The widespread appeal of the PME and Gordon’s emigration campaign underscores the continued salience and influence of black nationalist thought and praxis in the 1930s. During this era of global economic instability and political turmoil, a large segment of the black working class in the United States embraced black nationalism—especially the core tenets of black capitalism, political self-determination, and emigration—as viable solutions to achieve universal black liberation. Importantly, Gordon’s founding of the PME and the remarkably popular emigration petition from working-class black Americans at the dawn of the New Deal exemplifies the important and wide-ranging political projects undertaken by black nationalist women in the aftermath of Garvey’s deportation.
Mittie Maude Lena Gordon’s Early Years
Gordon’s childhood was critical in shaping her interest in black nationalist politics as an adult. Born Mittie Maude Lena Nelson on August 2, 1889, in rural Webster Parish of Louisiana, Gordon spent her early childhood in Louisiana, but it was not long before her family moved to Hope, Arkansas, in an effort to find better job and educational opportunities.6 The school system in Webster Parish thwarted her parents’ plans to provide a decent education for Gordon and her nine siblings. According to Gordon, “School facilities for colored children were so bad in Webster Parish, that the third-grade was as high as one could go, because pressure was so strong against educating [N]egroes.”7 Local resistance against black education coupled with vast disparities in quality between white and black schools confirmed her parents’ decision to move out of Webster Parish in 1900. The family moved to Hope after Gordon’s father, Edward Nelson, became a minister in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (CME) that year and asked to be transferred to Arkansas.8 To his dismay, however, the educational opportunities for African Americans in Arkansas were no different from what he had left behind.
Nelson, the son of a former slave who had been denied access to formal education, was determined to secure the best educational opportunities for his children. When the local school districts in Arkansas failed to provide viable options, Nelson began to homeschool his children with the limited education that he had received. This choice had a significant impact on the formation of Gordon’s nationalist ideology. According to Gordon, her father devoted much time to the teachings of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, laying the foundation for her decision to embrace Garveyism later in life.9Born near Abbeville, South Carolina, in 1834, Turner became a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1851 and went on to join the African Methodist Episcopal Church seven years later. During the late nineteenth century, Turner began advocating for emigration after his political prospects abruptly ended after Reconstruction. Convinced that extinction was the only likely outcome for African Americans who opposed emigration, Turner appealed to African Americans to leave the country, and between 1891 and 1898, he made several trips to the African continent. Similar to other black nationalists of the period, Turner maintained a civilizationist perspective, believing that emigration to West Africa would blaze a path toward modernity in Africa.10 His writings underscore his nationalist vision and strong affinity for Africa—ideas that Gordon began to embrace at an early age.
During these formative years, Gordon was also exposed to the harsh realities of Jim Crow and the scope of the black condition in America. As she traveled with her father to church events across the South, Gordon encountered the same racial disparities that she witnessed in her own community. She wrote, “In travelling, I found thousands of people suffering under the same conditions as we.” It was during this period that she began to develop a deep sense of race consciousness, which only intensified after witnessing a lynching in 1898, two years after the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation. As Gordon later explained, “I saw a lynch mob of 1600 men pass my home when I was nine years old. They lynched this man, Will Streake, near Dorlean, Louisiana. Since that day I have been the most unhappy person that ever lived.”11 Her statements reveal the traumatic social impact of lynching in black communities and capture the lingering pain of those who witnessed racial violence.12
In 1900, at the age of fourteen, Gordon married Robert Holt, a bricklayer who was more than thirty years her senior, in Hampstead, Arkansas.13 Although the full circumstances remain a mystery, it is likely that her marriage was arranged by her parents—perhaps driven by economic necessity. Her marriage to Holt resulted in the birth of two children—Lucille and John. When Holt passed away in 1906, Gordon became a dressmaker in an effort to take care of her two young children.14 Her relocation to the urban North during the World War I era marked a key turning point in her life. Like many other black southerners who collectively resisted Jim Crow and white supremacy, Gordon headed North during the early years of the Great Migration.15 Sometime around 1913, she arrived in East St. Louis, Illinois, as a widowed mother in hopes of building a new life in the aftermath of her husband’s death.16 Her life was forever shattered in the summer of 1917 when the East St. Louis race riot erupted over labor-related conflicts and growing white resentment toward the rapid influx of black southerners.17
Although the specific details are unclear, Gordon’s ten-year-old son, John, sustained significant injuries during the riot, resulting in his untimely death shortly thereafter.18 Gordon offered no details on the matter in any of her personal writings—a likely indication that she did not want to recall the painful incident—but one can easily imagine that the riot sparked many intense emotions in the grieving mother. When Marcus Garvey delivered an impassioned speech in New York denouncing the riot, Gordon might have heard about it or read its transcript in a local newspaper.19 Describing the riot as “one of the bloodiest outrages of mankind” and a “crime against the laws of humanity,” Garvey called on black Americans to “lift [their] voice[s] against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.” “White people are taking advantage of blackmen,” Garvey added, “because blackmen all over the world are disunited.”20 Garvey’s powerful comments might have resonated with Gordon.
In the immediate aftermath of the riot, Gordon relocated to Chicago, joining thousands of other black residents pouring into the city. Since the late nineteenth century, Chicago—known as the “City of the Big Shoulders”—was a major commercial and manufacturing hub, providing an array of job opportunities in factories, stockyards, and railroad yards.21 As opportunities expanded in mass production during the early twentieth century, Chicago became “a city of migrants.”22 During the first wave of the Great Migration, which began in 1915, the black population in Chicago rapidly grew. In 1910, 44,000 black men and women resided in city. From 1915 to 1920, an estimated 50,000 black southerners migrated to Chicago in search of better job opportunities, primarily in industrial and domestic service and in an effort to escape the racial violence of the South.23 While Gordon and other new migrants in Chicago inevitably faced a host of social challenges, including many of the same ones they encountered in the South, urban migration still offered some glimmer of hope.
Abandoning the Jim Crow South, Gordon and other working-class “New Negro” migrants joined a thriving black consumer culture and intellectual community in Chicago.24 Shortly after relocating, Gordon married William, a fellow southerner.25 Born in Thomasville, Georgia, in 1873, William Gordon had worked as a farmhand in Florida until the age of eighteen, when a local railroad company employed him. He relocated to Chicago in 1918 and within two years was employed as a laborer at a local iron mill.26 Although it is unclear exactly how the Gordons met, the two married in 1920 and, three years later, began attending UNIA meetings located not too far from their home.27 Gordon noted that she had joined “every movement . . . that claimed to better [the] race’s condition,” but “I had a greater hope in the U.N.I.A., than any other movement.” Moreover, Gordon found Garvey’s message of African pride and black self-sufficiency appealing: “[Garvey] gave us light on Africa and taught us nationhood.”28
Wholehe
artedly embracing Garvey’s teachings, Gordon became an active member of the UNIA, quickly moving up the ranks. After only a few years, she was appointed “lady president” of a local UNIA division in Chicago. This position gave her the responsibility of overseeing the women’s division, but her authority was limited because women who served as lady presidents did not lead autonomously. In each UNIA division, the lady president was expected to answer to the male president, who had the final say and often amended women’s reports to the division at large.29 Notwithstanding its limitations, Gordon’s tenure as lady president provided a meaningful opportunity for her to hone her leadership and organizing skills and brought her into contact with hundreds of Garveyites.30 Moreover, the position provided an opportunity for Gordon to work alongside notable Garveyite women, including Amy Jacques Garvey and Maymie De Mena, who became Assistant International Organizer for the UNIA in 1926.31
Gordon’s leadership in the UNIA would be short-lived, however. In 1929, two years after Garvey’s deportation, Gordon attended the UNIA’s Sixth International Convention in Kingston, Jamaica, where she encountered male resistance to her leadership. Determined to advance black nationalist politics, Gordon set out to find other political alternatives in Chicago. Her restaurant proved especially crucial for her engagement in nationalist politics. In 1927, two years before she left the UNIA, she and her husband had opened up a small restaurant, conveniently located in the back of their apartment on State Street. What began as a delicatessen—selling a few carryout items—became a full-fledged restaurant in 1932 until it ran out of business in 1934.32 Though short-lived, the opening of the restaurant underscored Gordon and her husband’s belief in the value of economic self-sufficiency and black capitalism—central tenets of black nationalist philosophy. In addition to helping her build a livelihood, business ownership also bolstered Gordon’s engagement in politics.33 Similar to Amy Ashwood Garvey, who owned a London restaurant that became a central meeting space for Pan-African leaders during the mid-1930s, Gordon used her restaurant as a physical space to strategize and develop relationships with potential allies.34
Ashima Takis and the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World
During the early 1930s, Gordon used her restaurant as a central location for intellectual exchanges with a wide range of individuals, including a man who called himself Ashima Takis. Born in the Philippines in 1900, Takis, whose birth name was Policarpio Manansala, arrived in Chicago sometime during the late 1920s. Posing as Japanese, Takis spoke to local black residents at UNIA meetings in the city and across the U.S. Midwest.35 In 1931, UNIA leader Maymie De Mena invited Takis along with a few other Asian speakers to appear at various UNIA public events.36 It is unclear whether De Mena was knowledgeable about Takis’s actual ethnic identity. Takis later insisted that De Mena asked him to pose as Japanese, but given his tendency to misrepresent information, this claim was probably fabricated.37 Although the specific details are murky, extant records reveal that De Mena was largely responsible for Takis’s involvement in multiple UNIA divisions. Intent on convincing black audiences that the UNIA “was sponsored and encouraged by the Japanese government”—perhaps hoping to bolster the UNIA’s global political standing and to improve morale in the movement at a moment of uncertainty—De Mena enlisted Takis’s speaking services in Chicago, Cincinnati, and Columbus.38
Takis’s speaking tour coincided with a period in which the U.S. government had adopted several policies that excluded Asians from American citizenship and limited the number of Asian immigrants entering the country. The racist “yellow peril” ideology of the late nineteenth century, which stemmed from white fears and anxieties over Asian immigration, had persisted well into the twentieth century. Reflecting a pattern of anti-Asian policies—including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and 1907 regulation that barred the entrance of Japanese and Koreans from Hawaii—the U.S. government passed the 1924 Immigration Act that declared all Asians “racially ineligible for citizenship.”39 The global economic crisis during the early 1930s, which resulted in more competition over jobs and resources, served as a catalyst for rising anti-Asian sentiment in mainstream American discourse.
The negative images and stereotypical depictions of Asian cultures that dominated Western mass media mirrored the pervasive global racist attitudes toward African Americans. These similarities underscore how the historical experiences of peoples of Asian and African descent have been intertwined for centuries. Indeed, both groups have experienced racial oppression and as a result have collaborated to resist racism and discrimination.40 Following the abolition of slavery during the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of Chinese and Indian laborers were sent to work on sugar plantations in the Caribbean, including Trinidad, Cuba, and British Guiana (now Guyana). The manner in which Asians were brought to the Caribbean mirrored the kinds of experiences that Africans endured during the transatlantic slave trade. Under the trans-Pacific “coolie trade,” as it became known, Asian laborers were often transported to the Caribbean in the same ships that had once carried Africans and, in many cases, were captured and coerced into a life of plantation labor.41
Although Asian indentured servants were generally given contracts ranging from five to eight years, they had no guarantees that they would be able to return to their native lands. With no means of enforcing these contracts, many Asian indentured servants found themselves in a perpetual state of servitude with minimal financial compensation—if at all. The lack of economic and political power under a system of white domination and control mirrored the experiences of Africans under chattel slavery. These overlapping histories provided impetus for Afro-Asian solidarity as a revolutionary collective effort to challenge racial oppression throughout the diaspora. In nineteenth-century Cuba, for example, people of African descent joined forces with people of Asian descent to challenge the Spanish empire.42
In a similar vein, several black leaders in the United States during the twentieth century pursued collaborations with Asian activists in a unified effort to contest the global color line. Recognizing the shared historical experiences of peoples of Asian and African descent, civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois, UNIA leader Marcus Garvey, and others emphasized the significance of Afro-Asian solidarity as a viable strategy for combatting racial oppression. A number of earlier historical developments strengthened this point of view, including the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), in which the Japanese military defeated Russian warships. For Du Bois, Garvey, and many others, Japan’s military victories served as a symbolic triumph against global white supremacy. Years later, the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria reinforced some of these sentiments among certain members of the African American community. In September 1931, the Japanese military invaded Manchuria, initiating what would result in a brutal fourteen-year occupation of the country. While many disparaged Japan’s imperialist impulse, some praised the nation’s success in expanding its territory and influence.43 This was certainly the case for Takis, who began speaking in black communities during this period, strategically masking his Filipino identity and claiming to be Japanese.
It was during one of Takis’s speaking services in Chicago that Gordon first encountered the Filipino activist and, shortly thereafter, arranged for them to meet at her restaurant on State Street. During the meeting, Takis shared with Gordon his plans to establish the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World (PMEW), a pro-Japanese organization that supported the unification of people of color globally.44 Gordon found the proposition appealing but admitted that she was most intrigued by Takis’s support for black political self-determination and emigration. “I had already decided to go ahead with the [PMEW],” she later remarked, “after I found there was no hope of our going to Africa through the U.N.I.A.”45 Gordon and Takis collaborated in the months that followed, circulating an emigration petition in Chicago and later in Indiana, until their relationship began to unravel sometime in the fall of 1932. While FBI records indicate that the source of the conflict was financial, Gordon attribute
d the conflict to ideological differences.46 Recounting the course of events years later, Gordon insisted that she parted ways with Takis because he proposed emigration to Manchuria, then occupied by Japan, instead of West Africa.47
Gordon’s statements reveal the contradictory nature of her political ideas. On one hand, her collaboration with Takis offers a glimpse into Gordon’s global vision and growing interest in black internationalism. In fact, Gordon would later amplify her efforts to forge transnational solidarities with Asian activists and other activists of color from across the globe. However, her resistance toward Takis’s proposal also underscores Gordon’s early struggles to reconcile her Pan-Africanist vision with her desire to forge alliances with other people of color. Because of her affinity for Africa as the homeland of black people and her belief that emigration was a crucial step toward its “redemption,” Gordon maintained the view that Africa provided the only logical destination for people of African descent. While Gordon viewed Japan as a model and potential military ally, she was unwilling to support black emigration to Japan’s newly conquered territory.48 Finding little success in Chicago, Takis headed to St. Louis, Missouri, where he forged ahead with plans to launch the PMEW.
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