An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by Paul Ortiz

  The December 20, 1924, edition of the Negro World celebrated Simón Bolívar, and joined Peruvians in observing the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Ayacucho, one of the final struggles of the Latin American wars of independence. In the nineteenth century, Black newspapers had promoted the stories of South American freedom fighters, yet now, the Negro World lamented, US citizens were ignorant of this history.61 Rejoicing in the fact that Bolívar’s and General José de San Martín’s armies had contained a mix of “Spaniards, Scots, Irishmen, Negroes and Indians,” the World pointed out that “Anglo-Saxons, who boast of tenacity and courage as if these qualities were peculiar to Nordics[,] should read of the achievements of such men as Bolívar and San Martin. Then they might understand why their arrogant attitude has roused such resentment in the Latin American Republic[s].”62

  The UNIA promoted a vision of Pan-Africanism moving in concert with anticolonial movements. With a distribution approaching five hundred thousand, the Negro World was more than the mouthpiece of UNIA’s leader, the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey.63 (After Garvey’s arrest for federal mail fraud in 1923, Amy Garvey took over leadership of both the Negro World and UNIA.)64 The UNIA chapter reports pouring in from all over the colonized world allowed readers to join in a community of international struggle. “UNIA Continues to Sweep Cuba,” read the headline over a summary of a bilingual meeting in Cuba. “The president of the division . . . gave a wonderful address on the aims and objects of the U.N.I.A. . . . While the band was playing the Himno Bayames; [and, subsequently] Master Elpidio Morales and Miss Memima James lifted the Cuban flag and Master Morales recited, ‘Cuba Libre y Africa sera libre,’ [Free Cuba and Africa will be free], then the tricolor was raised amidst great applause, while the U.N.I.A. anthem was sung.”65 (The national anthem of Cuba was “El Himno de Bayamo.”)

  The Negro World shared stories about Chinese workers’ strikes in British-occupied China, anticolonial resistance in India, and the struggle against US imperialism in Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, and the Philippines.66 The paper republished stories from white newspapers, including the investigation conducted by the labor journalist Chester Wright on the murders of Cuban trade union organizers in 1927 by “the murderous regime of [Gerardo] Machado, tool of the National City Bank.”67 The Negro World led with headlines such as “Race and Class Struggle Fierce in South Africa,” and it emphasized that “the majority of workers of the world are non-European.”68 The World reprinted pieces from the Johannesburg International Communist Organ; one such story was headlined “Capitalists Exploit European White and Native Black Worker Alike.”69 In 1925, the World published the proceedings of the radical Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union in South Africa, approvingly quoting the keynote lecture of the Black leader Clements Kadalie, who advocated major labor reform.70 Alongside Kadalie’s speech, the World published an editorial titled “Our Labor Troubles Are World-Embracing and Perplexing” and lauded the work of the insurgent South African labor union: “They are going about it in a way to get what they want. We shall get a measure of it everywhere if we go about it with the like spirit.”71 In essence, the newspaper’s tireless editors reminded their readers that they were engaged in a worldwide struggle against economic exploitation. In one example, the editors linked the migration of Black workers out of the American South, declining domestic cotton production, and Egyptian anticolonial insurgencies against British authorities seeking to export cotton to the United States.72 A global community of readers united in anticolonialism made a global analysis of capitalism possible.

  Domestically, the Negro World reported on numerous dimensions of Jim Crow in the United States, including anti-Black violence, employment discrimination, and educational inequalities. It also published cases of Jim Crow policies in Spanish-language columns in an effort to educate its international readership about “procedimientos inhumanos” (inhuman procedures), as one article on police torture in Washington, DC, called police actions.73 Letters to the Negro World expressed excitement at the sense of being part of a worldwide movement against racial oppression. “Dear Editor of the Negro World,” one letter from a member of a Cuban UNIA chapter began, “We rejoice at the fine support that American Negroes are giving the Universal Improvement Association. It encourages the oppressed members of our race in other countries to learn of what you are doing in America. Many members of our race in Cuba are just as interested and enthusiastic as those in other parts of the world, but we are not always able to do as much financially as we want to do.”74

  Black commentators warned that increasing US investment in the Global South would mean peonage, sexual violence, and political repression.75 An editorial in the Afro-American observed, “In Central America, especially in Panama, since the United States commenced to build the Panama Canal, American prejudice has made its appearance until conditions are almost as bad there as in some parts of the United States although the larger part of the people are of dark skin.”76 Joseph Mirault, a leader of the Patriotic Union of Haiti, informed the readers of the Negro World that in the wake of the US invasion of Haiti in 1915, US occupation troops were censoring the mails, incarcerating dissenters, and murdering Haitians.77 Black newspapers featured interviews with distinguished organizers such as Trinidad’s George Padmore, who wrote, “Negroes have nothing to gain in imperialistic wars. Their place is by the side of the workers and the oppressed colonial people.”78

  The author James Weldon Johnson’s 1920 exposé of the American occupation of Haiti, published in the NAACP’s Crisis as well as in the Nation, used its audience’s familiarity with Jim Crow in the United States to attack American imperialism abroad. Black audiences analyzed Johnson’s shocking findings in Haiti by using the interpretive lenses they used to judge the United States. When Johnson gave a talk on US military atrocities in Haiti to a Cleveland-area audience, the Black press framed American war crimes in Haiti as “3,250 lynch murders.”79 Johnson began his published written report by arguing that in order to understand why “some three thousand Haitian men, women, and children have been shot down by American rifles and machine guns, it is necessary, among other things, to know that the National City Bank of New York is very much interested in Haiti. It is necessary to know that the National City Bank controls the National Bank of Haiti and is the depository for all of the Haitian national funds that are being collected by American officials.”80

  IN THE INTERESTS OF AMERICAN BANKERS

  African Americans cheered the Nicaraguan resistance against the United States invasion of that country in the 1920s. Black media exposed the ugly reality that the US Marines were in Nicaragua to defend the profits of the United Fruit Company, Brown Brothers, J. & W. Seligman, and other entities with a monetary interest in exploiting the region. According to the Pittsburgh Courier, the United States sought to destroy labor and land reform in Latin America:

  Casting the last bit of pretense and hypocrisy aside, the United States Government has grabbed little Nicaragua. For years a detachment of American Marines was kept at the capital of the country as a warning to the politicians to work steadily in the interest of American business as represented by the mahogany and fruit companies. Alarmed by the success of the Labor government in Mexico which had taken over the land and given it to the peons and anxious to protect the investments of Yankees in Latin American countries from possibly a similar fate, the United States Government stepped into the picture recently when Sacasa, the Liberal leader, friendly to Mexico, was about to gain the Presidency of Nicaragua. The marines proceeded to make Nicaragua safe for Wall Street, as they helped to make the world safe for it ten years ago. Thousands of soldiers of the sea were piled into the country to “protect” the handful of Americans there.81

  The Courier predicted a grim outcome for the Nicaraguans in the case of a successful US invasion, included the granting of apparent independence to leaders who actually served at the pleasure of their Yankee bosses. If the United States triumphed in Nicaragua it would mean that its nation’s ci
tizens would be subjected to the twentieth-century slavery imposed by the United States and its corporations:

  In reality she [Nicaragua] takes her place alongside of Haiti, which belongs to the National City Bank, and of Cuba, which is a satrapy of the Sugar Trust. Henceforth, under the lash of “efficiency” and “improved methods” the dark-skinned workers of Nicaragua, formerly pawns in the frequent revolutions financed by alien schemers and headed by rival generals, will sweat to pay off money “lent” to them by their American masters. So, the American Empire follows its star of destiny.82

  African Americans organized workshops and educational forums to learn about Haitian and Nicaraguan resistance movements. Harlem became a vital site of emancipatory internationalism and home to the Virgin Islands Committee, the Haitian Patriotic Union, the American Anti-Imperialist League, and other organizations led by immigrants from the Caribbean.83 Harlem’s Black churches hosted interracial meetings where organizations of different political tendencies met together to create strategies to combat US and European imperialism. Harlem’s Grace Memorial Church was the site of a “monster mass meeting” in 1924 where the Black socialists A. Philip Randolph and Frank R. Crosswaith, as well as the Virgin Islands labor leader Rothschild Francis, joined with the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Federation of Labor, and a representative of the New York City Mayor’s Office to protest US economic control of the Virgin Islands. Randolph stated, “The problem of the Virgin Islander, is one phase of the universal struggle on the part of the world’s lowly, a place in the sun.”84 He pointed out the need for American Blacks to join with Blacks everywhere and present a solid front against the imperialists of every land. Touching on the point of constructive propaganda, Randolph said it was necessary “to interest the entire press of this nation in the affairs of the down-trodden peoples of the Virgin Islands.” The Virgin Islands Committee used these meetings to create a campaign to pressure the federal government to guarantee “a permanent form of civil government” and a “bill of rights” for Virgin Islanders.85

  The African American press celebrated the exploits of Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto Sandino, who led the resistance struggle against the US invasion of Nicaragua in the 1920s. The Pittsburgh Courier wrote, “It is assumed that the Nicaraguan patriots who are following Sandino are illiterate. Illiterate they may be, but certainly they are as surely patriots as the ragged hosts that cast their fortune with George Washington in 1776. Mention of the Negroes brings to mind the fact that in the State of Neuva Segovia, in Northwest Nicaragua, there are close to 10,000 Negroes, and many of them are fighting in the Army of Sandino.”86 The New York Times depicted Sandino as a criminal and called him a “small-time Cesar.” A rejoinder came from the Amsterdam News: “Sandino has been called a bandit, but his words are not those of a bandit; they would have fitted the mouth of George Washington when he was fighting the British. The worst feature of the business is the curtailing of Latin American freedom of speech by American military power. In Nicaragua, the [US] marines seem to be repeating their record in Haiti and the Virgin Islands.”87 The Norfolk Journal and Guide editorialized: “The victory of our fighting forces over the Nicaraguan rebels may have been a fine achievement for the military, but it is nothing to reflect credit upon our country’s Latin-American policy. In fact, it is rather a discredit, indeed a disgrace.”88

  When citizens of the Dominican Republic rallied against the US occupation of their country, the Cleveland Gazette ran the headline “Rah! For The Dominicans! They Demand the Unconditional Withdrawal of U. S. Marines and It Ought to Be Done.”89 The Pittsburgh Courier railed against the exploitation of African workers; its Views and Reviews section pointedly noted in 1928,

  What has happened in Liberia is precisely what has happened in Nicaragua, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Costa Rica, Porto Rico, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, Ecuador, and Peru, and what will someday happen in Mexico, i.e., the country is now irretrievably in the claws of the American bankers. The country is having a new day, all right, but the profits will hereafter go almost entirely to the Firestone Company and the National City Bank.90

  In a review of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America, Schuyler referred in deprecating terms to the “Mexican land grab” and noted that African Americans, who had served in every other war, “should be proud” that they had not been involved in the Mexican-American War.91 In 1943, the Courier formulated a powerful argument in favor of reparations for slavery and debt peonage by unifying the suffering of African Americans as “among the earliest victims of white aggression” with that of Mexican Americans who had been “murdered and enslaved” and of Native Americans and the victims of French and Belgian imperialism in Africa. Reparations from the imperial powers were only fair: “Since [US president Franklin] Roosevelt and Co. are so enthusiastic about this sort of thing [compensation] for others, I think the United States should wholeheartedly subscribe to this program of recompensing the victims of robbery and aggression.”92

  African Americans drew courage from the resistance of Latin American freedom fighters and they brought anti-imperialism as a way of life into the twentieth century. They built a movement culture around identifying with oppressed people facing US military aggression in Latin America and the Caribbean—a culture with which their counterparts in the Cuban solidarity movement of the 1870s and their earlier ancestors in the radical abolitionist movement would immediately have identified. By defining the core of US imperial culture as “the government of American banks,” Black critics identified the newest phase of American imperialism, its origins, and its financial imperatives. The rising power of Wall Street to determine US foreign policy was exposed at its roots. Such an incisive analysis would bear fruit as Black internationalism flowered once again after World War II.93

  During the 1928 presidential election campaign, the Baltimore Afro-American sent Herbert Hoover a public questionnaire asking, “Where does Hoover stand on the withdrawal of Marines from Nicaragua and Haiti[?]”94 Unsatisfied with Hoover’s evasive response, the Afro-American editorialized:

  Mr. Hoover may be only a secretary of commerce now, but he is asking the people of this country to elect him to the presidency. For this reason, the people have a right to ask him—Mr. Hoover, where do you stand on the Haiti and Nicaragua question. Will you continue the Coolidge policy of imposing on these small countries because they cannot fight back, or will you treat them like you’d treat England and France or Japan, the great nations who are able to match you bullet for bullet and man for man?

  The editorial concluded by tying the fate of African Americans to that of the individuals fighting imperialism in the Americas: “Mr. Hoover, if elected to the presidency would you continue [to] be the bully with the big stick or would you be the big brother to these weaker nations of Central America? . . . If you cannot be depended upon to give a square deal to the weak white man in Nicaragua, how can we expect you to give justice to the weak black man at home?”95

  The Washington Bee evaluated the US’s commitment to democracy thusly: “What really counts—the acid test—is what we shall do to little Haiti, the one country which, by a curious irony, made a really substantial contribution to the cause of Bolivar and South American freedom, while we stood aloof.”96 If this internationalist vision of social justice had been allowed real political expression, the subsequent history of US-sponsored violence in the Americas might have been avoided. Again, however, the pall hanging over the prospects for challenging US imperialism was voter suppression.97 White business supremacy kept Black people away from the ballot box, where they would have been able to join their votes to their voices. Latin America suffered from US interventions made possible by Jim Crow.

  Like José Martí a generation earlier, Bernardo Ruiz Suarez left his native Cuba in the early twentieth century to write about the United States. Suarez observed, “The white race is haughty and domineering everywhere. In those countries
where religion, education and other influences have softened the hearts of men, the sentiment of brotherhood tends to level the inequalities and barriers of race and to give reality to that form of society which in Political Science is called Democracy.”98 Suarez warned that the United States lacked the “sentiment of brotherhood” altogether: “But the race which colonized and still forms the majority of the people of the United States, with its historical antecedents and its degrading record of bloodshed, cannot be classified, in the opinion of an impartial observer, as a democratic race.”

  The refusal of people in Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, and other nations to submit quietly to US power inspired African Americans trying to ward off racial capitalism’s blows in the United States throughout the twentieth century. Veterans of the war on the government of American banks would have taken exception to a later generation of scholars who characterized the United States as either “isolationist” or democratic. The insurgent citizenry of the Americas who faced the “colossus of the North” would have scoffed at the idea that the United States was not an empire. The opponents of the US military invasions of the early twentieth century demanded that the United States be held accountable for its overseas depredations. Instead, historians shrouded the country’s history in a veil of innocence and exceptionalism, which has undermined the nation’s ability to reform itself to this day. It cannot be said that scholars lacked sources that could have guided them to the truth. Suarez, whose nation had dealt with US power for decades, spoke for many in the Global South in 1922 when he concluded, “No matter what is said to the contrary, and there is much truth that may be said, the United States of America have by no means lived up to their professed abhorrence of autocracy and aggressive imperialism in their international affairs.”99