In early December, just four days after President Wilson sailed for Europe aboard the U.S.S. George Washington, however, Du Bois boarded the Orizaba, the authorized U.S. press boat. With his passport request languishing in the hands of Lansing and Polk, “only quick and adroit work on the part of myself and friends” allowed him to travel to France on official Crisis business. Also on board the otherwise all-white voyage to France were New York Age reporter Lester Walton, Tuskegee president Robert Russa Moton, and Moton’s assistant, Nathan Hunt, with whom Du Bois shared a cabin. During the crossing Du Bois told a New York Herald reporter: “The leading Negroes of the U.S. will ask the peace conference to turn back to native control the German colonies in Africa for national organization by those there now and by other Negroes who may wish to live under a government of their own race in the old African land.”
Like Du Bois, Madam Walker hoped to travel to Paris once the negotiations among the Allied nations—the United States, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and more than twenty other countries—commenced. During November and December, as several political groups approached her about representing them in France, she and Ransom debated the feasibility of black American efforts to influence the outcome of the peace talks. Always more conservative than she, Ransom scoffed at Monroe Trotter’s plan to form his own overseas delegation. “I talked with Emmett Scott and he is in perfect accord with my opinion that there is no way that this can really be done,” he wrote. “About all the American Negro could do is to send someone . . . to influence the Japanese and Liberian delegates to insist on the settling of the Race question at the Peace Conference.” Because he was convinced that “domestic questions cannot and will not be thrashed out . . . in France,” Ransom suggested that a more effective approach would be “a great Race Conference . . . to sit at Washington contemporaneously with Congress and the Peace Conference [so that] the Negro’s position could be, by petition, properly placed before Congress and the United States President.”
Despite Ransom’s caveat, Madam Walker traveled to Washington in mid-December to attend Trotter’s National Race Congress for World Democracy. Having been selected “by unanimous vote” to represent the National Equal Rights League’s New York branch, she joined at least 250 delegates from all over the country at the venerable Metropolitan AME Church not far from the White House. If Madam Walker arrived expecting decorum and civility during the two-day conference, she was immensely disappointed by the tenor of the proceedings. “I wish you might have been at that conference,” she wrote Ransom with annoyance. “A lot of old ignoramus preachers—and every one wanted to be sent, or at least to have their particular friend sent.”
On the one hand, she was flattered to learn that, in the selection of Paris representatives, she had polled more votes than all “the names submitted, even to the Bishops.” On the other hand, she and Ida B. Wells-Barnett were offended when, despite their high tallies, the all-male nominating committee “decided that no women be sent except as alternates.” As the council named its five-man delegation—while relegating the women to alternates required to pay their own expenses—Wells-Barnett remembered that such “a clamor arose” that “the committee’s report was halted.” Taking the floor, she announced that she “regretted that the years spent in fighting the race’s battles had made me financially unable to accept the honor which they had offered me.” Madam Walker watched with pride as “Mrs. B. registered a strong protest and declined the empty honors which resulted in our being elected from the floor, as full and legal delegates.”
Now with nine official National Race Congress delegates, Madam Walker told Ransom she doubted the organization “would be able to send two.” With or without them, however, she was already planning her trip to Europe. “Since they have elected me, I shall go even if they cannot do everything for me in the way of expenses, tho I have not said as much to them,” she wrote. “Of course Lelia will accompany me.”
Ransom reluctantly congratulated Madam Walker on her election, but could not mask his misgivings about the organization. “Monroe Trotter may be all right, but he stands for practically nothing in America,” warned Ransom, especially conscious of Trotter’s past confrontations with President Wilson, the head of the American delegation in Paris. “I hope you will be very careful in not identifying yourself too closely with the Trotter bunch, who may do something that will bring the whole delegation into ill-repute or offend the country. You must always bear in mind that you have a large business, whereas the others, who are going, have nothing. There are many ways in which your business can be circumscribed and hampered so as to practically put you out of business.”
Whether Ransom was aware of it or not, the political pressure he feared for Madam Walker had already been applied to Chicago Defender publisher Robert Sengstacke Abbott, a man they both knew well. Earlier that year, Major Walter H. Loving, a black Military Intelligence Division agent, had personally visited Abbott to notify him that some of his articles and editorials—especially those about lynching and the rights of black soldiers—had given government officials the impression that he might be “unpatriotic.” By the end of the visit the “chastened editor,” sufficiently intimidated by the threat that his newspaper could be banned by government censors, was said to have “promised to print nothing offensive.” During the summer of 1918—not long before Abbott attended Madam Walker’s Chicago convention—representatives of the U.S. Post Office began scrutinizing each edition of the Defender, “convinced the paper promoted racial hatred and put misguided racial goals ahead of winning the war.” By the fall of 1918, Abbott’s trademark fiery criticisms, though not entirely absent, were accompanied by “professions of patriotism.”
In addition to the War Department’s MID operations and the Post Office censors, the State Department had stepped up its surveillance of private American citizens. Empowered by the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, federal agents now had the authority to punish even the “appearance of disloyalty,” not only in the press but in any “writing or speech that might harm the country’s war efforts, promote the cause of Germany, or discredit the American government, Constitution or flag.” Near the end of the war anyone with ties to the Socialist Party or with sympathies for Russia’s anticapitalist Bolshevik Revolution was especially vulnerable to accusations of disseminating “subversive” ideas. After the war, MID operatives continued to spy on such prominent Americans as Hull-House founder Jane Addams and former Stanford University president David Starr Jordan.
Even if Abbott failed to share the details of his visit from Major Loving with Ransom and Madam Walker, Ransom’s apparently frequent contact with Emmett Scott, as well as his own wide-ranging reading habits, kept him well versed on Washington’s political climate. “I am seriously of the opinion that you will not be able to get a passport,” he predicted in a lateDecember letter to Madam Walker. At the time, of course, Ransom did not know just how close to the truth he might be, for Major Loving—not content to confine his surveillance activities to newspaper editors and publishers—had infiltrated the National Race Congress meetings just a week earlier. As a result, Madam Walker’s name had been added to the Military Intelligence Division’s files of “Negro Subversives.” Along with Hallie Queen, the Christmas season visitor to Villa Lewaro whose spy work he supervised, Loving was “one of a half dozen” black MID operatives. His surveillance efforts within the black community, wrote David Levering Lewis, were “indefatigable.” What particular strain of patriotism compelled this former music director of the Philippines Constabulary Band to engage in intra-race espionage remains unknown.
With Kaiser Wilhelm II and Germany no longer a threat, Communism and Bolshevism presented the MID and the White House with a postwar umbrella under which to place troublesome dissent of all stripes. Any aggressive protest in response to racial discrimination, lynching or the poor treatment of black soldiers—all issues that Madam Walker championed—had become tantamount to radical and seditious behavi
or. In 1919 Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer told Congress of “a well-concerted movement among a certain class of Negro leaders” to create “a radical opposition to the Government, and to the established rule of law and order.” Many black publications, he charged, especially when reporting on lynchings, were filled with “defiance and insolently race-centered condemnation of the white race.”
Apparently unable to fathom that African Americans might have legitimate concerns without ever looking beyond U.S. borders, Woodrow Wilson “confided the fear that black soldiers returning from Europe would be ‘our greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America.’” Wilson and Lansing, of course, wished to keep Madam Walker and other African Americans on the western shore of the Atlantic throughout the negotiations. As well, the three major European Allies were described as “puzzled by and cynical about the desire of a large number of black individuals and newly organized groups to attend the Paris conference.” For entirely different reasons, some black Americans expressed doubts that the delegations could have any meaningful impact upon the proceedings. In late December 1918, after several groups had chosen delegates and held rallies, the New York Age editorialized: “This business of electing delegates to the peace conference at Versailles is being run into the ground . . . It might as well be understood that there is no sense or reason in this multiplying of so-called peace delegations that will never get as far down the harbor as the Statue of Liberty.” Besides Trotter’s National Race Congress, there were other eager contingents. In November, National Medical Association president George Cannon appealed to Wilson, “We feel that our unselfish devotion at home and our heroism and supreme sacrifice on the battle fields of Europe merit representation in the make-up of the Peace Conference.” Within hours of the armistice announcement, Harlem’s Palace Casino was packed with five thousand followers of Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who himself boldly demanded that “the Allied Powers . . . hand over the ex-German colonies in Africa to black rule.” By the end of Garvey’s highly charged Universal Negro Improvement Association rally, Socialist labor leader A. Philip Randolph and Ida B. Wells-Barnett—herself now a delegate for at least two organizations—were selected to speak on behalf of the group’s interests in France. A much smaller association, the Hamitic League, nominated as two of its representatives Puerto Rican bibliophile Arthur Schomburg and militant newspaper editor John Bruce, whose “Bruce Grit” column had been carried by several black publications since the 1880s. With no authorization from the United States government, the quixotic quest of all these groups still seemed likely to end, as the Age had predicted, in New York Harbor.
Nevertheless, in an effort to unite the various factions, Madam Walker joined forces with an eclectic group of activists—including Reverend A. Clayton Powell, Sr., Reverend Frederick Cullen (who had been part of the Silent Protest Parade delegation to the White House in 1917), A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey—to form the International League of Darker Peoples. On January 2, 1919, as Madam Walker welcomed the coalition to Villa Lewaro, she announced her hopes for a permanent organization that would position itself to “engage world opinion even after the peace conference shall have ended.” Randolph, the tall, chestnutcomplexioned editor of The Messenger—a publication with decidedly leftist leanings—presented a set of “peace proposals” in the precise, Oxford-style English he had learned from a Shakespearean tutor. High on the list of demands was a call for “a more enlightened world politics” aimed at providing independence and autonomy for African nations. “Rapacious and unscrupulous ‘world power’ politics has raped Africa of over 100,000,000 souls and billions of wealth,” Randolph, the League’s secretary, asserted in his written statement. “No ‘League of Nations’ can long endure which ignores the just claims of Africa. The world cannot be ‘made safe for democracy’ while Africa is unsafe for the Africans,” the sharply worded manifesto mocked President Wilson. Further, the ILDP document insisted upon an international agreement to abolish “all economic, political and social discriminations in all countries, based upon color.” Under its plan, a “supernational” commission, composed of the world’s “educated classes of Negroes,” would develop and govern Germany’s former colonies. Such a body, the group proposed with missionary-like presumption, would establish educational systems to teach “chemistry, physics, biology, horticulture, geology, mining, engineering and political science” and supervise the construction of transportation systems and communications networks. “If peace can be secured through a league of free nations,” the ILDP declared, “so can the hydra-headed monster—race prejudice—be destroyed, by the darker peoples of the worlds . . . making common cause with each other, in one great world body.”
As a document it was wildly idealistic and utopian. Nevertheless, it embodied a vision with which Madam Walker found little to disagree. And if some of the more excessive rhetoric seemed overblown, the proposed education programs meshed easily with her longtime dream for an African Tuskegee. Ransom, however, was not nearly so open-minded, labeling many of the ILDP goals “utterly impossible as well as impractical.” As well, he found little to commend the League’s membership roster. “It seems strange to me that so few prominent New Yorkers are connected with it, in fact, there seems to be practically none,” he tartly observed. “Of course, they have your name and Mr. Powell’s,” he added a few days later. “People always seek to get the names of someone with standing to use as one would use vinegar to catch flies. You and Mr. Powell, however, owe it to yourselves to be very careful how you lend your names to every propagandist that comes along,” he admonished.
Despite Ransom’s reservations, Madam Walker continued to explore additional avenues to influence the peace talks. Aware that members of the Japanese peace delegation were in New York, the League—in the “spirit of race internationalism” and probably at Madam Walker’s expense—sent them a floral arrangement “as a token of friendship and brotherhood.” Five days after the ILDP’s inaugural meeting—with hopes of persuading Japan’s representatives to present the “race issue” before the Paris conference—Madam Walker hosted a gathering at the grand Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for a small League delegation and S. Kuriowa, a Japanese envoy and publisher of Yorudo Choho, a Tokyo newspaper. During the session, Kuriowa—whose Japanese American brethren had been prohibited from purchasing land in California because of their race—was said to have “assured the delegation of his unqualified and genuine approval of the darker peoples making common cause against the common enemy—race prejudice based upon color.” In the only edition of The World Forum, the ILDP’s newspaper, Kuriowa promised that “the race question will be raised at the peace table.”
Having declared war on Germany in 1914 and deployed its navy in defense of British convoys in Far East waters throughout the conflict, Japan now was entitled to a seat in Paris with the other Allies. Harboring their own expansionist objectives, the country’s leaders were intent upon continuing to occupy the Chinese territory they had invaded and assuming control over Germany’s former Pacific islands north of the equator.
With Madam Walker already a target of the MID, her meeting with Kuriowa surely heightened Loving’s suspicions. Just two months earlier, in fact, at a November 1918 rally, Marcus Garvey had attracted MID attention when he predicted—with a heavy dose of hyperbole—that “the next war would pit white nations against a black-Japanese alliance.” More cautiously, the Age cited Japanese newspaper articles that urged Asian delegations to champion a peace agreement clause prohibiting worldwide racial discrimination. “If Japan and China raised this question at the peace table there would really be some chance at making it an issue,” said the Age. But Ransom, ever the contrarian, saw little possibility for a genuine coalition with the Japanese. “There is no sympathy between Japan and the Negro, absolutely none between China and the Negro, or the Turk or any other of the Darker Peoples, and it cannot be brought about by a few theorists combined together,” he advised Madam Walker in a rather testy foreign aff
airs lesson. Even Randolph—who was said to have arranged the Kuriowa meeting at Madam Walker’s request—had discouraged any black-Japanese alliance seven months earlier in The Messenger, the publication he proudly called “the only radical Negro magazine in America.” Branding Japan “imperialistic,” “autocratic” and “reactionary” because of its threats to invade Siberia, Randolph and his coeditor, Chandler Owen, had written: “We admonish Negroes not to be appealed to on the ground of color . . . Japan oppresses shamefully her own Japanese people and she would oppress you likewise.”
On Her Own Ground Page 34