An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by Paul Ortiz

  Like Maceó, Martí felt a grave sense of urgency in expelling the Spanish from Cuba and declaring Cuban independence before the United States could seize control of the island. On the day before he was killed in battle, Martí began composing a letter to his friend Manuel Mercado, in Mexico, explaining his fears of US imperialism. It was a prophetic rumination:

  Every day now I am in danger of giving my life for my country and my duty—since I understand it and have the spirit to carry it out—in order to prevent, by the timely independence of Cuba, the United States from extending its hold across the Antilles and falling with all the greater force on the lands of our America. All I have done up to now and all I will do is for that. . . . I lived in the monster, and I know its entrails—and my sling is the sling of David.24

  When the United States launched the war against Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898, Martí’s worst fears were realized. Although most African Americans supported the expulsion of the Spanish, African American writers generally doubted that the United States would treat the new nations as equals. The premise of the Cuban solidarity movement had been that the recognition of the legitimacy of the Cuban resistance—not a US military invasion—would have allowed Cuban patriots to receive international assistance allowing them to establish an autonomous republic on their own terms. How could the United States aid the cause of liberty anywhere when it was building elaborate structures of oppression against African Americans and Latinx people in the United States? The Black press reacted with outrage when General Maceó’s son, a lieutenant volunteering for service against the Spanish in the Philippines, was refused admission to a public dining room in Spokane, Washington, because of his race.25

  In a letter to one Black newspaper, the writer J. H. Wheaton shared his reservations about a US invasion of Cuba:

  I was recently approached by an old acquaintance, as to the reason I had not said more upon the question of Cuban Independence. There are many reasons, but my primary one is this: Should the United States recognize the independence of Cuba the chances are that she would establish a protectorate over the island. In the Spanish nations, color is no barrier to the progress a man may make in any of the avocations of life. He rises according to his energy and ability. His capabilities are not shackled by his color, nor his progress hampered by race.26

  Though Wheaton elided centuries of racism in the Spanish empire, his skepticism about US intentions was confirmed at the end of the Spanish-American War.27 American occupation authorities exported the Jim Crow architecture of expropriation and inequality to the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. US military officers paid no mind to the fact that Filipinos had waged a valiant struggle against Spanish imperialism for decades; occupation officials were obsessed with crushing the movement for independence in the Philippines.28 When T. Thomas Fortune explored the possibility of bringing Black workers to the Philippines he was met with hostility by US authorities, who felt that African Americans would demand decent wages and build labor coalitions with Filipino workers: “The plea was that the Negro and the Filipino got along too well together and thus endangered the well-being of the government,” Fortune remarked.29

  The United States exported its weaponized labor relations to Puerto Rico, where big sugar growers counted on police power to crush strikes.30 In 1925, the Negro World published a scathing critique of the conduct of US corporations in newly occupied nations, headlining its report in bold type: “American Capitalists Gaining Control of Industries in Porto Rico, Haiti, San Domingo and Reducing Natives to Peons.” The report hammered American imperialism, stating, “Puerto Rico is superficially prosperous, but the masses of the people are wretched. They are landless in an agricultural country. Some of them are allowed a minute patch of ground on a plantation. In return they are expected to work on the plantation for a small wage. This is locally called peonage.”31 Dr. Gilberto Concepción summarized the “stark and tragic” consequences of US corporate control of Puerto Rico for the Chicago Defender:

  U.S. controlled sugar interests—Fajardo company, South Puerto Rico Associates, and Guanica Central company—built a one-crop economy, controlling all fertile land except a few hundred acres unfit for sugar growing. Absenteeism prevails, profits going to absent owners in the U.S., who spend not one cent—not even taxes—beyond poor wages for sugar workers, for development of [the] Puerto Rican economy. U.S. laws governing the Island have hurt rather than helped.32

  Puerto Rico became, in the words of journalist Juan Gonzalez, “the richest colony in American history,” hugely profitable to US corporations, yet mired in poverty after generations of exploitation by the United States.33 An impoverished working class began a decades-long exodus to the United States in search of economic security.34

  In the United States, women’s clubs, labor unions, churches, and secret societies sustained organizing traditions that served as platforms for the recreation of internationalist movement culture. This tradition infused a public manifesto issued by the Niagara Movement, a national civil rights organization founded in 1905 by W. E. B. Du Bois and the journalist William Monroe Trotter. The manifesto explained that racism and class oppression were intertwined in the United States and abroad:

  That black men are inherently inferior to white men is a widespread lie which science flatly contradicts, and the attempt to submerge the colored races is one of the world’s old efforts of the wily to exploit the weak. We must therefore make common cause with the oppressed and down-trodden of all race[s] and peoples, with our kindred of South Africa and West Indies, with our fellows in Mexico, India and Russia and with the cause of working classes everywhere.35

  In 1912, the National Negro Independent League announced at its fifth annual meeting, in Philadelphia, “We desire to ally ourselves with all those who are laboring for equal rights and opportunities for all the oppressed people of this world.” The league used its critique of Jim Crow as a foundation to attack US imperialism abroad. Members of the league protested US control of the Philippines as well as the bloody suppression of the Cuban Partido Independiente de Color by the government of José Miguel Gómez in 1912. The league issued a declaration: “We commend the colored Cuban patriots for their manly resistance against a denial of full rights. Color prejudice has grown there by the invasion of people of the United States. We call upon Congress to prevent the sending of United States warships to Cuba to interfere against these Cubans fighting for their rights and liberties.”36

  Du Bois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), used that organization’s publication, the Crisis, to expose imperialism’s inner workings. In “The African Roots of War,” an essay published in 1915, Du Bois argued that the origins of the war that he could see approaching could be traced to the European competition over the spoils of colonialism in Africa.37 Black publications frequently showed how racial capitalism and imperialism worked together as a dual engine of expropriation. The Washington Bee argued that the invasion of Haiti in 1915 and the occupation of the Dominican Republic the following year were done “at the hands of the National City Bank group of New York City, aided and abetted by our Department of State, which in turn has been aided by our Navy Department.” The Navy Department was led by Josephus Daniels, a leader of the 1898 white supremacist insurrection and coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, that led to the Wilmington Massacre. The Bee wrote: “It is superfluous to note that the Haitians are colored people and that the Democratic administration responsible for this deviltry is almost synonymous with the Solid South. The Solid South, which raised its vicious rebellion to perpetuate slavery in the United States! The Solid South, which has never repented its desire for race degradation and enforced labor!”38

  African Americans debated within their churches, labor unions, and political organizations how best to confront racial imperialism. Should African Americans participate in the international conflict that came to be called the Great War (a strategy advocated by
Du Bois) or should they refuse to fight? Should they place their hopes in the League of Nations or reject it as a prop for continued European colonialism? African American troops had fought heroically before without gaining anything from it. Did this not prove the futility of “working within the system” for change? After World War I, in 1920, members of St. Paul’s AME church in Wichita, Kansas, gathered to hear an NAACP activist, Neval Thomas, speak on the League of Nations: “The League of Nations is a war-breeding pact to enslave the darker race of the world. . . . Wilson signed this pact which means that our black boys will be called at any time from the Jim-crow car, the city ghetto, and the menial service to which America’s caste system has condemned them, to go overseas to maintain England’s domination over nearly four hundred million of dark-skinned people.”39

  THE RESURGENCE OF EMANCIPATORY INTERNATIONALISM

  W. E. B. Du Bois insisted that the struggle to regain the vote must be joined with anti-imperialism. To the audience at the 1928 NAACP convention in Los Angeles, Du Bois explained that the “disfranchisement of the Negro in Southern States has brought about such distortion of political power in the United States, that a small white oligarchy in the South is the dictator of the Nation.”40 To change this, he said, “The American ballot must be re-established on a real basis of intelligence and character.” The stakes were high:

  Only in such way can this nation face the tremendous problems before it: the problem of free speech, an unsubsidized press and civil liberty for all people; the problem of imperialism and the emancipation of Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Philippines and Hawaii from the government of American banks; the overshadowing problem of peace among the nations and of decent and intelligent co-operation in the real advancement of the natives of Africa and Asia, together with freedom for China, India and Egypt.41

  In linking the fight against “the government of American banks” with the crusade to regain the ballot, Du Bois channeled venerable currents of the Black radical tradition and directed these ideas toward a new generation of organizers who were fighting Jim Crow imperialism. The Pittsburgh Courier, a newspaper published by George Schuyler, approvingly quoted Senator John J. Blaine of Wisconsin, who excoriated “dollar diplomacy” and the US invasion of “14 out of 20 republics to the South,” including Nicaragua and Haiti. “It is under the banner of bonds and bullets,” Blaine argued, “that all the forces of privilege march and demand that our government guarantee their questionable and usurious loans and unconscionable exploitation of weaker people.”42 The Oakland-based Black newspaper Western Outlook pointed out that “North American officials were directing the financial policies” of several nations in Central America and the Caribbean and that “in six of them armed forces of the United States were backing up financial agents.”43 Responding to US officials who were surprised at the hostility they faced at the 1928 Pan American Conference in Cuba, the Western Outlook reported, “At the present time, parliamentary government is still suspended in Haiti, and the American high commissioner virtually runs the government. Our marines, sent to Nicaragua to preserve the peace pending an election[,] are killing and being killed by Nicaraguan insurgents who do not relish the arrangement. It there any wonder that these conditions breed discontent and hostility toward this country?”

  Critiques of slave owners and manifest destiny gave way to condemnations of banks, military intervention, and racism as destructive forces. These critics rejected the idea that the United States had a mission to spread democracy abroad and insisted that people in the Global South had the right to determine their own destinies.44 The resiliency of this political tendency served as precursor to the rise of organizations in the twentieth century such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the African Blood Brotherhood, and the Black leftist organizations of the New Deal era.45 By stressing the connections between freedom, labor power, and national liberation, the practitioners of emancipatory internationalism unveiled the workings of racial capitalism while deepening democratic resistance to it.46

  Anti-imperialism found thriving expression in the Black press in the 1920s. In criticizing US foreign policy vis-à-vis Mexico and Nicaragua, the Pittsburgh Courier explained that President Calvin Coolidge’s aggressive policies in Latin America were pursued in the interests of Wall Street corporations:

  The reason why Coolidge and [Secretary of State] Kellogg are rattling the sabre now toward Mexico and Nicaragua is because the former wants to keep the natural resources of the country for the Mexicans instead of the Americans, while [Juan Bautista] Sacasa, the legal President of Nicaragua[,] is being kept out of his office by American Marines as a penalty for his friendliness to the Labor Government of Mexico, which is leading the fight against the financial imperialism of the Yankee ruling class. This is the situation minus the flimsy excuses of “our” government and its apologists.47

  The Negro World exposed the role of the United Fruit Company in promoting economic oppression in Honduras, while the Philadelphia Tribune, a Black newspaper, wrote of the situation in Haiti, “The [Woodrow] Wilson administration of affairs in Haiti is founded on two propositions, one being that the Haitians being colored men they have no rights which any white man, and especially any ‘Southern gentleman,’ is bound to respect, and secondly, that the negroes must be taught to obey every mandate from President Wilson, whether they like it or not.”48 The Tribune drew on the work of the Patriotic Union of Haiti to explain to its readers that the military occupation of the island was effected on behalf of New York bankers, who took control of the Haitian national debt, as well as corporations, which seized arable lands, forcing Haitian farmers to migrate to Cuba.49 The Tribune printed an exposé of the US occupation of Haiti: “By a secret and unlawful agreement, the period of American control over Haiti has been increased from 10 to 20 years in order to assure the $40,000,000 Haitian loan floated by American banking institutions.”50 The Negro World reported: “In Cuba, the murderous regime of Machado, tool of the National City Bank, has slaughtered trade union leaders and members until their blood has attracted even the attention of [the labor journalist] Chester Wright.”51

  Just as the general strike against slavery prepared the way for the expansive thinking that produced the Cuban solidarity movement of the 1870s, Black resistance to Jim Crow generated creative possibilities of a revived anti-imperialism in the early twentieth century.52 African American communities launched sustained boycotts of segregated streetcars and other mass transit in the South, took up arms to defend their communities against lynching, and agitated for a return of the ballot.53 Community organizers built vital new institutions such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) as well as the NAACP, which launched national campaigns against debt peonage and voter suppression. Of course these campaigns took place on a profoundly unequal terrain that placed Black citizens in direct conflict with federal and state authorities, corporations that profited from their labor, and local white civilians and businessmen. Indeed, this insider knowledge of capitalism was what gave Black critics of US economic imperialism their special force. The Black journalist William Jones mounted an attack on US State Department interference with land reforms in Mexico, observing, “Those who have studied the Mexican problem will be inclined to believe that the whole sudden outburst on the part of the State Department was inspired by that group of capitalists in this country who have been for some time displeased with recently passed Mexican agrarian laws.”54 Jones accused the United States of falsely claiming that American citizens’ lives were endangered in Mexico with the actual agenda of abrogating revolutionary land reform measures, which he said

  were so framed as to make it possible for actual toilers on the soil to compel foreign owners to dispose of their holdings. Americans call this confiscation when practiced in Mexico, but patriotism when exacted as California did against the Japs. But some human beings will always seek a way to keep other human beings toiling for them. You wonder why, with so much untilled land in this country[,] with o
ur farmers begging for capital, and industry lagging, we have so much money to invest in Mexican farms.55

  Decades of the abysmal economics of Jim Crow demonstrated that white employers would do everything possible to ensure that workers remained mired in poverty. Why should it be otherwise when these employers invested outside the United States? Jones asked why Washington opposed land reforms in Latin America, and answered his question:

  The answer is that in Mexico, it is still possible to grind out toilers for nearly nothing and “capital” always goes where it can squeeze the most out of the toiler. American farming demands too much when it comes to dividing time, to suit capital, hence our [J. P.] Morgans aided and abetted by our Government sends it [capital] off to Mexico, to France, and other nations. While the American system of exploitation in such lands as Mexico, Haiti, Cuba and the Philippines differ[s] somewhat from that of English control of Africa, India and her other dominions, we may expect the same protest as these people rise in the spirit of nationalism and develop higher standards of living.56

  THE UNIVERSAL NEGRO IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION AND GLOBAL STRUGGLE

  The newest expression of emancipatory internationalism was informed by a vision of the past that imagined the Black freedom struggle as uniting people across the globe. With millions of members spread throughout at least forty countries, and chapters in many states and countries, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and African Communities League taught history without borders. UNIA’s primary organ, the Negro World, a weekly founded by Marcus Garvey and his wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, in 1918, was published in New York. The paper featured reports on the activities of chapters in Central America, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, in Spanish, French, and other languages. The Negro World’s vibrancy was a reflection of a globally insurgent readership.57 Theodora Holly, the French-language editor of the World, published essays on Haitian life that brought together Indigenous, African, Latin American, and European histories. She paid homage to the Indigenous people of the island of Hispaniola, the Caribs; the accomplishments of the Haitian Revolution; and the critical role that Haitians played in helping the “American colonies to achieve independence.”58 Holly emphasized the resourcefulness of the Haitian people, who toiled for more than a century under the weight of the indemnities levied by France against Haiti for abolishing slavery—penalties supported by other colonial powers as a tool to prevent the “contagion of liberty” in the Caribbean from spreading.59 In “Heroic Women of Haiti,” Holly again honored the Carib Indians and the women who played a critical role in fighting the Spaniards in the 1490s while reminding her audience that Haitian women had served in combat against the French army in the great war of liberation.60