Facing the Rising Sun

by Gerald Horne

94 Michael W. Myers, The Pacific War and Contingent Victory: Why Japanese Defeat Was Not Inevitable (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 1.

  95 Carl Murphy to Claude Barnett, 1 April 1942, Reel 17, #242, Part II, Organizational Files, Barnett Papers.

  96 Claude A. Barnett to P. B. Young, 2 April 1942, Reel 1, #375, Part II, Organizational Files, Barnett Papers.

  97 In 1941 the U.S. authorities intercepted a message from the Japanese embassy in Washington that spoke bluntly of “using a Negro literary critic” whom they helped to “open a news service for Negro newspapers.” There was an “advantage,” it was said, in “using Negroes in procuring intelligence.” The author conceded that he had “not yet used the Negro spies directly,” though he was now “instructing” an unnamed “official” of the “National Youth Administration, and a graduate of Amherst and Columbia to be a spy.” See “Nomura” to Tokyo, 4 July 1941, Box 2, Frank A. Schuler Jr. Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, NY. See also David D. Lowman, Magic: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast during World War II (N.p.: Athena, 2001), 252: “Japanese authorities are watching closely the Negroes who are employed in defense production plants, naval stations and other military establishments.”

  98 Claude Barnett to Attorney General Biddle, 16 June 1943, Reel 1, #414, Part 2, Organizational Files, Barnett Papers.

  99 Gerald Horne, Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. before Emancipation (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Gerald Horne, Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014).

  100 See, e.g., “Petition of American Negroes to Support Bilbo’s Bill for Securing a Country in Africa for Those Negroes Who May Desire to Return,” UNIA, circa 1939, Box 1073, Bilbo Papers. A version of the preceding can also be found in Box 1128 of the same collection. In Box 1092 can be found a similar petition from the Peace Movement of Ethiopia with signatures affixed from Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland; however, all signatures seem to be from the same writer. In Boxes 1186 and 1187 there are more signed petitions, numbering in the thousands, all in the same handwriting. In the same collection, Box 1090, see also Senator Bilbo to W. F. Duncan, 17 June 1940: “I have close to three million Negroes all signed up ready to go. The number is increasing daily.” Interestingly, during the racial unrest that swept Detroit in 1943, the U.S. authorities claimed that agents of Tokyo played a role in whipping up this devastating conflict. See, e.g., War Relocation Authority, “Weekly Press Review, Week Ending July 4, 1943,” Box 3, McWilliams Collection.

  101 C. C. Edwards, President of Division #301 of UNIA in Kinston, North Carolina, to Senator Bilbo, 10 December 1938, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers.

  102 Senator Bilbo to W. F. Duncan, 17 June 1940, Box 1090, Bilbo Papers.

  103 G. E. Harris to Senator Bilbo, 5 June 1941, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers.

  104 Mittie Maude Lena Gordon to Senator Bilbo, 29 August 1938, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers. See also Keisha Blain, “‘Confraternity among All Dark Races’: Mittie Maude Lena Gordon and the Practice of Black (Inter)nationalism in Chicago, 1932–1942,” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender and the Black International 5, no. 2 (2016): 151–81.

  105 Amy Jacques Garvey, of “Garvey’s African Communities League,” to Senator Bilbo, 26 March 1944, Box 1090, Bilbo Papers. A parallel movement at the time declared, “Judea for the Jews, Africa for the Africans.” See Literature, n.d., Box 1090. In the same box, see J. R. Stewart, UNIA–Cleveland, to Senator Bilbo, 9 October 1939: We “received the 350 copies of your speech and Bill. . . . The demand greatly exceeds the supply. . . . The people of Ohio therefore are anxious to sacrifice now to form a pilgrimage numbering thousands to lend weight to the ultimate passage of this bill.” See also Mrs. R. L. Coleman to Senator Bilbo, 11 January 1939, Box 1091: A proposal in the Christian Century of 28 December 1938 argued that “we settle the Jews in Africa or in a segregated portion of this country. Why not repatriate the Negro or resettle them in a segregated area of this country, as is suggested for the Jews?” She continued, “Why should the South be dominated by them as will be the case in comparatively few years under present trends.”

  106 J. R. Stewart, State Commissioner of UNIA–Cleveland, to Senator Bilbo, n.d., Box 1091, Bilbo Papers.

  107 Marcus Garvey to Senator Bilbo, 12 August 1938, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers.

  108 Marcus Garvey to Senator Bilbo, 13 August 1938, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers.

  109 Mittie Maude Lena Gordon to Senator Bilbo, 15 October 1939, Box 1090, Bilbo Papers. See also Mittie Maude Lena Gordon to Senator Bilbo, 2 December 1938, Box 1090: She requested more copies of the legislation, “as I have many calls for them.”

  110 Mittie Maude Lena Gordon to Senator Bilbo, 19 October 1939, Box 1090, Bilbo Papers.

  111 Carlos Cooks to Senator Bilbo, 9 November 1939, Box 1090, Bilbo Papers.

  112 Clipping of Rogers’s column, n.d., Box 1090, Bilbo Papers.

  113 Carlos Cooks to Senator Bilbo, 18 July 1941, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers. Tellingly, when Angel Evanah, one of the many “followers of Father Divine,” the holy man, made a “demand” to Senator Bilbo that he back “passage of the anti-lynching bill,” Bilbo was uncharacteristically reticent: letter, 8 August 1939, Box 1090. On the other hand, Archie Whitehead of the Afro-American Navigating Association of New York was “100 percent in favor” of the resettlement bill since he had “personally spent 12 months in Liberia,” along with many of his group who served “as sailors, navigators, shipbuilders and seamen.” They saw a route to profit by handling this massive job of transporting Negroes overseas. Letter, 6 August 1939, Box 1090, Bilbo Papers.

  114 Theodor Van der Lyn to Senator Bilbo, 16 November 1938, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers. Interestingly, it was Garvey himself who put this London correspondent in touch with Bilbo: Theodor van der Lyn to Senator Bilbo, 18 October 1938, Box 1091. Correspondingly, Bilbo put his comrades in touch with Gordon. See Senator Bilbo to Theodore Jervy, n.d., circa October 1940, Box 1091.

  115 F. L. Scofield to Senator Bilbo, 20 November 1939, Box 1090, Bilbo Papers.

  116 Wyatt Dougherty to Senator Bilbo, 1 January 1939, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers.

  117 “Mr. Bilbo’s Afflatus,” Time, 8 May 1939, 16, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers.

  118 Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, “Germany’s Race Consciousness Lauded by Bilbo in Harangue to Senate on Liberian Bill,” Washington Evening Star, 28 May 1938, A-9.

  119 Speech by Senator Bilbo, 22 March 1944, Box 1084, Bilbo Papers.

  120 Senator Bilbo to “Captain James Thornhill,” 6 April 1940, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers.

  121 Joseph Edgar to Senator Bilbo, 31 January 1941, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers. Tellingly, even Berlin thought it could outflank Washington on the bedrock issue of white supremacy. See, e.g., Roi Ottley, No Green Pastures (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 153, 160, 162:

  Under the Nazis, few Negroes were victims of day-to-day brutality, as meted out to the Jews. The savage Nuremberg racial laws, which in theory embraced blacks, never were widely applied to Negroes. . . . Adolf Hitler was an ardent admirer of American racial know-how. There is fine irony in the fact that he sent a mission to the U.S. to study Jim Crow to enable him more efficiently to discriminate against Jews. . . . He invited Dr. S. J. Wright, a Negro professor doing a special study at Heidelberg, to have dinner with him and his Nazi Friends [in 1932] and revealed a surprising knowledge of the negative aspects of American racialism.

  Still, concludes the author, Berlin “wanted both to win over and eventually to enslave the black millions.”

  122 Ben Davis Jr., “Sen. Bilbo Perpetrates a Vicious Slander,” 27 December 1938, 3, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers. In the same box, see also the editorial in Harlem’s New York Age of 9 August 1941, denouncing Bilbo’s proposed speech in Harlem.

  123 Gerald Horne, “The Haitian Revolution and the Central Question of African American History,�
� Journal of African American History 100 (2015).

  124 Charles Eagles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

  125 James Meredith, Japan: As Seen through the Eyes of an American Black Man (Jackson: Meredith, 1995), i, available at University of Mississippi, Oxford.

  Chapter 1. Japan Rises/Negroes Cheer

  1 Edwina S. Campbell, Citizen of a Wider Commonwealth: Ulysses S. Grant’s Postpresidential Diplomacy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), 153–70.

  2 Eunsun Celeste Han, “Making a Black Pacific: African Americans and the Formation of Transpacific Community Networks, 1865–1872,” Journal of African American History 101, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2016): 23–48.

  3 Report, 14 July 1853, in The Personal Journal of Commodore Matthew C. Perry: The Japan Expedition, 1852–1854, ed. Roger Pineau (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1968), 98.

  4 Michael R. Auslin, Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 74. See also Eric Gardner, Black Print Unbound: The “Christian Recorder,” African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  5 Bayard Taylor, A Visit to India, China and Japan in the Year 1853 (New York: Putnam, 1855), 429, 434, 440. See also James D. Johnston, China and Japan: Being a Narrative of the U.S. Steam-Frigate Powhatan in the Years 1857, ’58, ’59 and ’60, Including an Account of the Japanese Embassy to the United States (Philadelphia: Desilver, 1861). The author, a Kentuckian, reflects the sectional and racial biases of that tormented era.

  6 Entry, 20 February 1856, in The Complete Journal of Townsend Harris: First American Consul General and Minister to Japan, ed. Mario Emilio Cosenza (Garden City: Doubleday, 1930), 64.

  7 E. P. Smith to Dear Sir, 19 November 1865, Box 18, Folder 3, Edward Carey Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. See also Ikukuo Asaka, “‘Colored Men of the East’: African Americans and the Instability of Race in U.S.-Japan Relations,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (December 2014): 971–97.

  8 “An Act Supplementary to the Acts in Relation to Immigration . . . March 3, 1875,” in The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience, ed. Franklin Odo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 38–40, 38.

  9 Nishimura Ekie v. U.S., 18 January 1892, in Odo, The Columbia Documentary History, 91–92.

  10 In re Saito, 27 June 1894, in Odo, The Columbia Documentary History, 101–3.

  11 Gerald Horne, The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005).

  12 Christopher W. A. Szpilman, “Miyazaki Toten’s Pan-Asianism, 1915–1919,” in Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, vol. 1, 1850–1920, ed. Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 133–37, 134.

  13 Introduction to Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, vol. 2, 1920–Present, ed. Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 1–41, 24.

  14 Theresa Runstedtler, “The New Negro’s Brown Brother: African American and Filipino Boxers and the ‘Rising Tide of Color,’” in Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem, ed. Davarian Baldwin and Minkah Makalani (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 104–27, 110.

  15 Edward A. Johnson, History of the Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War (Raleigh: Capital, 1899), 131.

  16 “Philippines for Negro,” Washington Post, 16 December 1902, 3. See also Joseph A. Fry, John Tyler Morgan and the Search for Southern Autonomy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

  17 Emma Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 235. See also Shawn Leigh Alexander, ed., T. Thomas Fortune, The Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880–1928 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008).

  18 Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

  19 Larry Arxen Lawcock, “Philippine Students in the United States and the Independence Movement, 1900–1935” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1975), 641.

  20 See, e.g., Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan, eds., Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

  21 Nerissa S. Balce, “Filipino Bodies, Lynching and the Language of Empire,” in Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse, ed. Antonio T. Tiongson Jr., Edgardo V. Gutierrez, and Ricardo V. Gutierrez (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 43–60. See also Scot Brown, “The Dilemma of the African American Solider in the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902” (M.A. thesis, Cornell University, 1993); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign People at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 252; and Willard B. Gatewood, “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898–1902 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).

  22 Michael C. Robinson and Frank N. Schubert, “David Fagen: An Afro-American Rebel in the Philippines, 1899–1901,” Pacific Historical Review 44 (February 1975): 68–83.

  23 See, e.g., Rene Ontal, “Fagen and Other Ghosts: African Americans and the Philippine-American War,” in Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999, ed. Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 118–33; Cynthia L. Marasigan, “‘Between the Devil and the Deep Sea’: Ambivalence, Violence and African American Soldiers in the Philippine-American War and Its Aftermath” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2010), 1, 12, 33, 34, 133, 186, 187, 223; Hazel M. McFerson, “‘Part Black Americans’ in the South Pacific,” Phylon 43, no. 2 (1982): 177–80; and Hazel M. McFerson, ed., Blacks and Asians: Crossings, Conflict and Commonality (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2006).

  24 Marasigan, “‘Between the Devil and the Deep Sea,’” 106.

  25 Susan K. Harris, God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 64–65, 66.

  26 Winslow Warren, “The White Man’s Burden,” Boston Evening Transcript, 18 February 1899, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. See also Willard Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1903 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 307.

  27 Frank Erb comment, 27 February 1899, in “Soldiers’ Letters; Being Materials for the History of a War of Criminal Aggression,” Boston: Anti-Imperialist League, 1899, Massachusetts Historical Society.

  28 Entry, 14 March 1905, in Journal of W. Cameron Forbes, vol. 1, Philippines, Massachusetts Historical Society.

  29 Article, 18 January 1906, Box 21, Illinois Writers Project: “Negro in Illinois” Papers, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, Chicago Public Library.

  30 Editorial, So Chaep’il, 8 November 1899, in Saaler and Szpilman, Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, vol. 1, 175–76.

  31 See, e.g., Colleen C. O’Brien, “‘Blacks in All Quarters of the Globe’: Anti-Imperialism, Insurgent Cosmopolitanism, and International Labor in Pauline Hopkins’ Literary Journalism,” American Quarterly 61, no. 2 (June 2009): 245–70.

  32 Horne, Race War!, 45.

  33 James Taylor, “Free Thought Africa,” Broad Axe (Chicago), 22 April 1905, 1.

  34 “If the Negro Paid . . . ,” Topeka Plain Dealer, 5 August 1904, 1.

  35 R. W. Thompson, “Short Flights,” Freeman (Indianapolis), 19 May 1906. Those I quote at times use the derogatory and racist term “Jap” in describing those of Japanese ancestry.

  36 “Colored Girl and Japanese Marry,” Freeman (Indianapolis), 25 February 1911, 4.

  37 “Comes to Japs Call,” Topeka Plain Dealer, 9 November 1906, 1.

  38 “Thompson’s Weekly Review
: Japanese and the States’ Rights,” Freeman (Indianapolis), 10 November 1906, 1.

  39 David Hellwig, “Afro-American Reactions to the Japanese and the Anti-Japanese Movement, 1906–1924,” Phylon 38 (March 1977): 93–104, 94, 96.

  40 Oliver Cromwell Cox, “The Nature of the Anti-Asiatic Movement on the Pacific Coast,” Journal of Negro Education 15 (Fall 1946): 603–64, 609.

  41 “What May Result if the Persecution of the Negroes Continues,” Broad Axe (Chicago), 19 January 1907, 1. Masaharu Homma, a Japanese military officer subjected to a war crimes tribunal in 1946, was born in 1888 and in the early twentieth century spent eight years in England. He told the tribunal that there were two factions in the military of Japan: “the pro-German group” and “the pro-British force,” which was “in the great minority. I was considered as the head of the latter group.” Hideki Tojo, the premier military figure in Tokyo, was “head of the pro-German group,” he said. Despite the self-serving nature of his testimony, the fact remains that London did see Tokyo as its watchdog in Asia—at least until 7 December 1941. See Transcript, 5 February 1946, Masaharu Homma Tribunal Records, University of Georgia, Athens.