Facing the Rising Sun
Page 25
70 Release, ANP, October 1935, Reel 11, #666, Part I, Series A.
71 Release, ANP, April 1936, Reel 12, #712, Part I, Series A.
72 Release, ANP, December 1935, Reel 11, #992, Part I, Series A.
73 Release, ANP, June 1936, Reel 13, #193, Part I, Series A.
74 Release, ANP, May 1936, Reel 12, #1056, Part I, Series A.
75 Release, ANP, September 1935, Reel 11, #294, Part I, Series A.
76 Release, ANP, December 1933, Reel 8, #232, Part I, Series A.
77 Release, ANP, September 1935, Reel 11, #295, Part I, Series A.
78 Release, ANP, December 1935, Reel 11, #1072, Part I, Series A.
79 Release, ANP, March 1936, Reel 12, #469, Part I, Series A.
80 Release, ANP, January 1936, Reel 11, #146, Part I, Series A.
81 Release, ANP, January 1936, Reel 11, #170, Part I, Series A.
82 Release, ANP, May 1936, Reel 12, #1090, Part I, Series A.
83 Release, ANP, October 1935, Reel 11, #602, Part I, Series A.
84 Release, ANP, December 1935, Reel 11, #1034, Part I, Series A.
85 Release, ANP, May 1936, Reel 12, #1098, Part I, Series A.
86 Release, ANP, June 1936, Reel 13, #66, Part I, Series A.
87 Release, ANP, May 1936, Reel 12, #1077, Part I, Series A.
88 Release, ANP, April 1936, Reel 12, #809, Part I, Series A.
89 Release, ANP, March 1936, Reel 12, #953, Part I, Series A.
90 Release, ANP, September 1936, Reel 13, #694, Part I, Series A.
91 Release, ANP, January 1936, Reel 11, #1124, Part I, Series A.
92 Release, ANP, August 1936, Reel 13, #630, Part I, Series A.
93 Release, ANP, September 1936, Reel 13, #746, Part I, Series A.
Chapter 3. Japan Establishes a Foothold in Black America
1 Testimony of George Young, grand jury, September 1942, Box 3, Folder 2, PMEW File.
2 U.S. v. PMEW, transcript, n.d., circa May 1943, Box 2, Folder 1, PMEW File.
3 PMEW to Claude A. Barnett, 17 August 1932, Reel 1, #23, Part III, Subject Files on Black Americans, Series I: Race Relations, Barnett Papers.
4 Claude Barnett to “Dear Dean,” 31 August 1932, Reel 1, #24, Part III, Series I, Barnett Papers.
5 “Pacific Topics,” 22 April 1933, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Illinois, Record Group 21, Criminal Case Files, Case No. 15840, Box 1, Folder 4, National Archives and Records Administration, Chicago. See also Gerald Horne, Powell v. Alabama: The Scottsboro Boys and American Justice (New York: Franklin Watts, 1997).
6 “Constitution and By-Laws” of PMEW, Box 1, Folder 4, PMEW File.
7 On the “one-drop rule,” see Gerald Horne, The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
8 Statement by General Lee Butler, 15 September 1942, Box 1, Folder 4, PMEW File. On the pogrom in Butler’s new hometown, see, e.g., Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis.
9 Testimony of Henry Hall, grand jury, September 1942, Box 3, Folder 4, PMEW File.
10 Testimony of William Baker, circa 1943, Box 2, Folder 2, PMEW File.
11 Testimony of Lula Livingston, circa 1943, Box 2, Folder 2, PMEW File.
12 Testimony of Charles T. Nash, circa 1943, Box 3, Folder 2, PMEW File.
13 Testimony of Thomas Albert Watkins, circa 1943, Box 3, Folder 1, PMEW File. See also Grif Stockley, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001). The authorities in the Razorback State were energetic in persecuting the small population of Japanese origin residing there. See, e.g., War Relocation Authority, “Weekly Press Review, Week Ending January 18, 1943,” Box 3, McWilliams Collection: “Land ownership in Arkansas by Japanese—whether citizens or aliens—would be barred by Bill introduced in Arkansas legislature by State Senator D. Frank Williams.” In the same collection, Box 9, see Clipping, Uncertain provenance, circa 27 February 1943: In neighboring Oklahoma, a U.S. congressman proposes that all of Japanese ancestry in the United States be subjected to “sterilizing,” thus preventing future births in this community.
14 Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence, 178, 180.
15 Testimony of Lula Livingston, September 1942, Box 3, Folder 1, PMEW File.
16 Testimony of Artie Mays, grand jury, September 1942, Box 3, Folder 1, PMEW File.
17 Release, ANP, August 1937, Reel 15, #456, Part I, Series A.
18 Testimony of Frank Mart, circa 1943, Box 3, Folder 3, PMEW File.
19 Testimony of E. M. Johnson, circa 1943, Box 2, Folder 2, PMEW File.
20 Testimony of E. M. Johnson, circa 1943, Box 3, Folder 4, PMEW File.
21 Testimony of Pink Brown, circa 1943, Box 2, Folder 2, PMEW File.
22 Testimony of Eugene Moore, circa 1943, Box 3, Folder 3, PMEW File.
23 Release, ANP, September 1934, Reel 9, #523, Part I, Series A.
24 See, e.g., “Sikeston among Towns Organized by Negro ‘Benevolent’ Order,” Sikeston (MO) Standard, 14 September 1934, 1. See also Kenneth Barnes, “Inspiration from the East: Black Arkansans Look to Japan,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 69, no. 3 (Autumn 2010): 201–19. See also Clipping, uncertain provenance, n.d., circa 1943, Box 8, McWilliams Collection: Tokyo radio reports lecture in Japan by “Ken Nakazawa described as a former lecturer of the University of Southern California”; accompanying his remarks were “40 pictures . . . ‘unmasking lynchings and many atrocities perpetrated by bloodthirsty Yankee mobs.’” His “stepson is in the U.S. Navy.”
25 Newsletter, n.d., Pacific, vol. 6, no. 9, Box 1, Folder 4, PMEW File.
26 Postcard from David D. Erwin, 28 July 1935, Box 1, Folder 5, PMEW File.
27 Note from David D. Erwin, 26 November 1935, Box 1, Folder 5, PMEW File.
28 Report, n.d., circa 1935, Box 1, Folder 4, PMEW File.
29 Report, 11 September 1938, Box 1, Folder 5, PMEW File.
30 General Lee Butler to Reverend F. R. Baker, 13 September 1939, Box 1, Folder 5, PMEW File.
31 Testimony of General Lee Butler, circa 1943, Box 2, Folder 4, PMEW File.
32 U.S. v. PMEW, transcript, circa 1943, Box 2, Folder 1, PMEW File.
33 Testimony of Mimo De Guzman, September 1942, Box 3, Folder 5, PMEW File.
34 Testimony of William M. Officer, circa 1943, Box 3, Folder 2, PMEW File.
35 Testimony of George Floore, grand jury, September 1942, Box 3, Folder 2, PMEW File.
36 Release, ANP, April 1939, Reel 18, #743, Part I, Series A, Barnett Papers. See also Michael Fitzgerald, “‘We Have Found a Moses’: Theodore Bilbo, Black Nationalism and the Greater Liberia Bill of 1939,” Journal of Southern History 63, no. 2 (May 1997): 293–320.
37 Material on Mittie Gordon, 1931, Box 25, Earnest Sevier Cox Papers, Duke University, Durham, NC.
38 Release, ANP, August 1939, Reel 19, #299, Part I, Series A: EWF just completed a five-day convention in New York City with delegates arriving from Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. “Negroes only” were present.
39 “Brief History of the Petition of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia to President Roosevelt,” circa 1938, Box 1090, Bilbo Papers.
40 Release, ANP, July 1938, Reel 17, #743, Part I, Series A.
41 Release, ANP, August 1941, Reel 22, #1047, Part I, Series A.
42 Claude Barnett to A. J. Siggins, 8 July 1939, Box 200, Folder 4, Barnett Papers.
43 Release, ANP, March 1937, Reel 14, #552, Part I, Series A.
44 Release, ANP, September 1937, Reel 15, #600, Part I, Series A.
45 Malaku E. Bayen to Claude Barnett, 31 March 1935, Box 170, Folder 9, Barnett Papers.
46 Malaku E. Bayen to Claude Barnett, 30 January 1935, Box 170, Folder 9, Barnett Papers.
47 Claude Barnett to E. G. Roberts, Department of Mechanical Industries, Tuskegee, 17 July 1935, Box 170, Folder 9, Barnett Papers.
48 Laurie F. Leach, Langston Hughes: A
Biography (Westport: Greenwood, 2004), 82–83; Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, 1941–1967, I Dream a World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 50.
49 Release, ANP, October 1937, Reel 15, #818, Part I, Series A. See also Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Pluto, 2016).
50 W. E. B. Du Bois, “As the Crow Flies,” Crisis 39, no. 4 (April 1932): 116. Cf. New York Amsterdam News, 21 October 1931. See also W. E. B. Du Bois, “No Chance,” Pittsburgh Courier, 29 February 1936, A2: “The thing that must impress us as colored people is that the chances for economic reform [in China] under Japanese imperialism are infinitely greater than any chances which colored people would have under the most advanced white leaders of Western reform, except in Russia.”
51 Robert Fikes Jr., “Japan,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: An Encyclopedia, ed. Gerald Horne and Mary Young (Westport: Greenwood, 2001), 111–13, 112.
52 Patrick S. Washburn, A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press during World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 261.
53 Claude A. Barnett to Horino Uchi, 12 February 1934, Reel 6, #720, Part III, Subject Files on Black Americans, Series I: Race Relations, Barnett Papers.
54 Release, ANP, October 1938, Reel 17, #903, Part I, Series A.
55 Release, ANP, August 1932, Reel 6, #49, Part I, Series A.
56 Releases, ANP, October 1934, Reel 9, #634 and #693, Part I, Series A.
57 Release, ANP, October 1932, Reel 6, #403, Part I, Series A.
58 Kansas City Plaindealer, 6 September 1935.
59 Release, ANP, August 1935, Reel 11, #292, Part I, Series A.
60 Release, ANP, August 1932, Reel 6, #120, Part I, Series A.
61 Release, ANP, October 1938, Reel 17, #976, Part I, Series A.
62 LaShawn Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 98–99.
63 See, e.g., Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen, eds., AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
64 Release, ANP, August 1932, Reel 6, #122, Part I, Series A.
65 Release, ANP, March 1934, Reel 6, #607, Part I, Series A.
66 Release, ANP, April 1937, Reel 14, #608, Part I, Series A.
67 Release, ANP, April 1937, Reel 14, #706, Part I, Series A.
68 Release, ANP, May 1935, Reel 10, #863, Part I, Series A.
69 Release, ANP, May 1937, Reel 14, #937, Part I, Series A.
70 Release, ANP, October 1937, Reel 15, #766, Part I, Series A.
71 Release, ANP, November 1937, Reel 15, #909, Part I, Series A.
72 Release, ANP, December 1937, Reel 16, #43, Part I, Series A.
73 Release, ANP, August 1938, Reel 17, #452, Part 1, Series A.
74 Raymond Gavins, The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership: Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884–1970 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
75 Release, ANP, October 1938, Reel 17, #920, Part I, Series A.
76 Release, ANP, November 1938, Reel 17, #1126, Part I, Series A.
77 Release, ANP, May 1939, Reel 18, #1053, Part I, Series A.
78 Release, ANP, March 1935, Reel 10, #340, Part I, Series A.
79 Release, ANP, November 1930, Reel 3, #499, Part I, Press Releases.
80 Release, ANP, May 1935, Reel 10, #755, Part I, Series A.
81 Release, ANP, November 1928, Reel 1, #139, Part I, Press Releases.
82 “‘Hands off China’ Contingent Makes an Appeal to Negroes,” Philadelphia Tribune, 16 June 1927, 1.
83 Clipping, 12 August 1925, Box II, L249, NAACP Papers: “Racial prejudice and oppression that arise therefrom are doomed; the Chinese with their millions will finally overthrow it just as the Negro will finally overthrow it in America. Of course, it is going to take time and patient toiling but God is against it and hence it must go.”
84 Release, ANP, January 1938, Reel 16, #243, Part I, Series A.
85 Release, ANP, June 1935, Reel 10, #967, Part I, Series A.
86 Release, ANP, May 1938, Reel 16, #1127, Part I, Series A.
87 Mittie Maude Lena Gordon to Senator Bilbo, 5 August 1939, Box 1090, Bilbo Papers. Seemingly, relating to Gordon helped to convince some white supremacists to rethink their views of some Negroes. See Letter to Senator Bilbo, 4 July 1938, Box 1091: She was considered to be one of the “mix breeds,” along with her spouse, who was viewed as “capable.” This correspondent deemed her to be a sound dispenser of good advice when she was said to counsel that an attack on “‘intellectuals’ of the Negro race who abandon their race and seek white mates” would be a “popular approach,” while deriding them as “race traitors.” Will R. Rose of Greenville, Mississippi, also thought misery was a good reason for resettlement in that the “U.S.A. has a few Negroes too many for its workers under the condition of the Depression,” and, assuredly, things could hardly be worse in Africa: see Letter, 22 August 1939, Box 1091. Strikingly, a number of white Chicagoans tended to agree with Gordon that Negroes must go. “If the Jews are a menace to the German race,” said one from this community, “then surely one can see the need of this precaution,” meaning resettlement. “At least 2/3 of the colored population here in the Chicago area are on relief” and their departure “would relieve congestion and filth” and “crime” too. It “would give our American [sic] youth a higher standard of living, a new Empire” in fact. Instead of compelling Paris and London to “pay war debts honorably,” why not compel the two to provide land for Negroes in Africa? Of course, when Jim Crow advocates supported resettlement, it hardly prepared Negroes to be supportive of the U.S. war effort against Japan. See Della Johnson to Senator Bilbo, n.d., Box 1091, Bilbo Papers.
88 Mittie Maude Lena Gordon to Senator Bilbo, 10 August 1938, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers. On the other hand, Bilbo was told that “Firestone interests and the shipping companies,” both with close ties to Liberia, were salivating at the prospect of bereft Negroes to pluck. The racist novelist Thomas Dixon inquired as to “what steps we have taken to support the [Bilbo] bill,” while “Mary Caperton Bingham, wife of the owner of the Louisville Courier-Journal is fully in accord with our repatriation work.” As for the poverty-stricken, “many signers of the Negro” petition in favor of resettlement were from Bilbo’s own Mississippi: Letter to Senator Bilbo, 16 October 1938, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers.
89 Belle Steiner to Senator Bilbo, 18 September 1939, Box 1090, Bilbo Papers.
90 Kathryn Mitchell to Senator Bilbo, 26 June 1939, Box 1091, Bilbo Papers.
91 Release, ANP, February 1937, Reel 14, #122, Part I, Series A.
Chapter 4. White Supremacy Loses “Face”
1 Release, ANP, December 1941, Reel 23, #496, Part I, Series A. Similarly, during the war Senator Bilbo was asked by a teacher in a class on “Race Relations” what “you feel the American people should do relative to the Negroes and Japanese,” who again were conflated. M. L. Jordan to Senator Bilbo, 16 June 1944, Box 1084, Bilbo Papers.
2 Release, ANP, July 1943, Reel 26, #87, Part I, Series A. See also Eduardo O. Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
3 U.S. v. Gordon et al., Brief and Argument for the Appellants, and Brief for the U.S., 9 July 1943. Quoted material in the following paragraphs is taken from the records of this case.
4 Release, ANP, February 1943, Reel 25, #366, Part I, Series A.
5 Release, ANP, February 1943, Reel 25, #411, Part I, Series A. As with African Americans, it seemed that the revulsion toward U.S.-style white supremacy drove many Filipinos into the arms of Tokyo. See, e.g., Theresa Kaminski, Angels of the Underground: The American Women Who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
6 Affidavit of Keith Brown, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York, U.S. v. Holness, C
113–40, C113–264, National Archives and Records Administration, New York (via National Archives and Records Administration, Kansas City).
7 Exhibit 5, Transcript of Testimony of George Buchanan, Direct examination of [John] Sonnett, and Remarks of John Thornhill, circa 1943, C113–40 and C113–264, National Archives and Records Administration, New York (via National Archives and Records Administration, Kansas City).
8 Transcript of Testimony of James Henry Thornhill, circa 1942, C113–40 and C113–264, National Archives and Records Administration, New York (via National Archives and Records Administration, Kansas City).