by Paul Ortiz
11. “Maceo’s Death Arouses Them,” Cleveland Gazette, December 19, 1896.
12. “Emancipation Address Delivered by Rev. C. Dillard,” Cleveland Gazette, May 1, 1897.
13. Edward A. Johnson, History of the Colored Soldiers in the Spanish American War (1899), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11102/11102-h/11102-h.htm (accessed February 9, 2015).
14. In recent years, scholars have been transcending binary thinking on race. See, for example, Manuel Pastor, Stewart Kwoh, and Angela Glover Blackwell, Searching for the Uncommon Common Ground: New Dimensions on Race in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).
15. “Sketches; Gen. Antonio Maceo,” Cleveland Gazette, November 14, 1896. See also “A Grand Record in the History of Cuba,” Cleveland Gazette, March 4, 1899; “The Colored Man in Cuba Knows No Color Lines,” Fair Play (Fort Scott, KS), March 10, 1899; Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 84–85.
16. “The Colored Man in Cuba Knows No Color Lines.”
17. “Cuba’s Mulatto Hero,” Freeman, April 30, 1898. See also “All Signs Point,” Freeman, December 6, 1896. In contrast, Florida’s superintendent of public instruction, W. M. Sheats, lectured: “Those of us who love the Anglo-Saxon race and this great American republic are willing to do almost anything to preserve race purity and to save the South from the spectacle witnessed in Hayti, Jamaica, Mexico, and wherever there are no race distinctions.” “The Florida Disgrace,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, September 12, 1895.
18. See “Another Cuban Hero Fell,” Cleveland Gazette, April 9, 1898; “Social Equality Discussed,” Freeman, July 31, 1897; “All Over the World Brave, Banderas,” Iowa State Bystander, September 3, 1897; “The Cuban Patriots,” Cleveland Gazette, November 28, 1896.
19. See Louis A. Pérez Jr., The War of 1898: The United States & Cuba in History & Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 81–133.
20. “‘The White Man’s Burden’: Kipling’s Hymn to U.S. Imperialism,” History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/ (accessed January 10, 2016); Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti: 1915–1934 (1971; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 44.
21. “Cuban Women: Some of Their Daring Acts of Bravery,” Fair Play, March 24, 1899. Edward A. Johnson also noted the participation of Cuban women as combatants in the War of Independence. See A School History of the Negro Race in America, from 1619 to 1890: Combined with a History of the Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, rev. ed. (New York: Isaac Goldmann Co., 1911).
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid. “It is easy to be heroes with women such as these,” José Martí remarked. See Lynn K. Stoner, From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman’s Movement for Legal Reform, 1898–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 20. See also Linda L. Reif, “Women in Latin American Guerilla Movements: A Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics 18, no. 2 (January 1986): 147–69; Karen Kampwirth, Women and Guerilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
24. José Martí, “Letter to Manuel Mercado,” in Selected Writings, 347. On the intersections of race and empire in the United States, see Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (December 2011): 1348–91.
25. “Race News,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland), November 24, 1899; “Race Echoes,” Iowa State Bystander, December 1, 1899.
26. “J. H. Wheaton Objects to American Interference in Cuban Affairs,” Enterprise (Omaha), February 6, 1897.
27. African Americans often understated racism in the former nations of the Spanish Empire in their efforts to contrast race relations in Latin America with social relations in the United States. On racism in the Cuban nationalist movement, see Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba. More generally, see Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (New York: Picador, 2001); Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (1997; New York: Pluto Press, 2010).
28. James A. Le Roy, “Race Prejudice in the Philippines,” Atlantic Monthly, July–December, 1902, 103. See Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Willard B. Gatewood, “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898–1902 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987).
29. “Unfairness of the United States,” Afro-American, November 13, 1909.
30. For an example of labor struggles in the sugar industry, see Santiago Iglesias, “Strike of Porto Rican Agricultural Workers,” American Federationist 22, no. 1 (April 1915): 264–67; “Strike in Porto Rico Becoming More General,” Facts About Sugar 4, no. 8 (February 24, 1917): 86; “Letter from Porto Rico, Labor Troubles Are Quite Acute,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer 54, no. 1 (February 27, 1915): 139.
31. “Porto Rico Misery Laid to Americans,” Negro World, March 7, 1925.
32. “U.S. Hurts, Doesn’t Help, Puerto Rico in Solving Island Ills of Hunger,” Chicago Defender, May 22, 1943.
33. Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire, 280–82; Carlos Alamo-Pastrana, Seams of Empire: Race and Radicalism in Puerto Rico and the United States (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016).
34. Serafiín Méndez-Méndez with Ronald Fernández, Puerto Rico Past and Present: An Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Denver: Greenwood Press, 2015), 220–21; Ronald Schmidt Sr. et al., Newcomers, Outsiders, and Insiders: Immigrants and American Racial Politics in the Early Twenty-First Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 86.
35. “Statement From the Annual Meeting of the Niagara Movement at Sea Island, NJ,” Afro-American, September 18, 1909; “Right to Work Is Question,” Afro-American, September 18, 1909.
36. “Independent Political League Adopts Strong Address against US Intervention in Cuba,” Afro-American Ledger, July 20, 1912. Historian Arthur S. Link discusses the work of the National Independent Political League in Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 503–6. See also National Independent Political League, Fifty Years of Physical Freedom and Political Bondage, 1862–1912 (Washington, DC: National Independent Political League, 1912).
37. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” Atlantic Monthly 115 (May 1915): 707–14.
38. “The Haitian Affliction,” Washington Bee, October 23, 1920. On the role of the National City Bank of New York in American imperialism and politics, see Peter James Hudson, “The National City Bank of New York and Haiti, 1909–1922,” Radical History Review 115 (Winter 2013): 91–114; Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1914), 28. On the Wilmington Massacre, see H. Leon Prather, We Have Taken a City: The Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898 (Wilmington, NC: Dram Tree Books, 2006).
39. “Neval H. Thomas Speaks Out for Equal Rights and Justice for All American Citizens,” Negro Star (Wichita, KS), September 17, 1920.
40. “Political Power ‘Distorted’ Says Dr. Du Bois,” Plain Dealer (Topeka, KS), June 29, 1928.
41. “N.A.A.C.P. Publishes Text of Address.” Amsterdam News, July 18, 1928.
42. “Imperialism? Turn to Haiti,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 11, 1928.
43. “Pan American Conference,” Western Outlook (Oakland, CA), February 4, 1928.
44. The continuation of Black internationalist ideas throughout the twentieth century can be traced in Singh, Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder; Conrad J. Lynn, There Is a Fountain: The Autobiography
of Conrad Lynn (1979; New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1993); Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Susan Greenbaum, More Than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).
45. For critical analyses of these organizations and Black internationalist tendencies in general, see James, A History of Pan-African Revolt; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961; New York: Grove Press, 2005); Ula Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Michelle Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Minkah Makalini, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Christopher J. Lee, Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2010); Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1986).
46. I have drawn heavily on the works of Cedric Robinson and Edward W. Said in making these points about the relationship between social theory and resistance. See Edward W. Said, “Traveling Theory Reconsidered,” in Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life, ed. Robert M. Polhemus and Roger Henkle (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 251–65; Cedric Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (1980; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
47. “Kaiser Sam Critique of US Foreign Policy,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 22, 1927.
48. “Brutal Official Rule in Spanish Honduras,” Negro World, October 11, 1924; “A Disgraceful Chapter,” Philadelphia Tribune, November 6, 1920. See also Jason M. Colby, The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
49. “Haitian Laws Disregarded by US Tyrants,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 13, 1926 (this investigation had been jointly conducted by the Patriotic Union of Haiti and the NAACP). For an analysis of the role of US banks in promoting US imperialism, see Hudson, “National City Bank of New York and Haiti.”
50. “Haitian Laws Disregarded.”
51. “US Get Out of Haiti,” New York World, April 10, 1927. Chester M. Wright served as English Language Secretary of the Pan-American Federation of Labor and was a major figure in the American Federation of Labor.
52. Building on the work of Lawrence Goodwyn and other democratic theorists, Harry C. Boyte promoted the idea that “political knowledge is importantly social and experiential.” See Harry C. Boyte, “Populism and John Dewey: Convergences and Contradictions,” University of Michigan Dewey Lecture, March 29, 2007, 2 (transcript in author’s collection), https://archive.org/stream/populism_devey/populism_devey_djvu.txt. See also Goodwyn, Populist Moment.
53. Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycott and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
54. “Day by Day,” Afro-American, June 20, 1925.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid. On the issue of American citizens’ land holdings in Mexico, see McLynn, Zapata and Villa, 16–18.
57. On the upsurge in Pan-African activity in this era, see James, A History of Pan-African Revolt.
58. “Beautiful Haiti and Its Brave Hearted People,” Negro World, February 7, 1925. On Holly, see “The New and Brilliant French Editor of the Negro World,” Negro World, February 7, 1925. See also Brenda Gayle Plummer, “The Afro-American Response to the Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934,” in Race and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Colonial Period to the Present, ed. Michael L. Krenn (New York: Garland, 1998), 70.
59. Between 1825 and 1947, the French government extorted approximately 90 million gold francs from the Haitians. See “M. Sarkozy, rendez à Haïti son argent extorqué,” Libération, August 15, 2010, http://www.liberation.fr/planete/2010/08/16/m-sarkozy-rendez-a-haiti-son-argent-extorque_672275 (accessed January 3, 2017); Isabel Macdonald, “France’s Debt of Dishonour to Haiti,” Guardian, August 16, 2010.
60. “Heroic Women of Haiti,” Negro World, February 21, 1925.
61. “Bolivar and San Martin,” Negro World, December 20, 1924.
62. Ibid. See also “Sad Bereavement,” Colored American, July 11, 1903; “Song of Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Negro World, September 15, 1923; “Mexico’s Black Lincoln [Vicente Guerrero],” Plain Dealer (Kansas City), February 16, 1945.
63. Martin, Race First, 92–100.
64. Taylor, The Veiled Garvey, 52–54.
65. “UNIA Continues to Sweep Cuba,” Negro World, October 6, 1923.
66. For example, see “Propaganda en Contra de la Aspiracíon Filipina,” Negro World, November 3, 1923; “Discontented Porto Rico Clamors for Justice,” Negro World, November 10, 1923; “Disturbances in China Are Laid to the British,” Negro World, June 27, 1925; “Can Britain Hold India in the Empire?,” Negro World, April 4, 1925; “Nicaragua y Estados Unidos,” Negro World, November 29, 1924.
67. “US Get out of Haiti and Colonial Traitors,” New York World, April 10, 1927
68. “Race and Class Struggle Fierce in South Africa,” Negro World, August 1, 1925.
69. “The Degradation of Labor in South Africa,” Negro World, November 15, 1924.
70. “ ‘Be Free Men and Women in Africa,’” Negro World, April 25, 1925. For background on the ICU, see Helen Bradford, A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural Africa, 1924–1930 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); C. Kadalie, My Life and the ICU: The Autobiography of a Black Trade Unionist in South Africa (New York: Humanities Press, 1970).
71. “Our Labor Troubles Are World-Embracing and Perplexing,” Negro World, April 25, 1925.
72. “The Cotton Revolution and Trouble in the African Sudan,” Negro World, December 6, 1924.
73. “Procedimientos Inhumanos,” Negro World, November 29, 1924.
74. “Cubans Appreciate U.S. Support of U.N.I.A.,” Negro World, August 8, 1925.
75. “Should Protest Butler as Military Governor of Cuba,” Christian Recorder, August 11, 1898; “The Black Man in Cuba,” Plain Dealer, February 3, 1899; “The ‘Color Devil’ in Cuba,” Christian Recorder, March 2, 1899; “A Lesson to Learn,” Afro-American, December 10, 1910; “Uprising in Cuba,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 25, 1912; “Color Line in Cuba,” Philadelphia Tribune, June 8, 1912.
76. “A Lesson to Learn,” Afro-American, December 10, 1910; Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).
77. “More Outrages in Haiti,” Negro World, November 24, 1923.
78. “Urges Race to Fight Facisti Movement,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 28, 1928.
79. “The Lynching of Haitians,” Cleveland Gazette, January 22, 1921. In a similar manner, the Negro World simultaneously critiqued Jim Crow and imperialism, showing how the two worked together in one provocative headline: “How American Occupation of Haiti Is Demoralizing Oppressor and Oppressed. Ignorant and Licentious Young Men Drawn Chiefly from the Negro-Hating South Sowing Seeds of Strife. Tax on Island’s Chief Product Benefits Only National City Bank of New York—U.S. Advised to Get Out.” Negro World, April 23, 1927.
80. James Weldon Johnson, “Self-Determining Haiti: The American Occupation,” Nation 111 (August 28, 1920), http://windowsonhaiti.com/windowsonhaiti/haiti_oc_series_03.shtml (accessed December 15, 2014). See also “White Hell in Black Haiti: U.S. Military Law Rules,” Washington Bee, September 11, 19
20.
81. “Annexing Another Colony,” Pittsburgh Courier, November 19, 1927. On March 18, 1911, the Savannah Tribune published a story on how William Taft’s administration attempted to meddle in the Mexican Revolution: “Chain Guard Along Border; Taft Admits the Real Purpose of the Mobilization.”
82. Ibid.
83. See “Haitian Laws Disregarded by US Tyrants”; “Haiti Conditions As Described by a Native,” Washington Bee, June 18, 1921; “Haiti Speaks!” Cleveland Gazette, June 11, 1921; “Nicaraguan War as Forum Topic,” New York Amsterdam News, January 25, 1928.
84. “New York Virgin Islanders Hold Big Mass Meeting to Protest Bad Economic Rule,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 23, 1924.
85. “Virgin Islands Ask U.S. For Citizenship,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 7, 1924.
86. “Uncle Sam’s Hot Potato,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 14, 1928. “Nicaraguan War as Forum Topic”; Neill Macaulay, The Sandino Affair (1985; Micanopy, FL: Wacahoota Press, 1998); Thomas W. Walker, Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003); Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 231–52.
87. “Says Sandino Served,” New York Times, January 6, 1928; “Republic or Empire?” New York Amsterdam News, February 22, 1928.
88. “Our Nicaraguan War,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, July 23, 1927.
89. “Rah! For the Dominicans!” Cleveland Gazette, June 25, 1921.
90. “Views and Reviews,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 12, 1928.
91. “Aggressors Pay for the Robberies,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 16, 1943.
92. Ibid. See also Schuyler’s essay, “The Caucasian Problem,” which appeared in Rayford Logan, ed., What the Negro Wants (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). Schuyler traveled to Liberia in 1931 and developed a more positive opinion of the Firestone plantations. See Oscar Renal Williams, George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 55–56.
