Ideological Foundations of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia
In the aftermath of her falling out with Takis, Gordon decided to establish her own organization, building on her prior experiences and drawing inspiration from several black political and religious movements of the period. In December 1932, Gordon held another meeting at her restaurant as she had done only months before. This time, however, she met with her husband, William, and a group of twelve other black Chicagoans and laid out plans for what would become the PME.49 This was a response to new developments nationally—including a presidential campaign that had just elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, promising a new era of government activism in the face of economic crisis. However, it was also an outgrowth of the experiences of Gordon and others in the new black-led political, religious, and social organizations that surged across the Midwest as elsewhere over the course of the 1920s.
According to Gordon, the process of arranging the PME’s first meeting was a rather difficult task: “[The] people had lost confidence in men after the defeat of the U.N.I.A., and refused to follow another man.”50 This was certainly an overstatement, but it exemplifies Gordon’s frustration with Garveyite men for what she viewed as their inability to effectively lead the UNIA. Gordon insisted that she only accepted the position after failing to locate a “strong man” to do the job, yet she had already secured her position as founder and president by planning, initiating, and facilitating the first meeting. Moreover, ten men were present at the PME’s founding meeting, including Gordon’s husband, William, who had also been active in the Garvey movement during the 1920s. Gordon’s suggestion that there were no “strong men” available, along with her apparent apprehension and attempt to underplay her own leadership role, was especially significant, however. It captured the struggle that many proto-feminists endured as they advocated for an expansion of women’s leadership roles while reinforcing traditional roles and expectations.
Despite these apprehensions, Gordon went through with plans to establish the PME, drawing inspiration from Garvey’s UNIA. The PME’s motto—“One God, One Country, One People”—was a rephrasing of the UNIA’s motto—“One God, One Aim, One Destiny.”51 Likewise, the PME’s official constitution reflected the same tone and language from Garvey’s 1920 Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World.52 For example, it underscored Garvey’s “race first” philosophy and strong commitment to emigration: “Our aim is to return to our motherland, to our true name, to our own language and to our true religion. Therefore, let Africa be free for Africans, those at home and those abroad. We believe in the National-Hood of all Races, and the right of all national movements.” To further reinforce the influence of Garvey’s ideas, Gordon included a short but significant clause in the PME’s constitution: “We freely coincide with [the] Nationalistic principles laid down by the Hon. Marcus Garvey.”53 With these words, Gordon revealed much about how she envisioned the organization; rather than pledging full allegiance to Garveyism, she chose instead to “freely coincide,” indicating an effort to draw some distance from Garvey.
FIGURE 5. Mittie Maude Lena Gordon. Earnest Sevier Cox Papers, Box 39, 1821–1973, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.
Further illustrating the black nationalist leader’s efforts to depart from Garvey’s UNIA, Gordon drew on the idiosyncratic Islamic teachings of Noble Drew Ali and integrated symbols of Ali’s MSTA into the PME’s official documents.54 Although Garvey’s UNIA was not directly affiliated with any church or religious organization, it did appeal to black churchgoers, and Garvey’s own Christian faith certainly influenced his beliefs. Garvey used religion and religious rhetoric to advance his “race first” philosophy. Moreover, he received considerable support from members of the African Orthodox Church (AOC), an international religious order that taught a blend of Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, and Garveyism.55 Established in 1921 by George Alexander McGuire of Antigua, the AOC generally attracted West Indians who were sympathetic to Anglicanism and others who embraced Roman Catholicism and the teachings of the Episcopal Church.56 While not a religious organization per se, the UNIA was closely affiliated with the AOC, and many of its members embraced a black reinterpretation of Christianity.57
Unlike the UNIA, the PME promoted a non-Sunni presentation of Islam. Emphasizing Noble Drew Ali’s teachings and the principles of the MSTA, Gordon encouraged her followers to “[trust] in Allah, [follow their] leader, and [look] East to Africa.”58 While there is no extant evidence to suggest that Gordon converted to Moorish Science, founding documents of the PME reveal that she certainly drew inspiration from many of Ali’s teachings. Founded by Ali, who according to tradition was born Timothy Drew in North Carolina in 1886, the MSTA held its first meeting in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913 but gained a significant following in Chicago during the late 1920s.59 Sometime around 1927, Ali established Temple No. 1, the headquarters of the MSTA, on Indiana Avenue on the Southside of Chicago.60 Given the close proximity of the MSTA’s headquarters to Gordon’s apartment, Gordon likely crossed paths with Ali. Advocating Islam as the true religion of black people and emphasizing an alternative identity, Ali taught his followers that they were “Asiatics” and “descendants of Moroccans” rather than “Negroes,” “blacks,” or “colored people.”61 Blending together elements of Islam, Freemasonry, Christianity, Theosophy, and Pan-Africanism, Ali published the Holy Koran (or Circle Seven Koran) in 1927, which maintained that African Americans—along with a host of other groups, including the Japanese, the Indians, and the Chinese—were “the descendants of Canaan and Ham and therefore the original Asiatic nations.”62
These teachings held sway with many black men and women during the post–World War I era—a period that witnessed a number of historical developments, including the relocation of millions of African Americans from the South to the Northern region, growing unrest in urban cities, and a global depression. Many black men and women, especially those residing in the urban North, envisioned membership in the MSTA as a way to distinguish themselves from their enslaved ancestors. According to MSTA doctrine, black people would not have been enslaved if they had rejected Christianity and honored the Islamic religious practices of their ancestors. Ali maintained the belief that he could alter the destiny of black people by erasing all ties to slavery and offering an alternative racial history and identity. Amid the political and economic upheavals of the period, these ideas served to bolster racial pride and certainly fueled hope. Within the black nationalist political milieu of the post–World War I era—no doubt influenced by the popular Garvey moment—Ali’s religious ideas gained currency.63 Not surprisingly, the two movements were closely aligned. Ali’s Holy Koran acknowledged Garvey’s UNIA as a forerunner to the MSTA.64 The two men maintained a cordial relationship during the 1920s, and in the aftermath of Garvey’s deportation, Ali envisioned the MSTA as a successor to the UNIA.65 During the early 1930s, the MSTA attracted many former UNIA members who certainly embraced this point of view.66
For Gordon, Ali’s teachings had particular appeal because they offered an alternative to mainstream Christianity, which she viewed as the religion of white oppressors. Though she did not require or even advocate for membership in the MSTA, Gordon used her weekly meetings as a forum to endorse Ali’s new Islamic ideas—a move that underscores the diverse religious and political thinkers from which Gordon drew. Along these lines, Gordon actively propagated the symbols and rhetoric of the MSTA. The PME’s letterhead, for example, bore the same Islamic symbols—the star and crescent—that appeared on Ali’s “Nationality and Identification Cards,” which he issued to his followers.67 Furthermore, at the weekly meetings in Chicago, Gordon and other PME leaders openly denounced Christianity and described Islam as the true faith of black people.68 As her husband, William, later explained, “We don’t have a connection with the Moslems but just believe in the Moslem faith.” “At our meetings . . . we talk about worshipping Allah,” William continued
, “[and] we also believe that Mohammed is the prophet of Allah, just like Jesus Christ was the prophet of God.”69 His comments underscore how Gordon and her followers formulated an ideology based on the Islamic teachings of Noble Drew Ali.
FIGURE 6. “Members of the Moors [Moorish Science Temple], a Negro religious group of Chicago, Illinois.” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library.
Even as she drew inspiration from Ali’s Islamic teachings, Gordon’s ideas were also informed by her own Christian upbringing, and she recognized the utility of Christianity in attempting to expand the reach of her political message and increase her following. Similar to Ali, Gordon appropriated the worship practices and “biblical tropes and characters” of black churches while claiming full allegiance to Islam.70 While indicating that the PME was “built . . . from a Biblical standpoint,” for example, the PME’s constitution included a clause that suggested its members believed in one God—“Allah, the God of the universe.” Throughout its pages, the PME’s constitution also included a number of well-known biblical verses such as Psalm 19:14—“Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in thy sight, O’ Lord my strength and my Redeemer.”71 Notwithstanding their support of many of Ali’s teachings and efforts to appropriate the religious leader’s rhetoric and symbols, Gordon and her followers did not adhere to the distinct rituals and practices of the MSTA. Members of the PME, for example, did not adopt the surname “Bey” or “El”—a common practice for Ali’s followers—or wear the Turkish fez, the MSTA’s official religious dress for men. For Gordon, the rejection of mainstream Christianity and promotion of Islam was both a religious and political move. By telling her followers to embrace an idiosyncratic ideology that fused Christianity and Islam, Gordon, like Ali, constructed a unique religious identity that defied mainstream religious expressions.72 Gordon’s propagation of Ali’s Islamic teachings functioned as a counterhegemonic response to white domination, and her organization provided a platform for blacks in Chicago and across the urban North to assert their political and religious agency.73
Rank-and-File Members of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia
The PME provided a crucial space for working-poor black men and women in Chicago to engage in black nationalist and internationalist politics during the economic crisis of the 1930s. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, many of these men and women were unemployed and struggling to make ends meet. As the nation sunk deeper into the Depression, Chicago faced a number of challenges. The city, which bore the full force of the Great Migration—with an estimated black population of 492,000 by 1950—economically collapsed.74 Only months after the 1929 stock market crash, Jesse Binga’s State Bank, the preeminent black-owned bank in the city, had been forced to close. By 1934, most of the residents in Chicago’s “Black Belt”—the predominantly African American community on Chicago’s Southside—were on government relief.75 Worsening conditions for black residents in Chicago and other Northern urban cities coincided with the declining influence of mainstream race organizations. During the early years of the Depression, Chicago’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and National Urban League (NUL) lost a significant amount of their funding from African Americans and white philanthropists. The lack of financial resources, coupled with changes to the local NAACP’s and NUL’s leadership, underscored these organizations’ instability and their inability to confront the growing problems of poverty in the city’s black communities.76
Around the same time that Gordon established the PME, the United States Communist Party (CPUSA) was beginning to gain traction in black communities across the country.77 The 1931 Scottsboro case, in which nine young black boys were sentenced to death after being falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama, became a significant recruiting tool for the party. Signifying the party’s commitment to eradicating racial injustice at home and abroad, Communists initiated a national and international justice campaign for the Scottsboro boys.78 The CPUSA’s growing popularity in various parts of the country, including Chicago, offered black Americans political opportunities in which to merge racial and economic concerns.79 Black women, in particular, found in the party a space in which to advance black leftist and feminist politics.80
Although the CPUSA provided a space for black women to engage in the struggle for racial advancement, the organization maintained a male-centered version of radicalism.81 Women’s roles were still limited in the predominantly white and male organization. Black women in the CPUSA functioned as “outsiders within,” never fully participating on an equal level with their white male counterparts.82 Gender politics, however, were not the only deterrents for some black women. Individuals like Gordon rejected Marxism, choosing instead to embrace black capitalism as a more viable political strategy. Similar to Garvey, Gordon and her followers maintained the belief that black economic development was possible within a capitalist system.83
Whereas some black activists during this period forged an idiosyncratic politics that drew on both Garveyism and Communism, Gordon and those who joined the PME viewed these two positions as ideologically incompatible.84 Writing in 1937, Gordon insisted that the sole purpose of the CPUSA was to “destroy any race-conscious movement” and prevent the establishment of an autonomous black nation-state. Within the context of the Great Depression era, which ushered in a period of intense repression of Communist organizing in the United States, Gordon’s words reflect a sense of distrust that some activists had for the Communist Left during this era—specifically, a fear that any Communist affiliation might bring unwanted attention and thereby hinder their political agenda.85 However, her rejection of Marxism and decision to remain distant from the Communist Left also capture the range of black radical politics during the Depression. Gordon’s PME provided a different avenue for black radical activists who were unwilling to affiliate with the Communist Left.
From the outset, the PME promoted a vision of Pan-African unity, appealing specifically to “black men and women whose hearts beat in unison with the race.”86 This is why Gordon chose to emphasize “Ethiopia” in the organization’s name. A common trend of blacks in the African diaspora, Gordon used the term “Ethiopia” to refer to all peoples of African descent. Rooted in the ideological underpinnings of Ethiopianism—race redemption ideas derived from biblical Ethiopia—Gordon’s use of the term in 1932 was symbolic. Significantly, the establishment of the PME coincided with the reign of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, who had been crowned two years prior.87 By her own statement, the reference to Ethiopia derived from the biblical verse Psalm 68:31, which reads, in part, “Princes shall come out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God.”88 Like many black nationalists before her, Gordon drew inspiration from the biblical verse, which served as a prophetic reminder of inevitable black redemption.89 This is exemplified by the PME’s installation ceremony script, which reads, in part, “I shall . . . to the best of my ability spiritually, mentally, and physically defend the cause of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia . . . and protect the morale of our members to the end that God’s divine purpose be accomplished in the ultimate redemption of Africa.”90 Gordon’s decision to include these words in the script signifies her belief in the message of Ethiopianism, her commitment to worldwide black liberation, and her steadfast belief that emigration would hasten the redemption of Africa.91
The height of Gordon’s PME coincided with the women’s peace movement of the period—a transnational effort to advance peace and nonviolent activism in the aftermath of World War I. Led primarily by middle-class white women reformers, the women’s peace movement provided a crucial public platform for women in various locales to agitate for pacifism and social reform during the twentieth century. Under the auspices of organizations like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the Women’s Peace Society, and the Women’s Peace Union, women in
the United States, Britain, and other parts of the globe employed a myriad of strategies and tactics intent on preserving peace and stability. Despite internal racial tensions in the movement that reflected the Jim Crow era in which it emerged, middle-class black women, including well-known black clubwomen Addie Hunton and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, found a space in the movement in which to advance their race work. As members of WILPF, Hunton, Dunbar-Nelson, and others forged interracial transnational alliances in their efforts to challenge racism and discrimination.92
Gordon may have drawn inspiration from the women’s peace movement of the period—even though she did not explicitly address the movement in her writings. Similar to women activists in WILPF and other groups, she and other leaders in the PME endorsed pacifism, calling on their members not to serve in the U.S. military.93 While their reasons for promoting this stance were far more complex, Gordon and other PME leaders emphasized the need for “peace and harmony” in the organization’s constitution. In later years, Gordon would also discourage her supporters from fighting in World War II. This was also consistent with various groups of the era, including Father Divine’s Peace Mission—an interracial religious organization that attracted a large following in the urban North in the 1920s and 1930s.94 Whereas Father Divine’s Peace Mission advocated pacifism in all contexts, Gordon’s PME endorsed pacifism insofar as it opposed the use of military force by the U.S. government and other white imperialist nations during this period. Gordon and her supporters recognized the significance of violence and military force in opposition to global white supremacy and racial oppression.
Set the World on Fire Page 8