); Agnes Newton Keith, Three Came Home (New York: Time-Life Books, 1965); Margaret Sams, Forbidden Family: A Wartime Memoir of the Philippines, 1941–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
55 Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon, 2001).
56 See, e.g., Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2014); and Gerald Horne, Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).
57 Horne, The End of Empires.
58 Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 325.
59 John Cheng, Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 138.
60 Christopher Frayling, The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 32, 265, 266. See also Cay Van Ash, Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), 253. There was also a Negro angle in that one of the most popular of the Fu Manchu series was grounded in the author’s trips to Haiti.
61 Mittie Maude Lena Gordon to U.S. Senate, 27 July 1942, Box 1091, Theodore Bilbo Papers, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg (hereafter Bilbo Papers). The “movement” to resettle U.S. Negroes in Africa, she claimed, embraced “upward of 4 million people.”
62 Gerald Horne, Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994); Gerald Horne, Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Horne, Black Revolutionary.
63 J. Edgar Hoover to Special Agent, 8 Decem
ber 1942, Roll 2, FBI File on Moorish Science Temple of America (Noble Drew Ali), Duke University.
64 “Confidential” Report, 28 May 1943, Roll 2, FBI File on Moorish Science Temple.
65 “Domestic Intelligence Memorandum No. 5,” 9 March 1944, Roll 2, FBI File on Moorish Science Temple.
66 Joseph Hanlon, “Fifth Column Propaganda among Negroes in St. Louis Area Traced to Japanese . . . Subversive Teaching . . . Alarm,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 5 March 1942, 7A.
67 Arthur Smith and Norma Abrams, “D.C. Filipino Held as Head of Jap Ring,” Washington Times-Herald, 1 August 1942, 1.
68 Release, ANP, November 1942, Reel 24, #1117, Part I, Series A, Barnett Papers.
69 U.S. v. PMEW, opinion by Judge Fred Wham, 15 June 1943, Box 1, Folder 2, PMEW File.
70 Release, ANP, October 1943, Reel 26, #1168, Part I, Series A.
71 Reports, 28 November 1933, circa 1930s and 1940s, 1460–1–3, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tokyo.
72 Robert Jordan to Hachiro Arita, 18 November 1936, A461, ET/11, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tokyo. This letter can also be found at the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, National Archives of Japan, Tokyo, #B0203121600. At the same site, see also Robert Jordan to Foreign Ministry, 12 May 1936, #B02031221000; and “Nationalist Negro Movement,” 9 August 1935, #B02031218800.
73 Memorandum on Ethiopia Pacific Movement, circa 1943, in Hill, The FBI’s RACON, 530–35, 532, 533.
74 “Confidential” Report, 13 August 1943, State Council of Defense, SG19872, GS-7–29, 28, 53, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery.
75 Wesley Phillips Newton, Montgomery in the Good War: Portrait of a Southern City, 1939–1946 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), 136.
76 Langston Hughes, “Here to Yonder,” Chicago Defender, 16 October 1943, 14.
77 Richard Wright recalled that during his childhood in Dixie his grandmother at times would make the family kneel and say a prayer for the Africans, the Chinese—and the Japanese. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Holt, 2001), 17.
78 Langston Hughes, “Simple and the Atomic Bomb,” Chicago Defender, 18 August 1945, 12. An observer in Cape Town, doubtlessly well aware of the danger of racism that Hiroshima portended, argued with emphasis that unless this new weapon of war was controlled, “THIS MEANS THE END OF OUR SPECIES.” “Atomic Bomb ‘Dynamite to Chimpanzees,’” Guardian (Cape Town), 9 August 1945, 1. A South Africa–born writer of Ethiopian descent recalled at the time that in the desolate aftermath of the bombing, “a number of people, writers and artists, one or two of whom I knew, were so overwhelmed by the horror that they committed suicide.” See Peter Abrahams, The Black Experience in the 20th Century: An Autobiography and Meditation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 49–50.
79 Sakashita, “Lynching across the Pacific,” 181–214, 188.
80 Release, ANP, April 1942, Reel 23, #1216, Part I, Series A, Barnett Papers.
81 Release, ANP, December 1944, Reel 3, #461, Part III, Subject Files on Black Americans, Series F: Military, Barnett Papers.
82 Robey Paeks, “Rare Human Sacrifices of Jap Directed Spy Ring,” Chicago Herald American, 23 September 1942, 7.
83 Tony Matthews, Shadow Dancing: Japanese Espionage Agents against the West, 1939–1945 (London: Robert Hale, 1993), 27. J. Parnell Thomas of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee claimed during the war that Tokyo actually had “a division of the Japanese army” on U.S. soil prior to the war in the form of a “Japanese American Veterans Association.” See “Supplementary Comments by the War Relocation Authority on Newspaper Statements Allegedly Made by Representatives of the House Committee on Un-American Activities,” n.d., Box 1, McWilliams Collection. The following items cited are also in the McWilliams Collection. “Weekly Press Review, Week Ending June 1943,” Box 3: HUAC claims that “10,000 Japanese Americans have received training in an espionage school operated by the Imperialistic Black Dragon Society of Japan.” “Weekly Press Review, Week Ending July 4, 1943,” Box 3: HUAC charges that “7000 Japanese in Hawaii belong to secret military society, Butoku-Kai.” John R. Lechner, “Playing with Dynamite: The Inside Story of Our Domestic Japanese American Problem,” n.d., prepared during wartime by American Legion, Box 4: “In 1936 one of Japan’s shrewdest organizers was directed to Hawaii to prepare the overseas structure for the war against the United States. . . . His task was to organize and consolidate Japanese subversive groups within America, so that Japan might have the assistance of powerful Trojan Horses.” T. S. Van Vleet, “Once a Jap, Always a Jap,” sponsored by California Veterans of Foreign Wars, circa 1944, Box 6: “There are about one hundred Butoko-Kai [sic] societies in the United States and Hawaii, including the fifty located in California.” “Report and Minority Views of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities on Japanese War Relocation Centers,” 78th Congress, 1st Session, U.S. House of Representatives, Report No. 717, circa 1943, Box 6: Listed here are scores of branches of the Butoku-Kai, mostly on the West Coast and in Hawaii. Clipping, uncertain provenance, n.d., circa 1943, Box 8: Book purportedly found in school in Japanese American neighborhood in Los Angeles, published in 1938, urging youth there to become “guerillas” at onset of war targeting “American military and naval installations” in the region. “Jap Farmer ‘Militia’ Here before War, Inquiry Told,” Los Angeles Times, 21 October 1943, 1, Box 8: “Thousands of Japanese farmers in the Southland were members of a thoroughly organized ‘partisan militia.’” (Of course, when reading these stories one must bear in mind the mass hysteria in the wartime United States, generated by the real fear that white supremacy had backfired spectacularly.)
84 Leon Taylor, “Japanese Propaganda among American Negroes,” Kansas City Plain Dealer, 18 June 1943, 7.
85 “Negro Woman’s Tip Leads to Roundup by G-Men,” Kansas City Plain Dealer, 19 June 1942, 1.
86 Horace Boyer, ed., Lift Every Voice and Sing: An African American Hymnal (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1993); James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Da Capo, 2000). There was a concerted effort to translate the “Negro National Anthem” into Japanese: see, e.g., Shana L. Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 81–98.
87 Quoted in Etsuko Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2014), 36.
88 Asa T. Spaulding, “Facing the Rising Sun: A Report to Policyholders,” n.d., Reel 6, Series C, Economic Conditions, Part III, Subject Files on Black Americans, Barnett Papers.
89 Frederick P. Close, Tokyo Rose/An American Patriot: A Dual Biography (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 28.
90 See also Report by Theodore Smith of Headquarters, Western Defense Command, 29 June 1943, Box 125, Herbert Hill Papers: “I certify that this date I witnessed the destruction by burning of the galley proofs, galley pages, drafts and memorandums of the original report of the Japanese evacuation.” See also “Evacuation of the Japanese from the West Coast, Final Report and Paper of the Adjutant General’s Office,” circa 1945, Reels 3 and 4, Louis Nichols Official and Confidential Files and Clyde Tolson Personal File, FBI Confidential Files, Library of Congress.
91 Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
92 Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003).
93 See, e.g., Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck, eds., Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).