While many race leaders openly denounced the bill and its controversial author, black nationalist men and women found it to be a glimmer of hope. Amid the social and political upheavals of the period, Bilbo’s controversial Greater Liberia Bill stirred long-held nationalist aspirations of establishing an autonomous black nation-state on the African continent. For black nationalists like Florence Kenna, the Greater Liberia Bill represented a viable step toward improving the social conditions of black men and women in a world deeply divided by the color line.4 In Kenna’s political vision, black emigration would serve a twofold purpose: to provide a means for black men and women to escape their second-class citizenship status in the United States and to increase their political power on a global scale. The Greater Liberia Bill, then, was a welcome proposition for black nationalists who maintained this point of view.
During this period, a cadre of black nationalist women leaders, including Mittie Maude Lena Gordon and Ethel Waddell, emerged as key proponents of the Greater Liberia Bill, publicly lobbying for its passage at the local and national levels. Similar to Marcus Garvey, these women leaders were willing to work in tandem with white supremacists on the basis of their mutual interest in racial separatism.5 Unlike Garvey, however, black nationalist women during the 1930s relied heavily on the support of white supremacists and played a far more proactive role in fostering these relationships in hopes of attaining their political goals.
Though controversial and paradoxical, this decision to collaborate with white supremacists was neither irrational nor haphazard. To the contrary, through these collaborations with seemingly unlikely political allies, black nationalist women sought to influence the direction of national and global public policy. At the same time, their collaborations were acts of performance that were shaped by historical convention.6 During a period of Jim Crow segregation and black disenfranchisement, these women activists were cognizant of their positions as outsiders in a white-dominated and patriarchal society. As such, they envisioned alliances with influential white male supremacists as a means to bolster their cause and secure federal legislation to improve conditions for blacks in the United States and across the African diaspora. An exploration of black nationalist women’s political collaborations with individuals like Senator Bilbo reveals the pragmatic and strategic steps, negotiations, and compromises that activists were willing to make in order to advance black nationalist and internationalist politics during a global economic crisis.
Liberia in the Black Nationalist Imagination
During the 1930s, many black nationalist men and women maintained a utopian vision of Liberia as a haven for black men and women throughout the diaspora. Viewing the United States as irredeemably racist, these men and women championed black emigration to Liberia in their writings and speeches. “Our condition is growing worse each day,” Mittie Maude Lena Gordon wrote in a 1934 letter to a political ally, “and our only hope is to go back to our own country, AFRICA.” “We want to go to this part of Africa[:] LIBERIA,” she quickly added.7 On the pages of Madame Maymie De Mena’s newspaper, the Ethiopian World, black nationalist men and women engaged in lively discourse on Liberia, grappling with its significance for the future of the black race and encouraging readers to rally in support of the nation. A gifted journalist and experienced political activist, De Mena had established the Ethiopian World in 1934 after a short stint in Father Divine’s Peace Mission.8 Appealing to black nationalists in the United States and other parts of the globe, De Mena pledged to provide “clean, constructive, fearless and progressive journalism that will help the race to find its true and noble place among the other great races of our common human family.”9 In order to help advance the race, De Mena envisioned emigration as a viable solution. She believed that relocation to Liberia would simultaneously help black Americans and improve conditions in Liberia.
In a 1934 speech to Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) supporters in Harlem, De Mena also encouraged the resettlement of black Americans to Liberia in light of that nation’s political turmoil.10 In 1930, Liberian President Charles D. B. King and members of his administration became embroiled in an international scandal surrounding charges of slavery and political corruption. The conflict, which had reached a boiling point during the late 1920s, began many years earlier in 1914 when Liberian officials made an agreement to provide contract labor in Fernando Po, a small island in the Gulf of Guinea. By the start of World War I, the Spanish colony had a shrinking labor force with an increasing demand for labor on the island’s cocoa plantations. Based on the terms of the agreement, laborers from Liberia were expected to work in Fernando Po for one to two years and receive compensation at the end of their term. From the beginning of the agreement in 1914 to 1927, thousands of Liberian laborers were sent to the colony. However, after a series of developments, including questionable recruitment practices and financial constraints, Liberian officials proposed to end the flow of workers to the Spanish colony in late 1927.11
In the subsequent months, Liberian officials faced increasing international scrutiny over their labor practices, resulting in an investigation by the League of Nations. Critics accused the Liberian government of condoning modern-day slavery as others questioned the ability of the nation’s leadership to rule effectively. Though members of the international community focused primarily on Liberia’s involvement in the scandals, deplorable conditions on the Spanish colony also played a key role.12 The charges of slavery and political corruption that were leveled against Liberia negatively impacted many black Americans’ view of the nation. In the aftermath of the scandals, many black Americans lost faith in Liberia as a potential haven for black people.13
However, for black nationalists, the problems in Liberia only bolstered their interest in the nation by confirming the need for black emigration. In a poem entitled, “Liberia,” written after the Liberian scandals, PME member Albert McCall emphasized the need to establish an independent black nation in Liberia to alleviate some of the nation’s social problems: “Liberia, Liberia, here we come / Sound the bugles and sound the drums / We are coming to build up a government . . . / We will build up a government like they have here; / Because [there is] nothing but trouble makers on every hand.”14 Deploying civilizationist rhetoric, McCall appealed to black men and women in the United States, noting, “You are the men and women that Liberia needs / And we’ll make an army of men like you / I am sure all of you have agreed, / To go back to Liberia to live / Where you won’t have to be lynched and killed.”15 McCall’s comments simultaneously capture his Pan-Africanist vision and his assumption that Americanization would fundamentally improve conditions for Liberians. Writing in the Ethiopian World, De Mena expressed similar sentiments: “In spite of whatever assurance the League [of Nations] may give in their final decision on Liberia, the inspiration of National service and self sacrifice must continue to be numbered by our people everywhere. The call is to ask the youth all over the world to make it a duty . . . to utilize the opportunity which now presents itself for greater and more useful service to your race.”16
Other black nationalist leaders appealed to black youth across the African diaspora to take up the cause of aiding Liberia in its time of need. Charles Mitchell, who served as U.S. ambassador to Liberia, challenged younger UNIA members at a meeting in Harlem to take advantage of emigration opportunities: “Liberia . . . is the land of opportunity [especially] for young people with adequate financial backing.”17 Similarly, members of the Harlem-based African Reconstruction Association (ARA)—a relatively small nationalist organization established during the early 1930s to “promote and encourage immigration and colonization into undeveloped areas . . . of Negro nations”—called on young black Americans to support nation-building efforts in Liberia.18 The organization’s leaders, Harlemites Bernard Mason and W. A. Ramsey, emphasized the economic opportunities for black men and women in Liberia and requested help to “colonize 50,000 or more Negroes there.”19 Laced with paternalist undertones,
Mason’s and Ramsey’s statements further demonstrate nationalists’ view of Liberia as a country in complete disarray and desperately in need of black Americans to come to its aid.
Significantly, Mason, Ramsey, and other ARA leaders continued to envision emigration to Liberia as the primary means of uplifting the black race generally. These activists emphasized emigration to West Africa as the most viable means of racial progress on a global scale.20 Members of the ARA, for example, laid out their case for emigration in the pages of the Ethiopian World, pointing out the need for a physical home for peoples of African descent: “The program of finding a home by immigrating and assisting in developing the Republic of Liberia is [our] only aspiration.” “Losing possession of the land and control of natural resources,” they continued, “we have become a poverty-stricken, unprotected people, merely engaged in a struggle with empty hands against tremendous odds for recognition.”21 Establishing a black nation-state in Liberia, they reasoned, was the ultimate solution.
In a weekly meeting of the ARA, black nationalists in Harlem gathered to listen to Liberian doctor S. S. Sesvir, who argued that African Americans could earn a substantial living by engaging in agricultural work in Liberia.22 Writing in a 1934 newspaper article, Lloyd Graves, a member of the ARA, insisted, “Liberia is the land of opportunity. . . . Some day we will be glad to go there, knowing there will be no more jim-crowism, no more segregation, no more lynching and brutality cast upon our people, knowing that we will be respected by men as men.”23 Garveyites Peter M. Easley, Leroy Edwards, and S. Campbell expressed similar sentiments in a pro-emigration petition, which emphasized the prospect of relocating to a country that seemed to offer financial stability for black Americans during the Depression.24 With limited job opportunities and minimal federal relief, Cora Lee Frazier, a member of the PME, lamented, “I have 5 children [and] I don’t see any future for them here . . . I have always wanted to be free. If we stay here we will all go to [nothing].”25 Another black resident from Washington, D.C. added, “We are tired [of] beg[g]ing for jobs and home relief . . . we want to go to Africa.”26
What is especially striking is that black nationalists imagined Liberia as a place of wealth—not the country steeped in millions of dollars in debt as it were. Perhaps this point of view resulted from a lack of knowledge regarding Liberia’s economic conditions, wishful thinking, or a little of both. Still, the vision of Liberia as a place of wealth offered some hope for black nationalists during an economic crisis in the United States. Expressing this highly romanticized view of Liberia, black nationalist Albert McCall declared in one poem, “There is fruit in Africa worth while eating / We don’t have to stay here and take a white man’s beating.” He went on to emphasize Liberia’s alleged thriving job market, insisting that “Liberia has many towns, where work can easily be found.”27 W. E. Johnson, a graduate of Howard University’s Dental School, lent his support to black emigration, arguing that “Africa offers great opportunities for us.” Reflecting the civilizationist rhetoric in black nationalist discourse, Johnson added, “We could bring about trade relations with America etc. . . . If we remain here we must apply for relief, charity [but] if we go to Africa we can solve our problem.”28
McCall’s and Johnson’s descriptions were exaggerated, and conditions in Liberia were far different from what they imagined.29 In reality, the Great Depression of the 1930s had devastating economic consequences for Liberia, as it did for other nations across the Black diaspora. During the Depression, Liberia’s financial debt grew rapidly as international demand for Liberian rubber and other exports declined.30 However, by envisioning Liberia as a haven with unlimited possibilities, black nationalists found an escape, if only imagined, from both the reality of life for black men and women in the United States and the real socioeconomic challenges in Liberia. This utopian vision, along with a desire to improve the lives of African descended people, strengthened black nationalists’ resolve to advance black emigration during the social upheavals of the 1930s.
Allies on the Outside and Rivals Within
The rise of Jim Crow in the United States coincided with the rise of a racial caste system that swept across the globe. The United States was very much a part of constructing this racial caste system as much as it was a product of it. The U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 exemplified the process by which the United States exercised territorial, economic, and political control over people of color.31 The American policies in Haiti were certainly not unique. To the contrary, these policies exemplified a larger pattern of U.S. foreign relations during the twentieth century and, indeed, much earlier.32 They also reflected a larger system of global white supremacy that was not particular to the United States.
The global color line, which W. E. B. Du Bois first described in a 1900 speech at the Pan-African conference in London, appeared to be fixed in place despite the persistent struggles and protest movements that emerged in the United States and abroad.33 At its core, the global color line—which described both European colonialism in Africa and Asia and U.S. expansionism in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and other countries—was deeply rooted in the eugenicist thinking of the day.34 These beliefs influenced many Europeans and Americans of the twentieth century to conceptualize race as both biological and overly deterministic and provided these individuals with a justification for discrimination, racism, and global imperialism.35 Many black men and women also accepted this form of racial thinking, albeit in different ways. Black elites such as Du Bois eschewed racial determinism, while black nationalist leaders like Garvey maintained essentialist views, glorified blackness, and emphasized the importance of racial separatism, racial purity, and self-determination.36 In the same vein, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, Maymie De Mena, and other black nationalist women during the Depression era embraced a biological conception of race and advocated for racial separatism and black political autonomy.37
During the mid-1930s, Gordon initiated a massive letter-writing campaign aimed at attracting support from powerful whites who also embraced biological conceptions of race and championed racial separatism. In 1934, one of her letters arrived on the desk of Earnest Sevier Cox, a white supremacist from Richmond, Virginia. An author and explorer who had traveled extensively throughout the African continent, Cox was an avid proponent of black emigration, maintaining the belief that it was necessary for “racial purity.”38 His first book, White America, published in 1923, championed white supremacy, calling on white Americans to “preserve ethnic purity, for upon his shoulders was the burden of civilization and progress.” In 1924, Cox’s popularity began to expand as his book drew the attention of white supremacists and, unbeknown to him at the time, black nationalists in Richmond and across the country.39 In September of that year, after hearing Garvey speak at a local event, Cox became a UNIA supporter, embracing Garvey’s pro-emigration message. In the ensuing months leading up to Garvey’s 1927 deportation, Cox maintained consistent correspondence with Garvey and worked closely with numerous Garveyite leaders across the country.
When she launched her letter-writing campaign in 1934, Gordon strategically targeted Cox. In four detailed pages, Gordon laid out for Cox her case for emigration to West Africa. First, she described her efforts to obtain 400,000 signatures for an emigration petition, which she mailed to FDR in 1933. She went on to assure Cox that although the U.S. federal government had denied her request for financial support, she had obtained “assurance that the governments of [Liberia and Ethiopia] would welcome mass immigration of American Negroes.” Convinced that she might be able to persuade the U.S. government to release New Deal funds for black emigration, Gordon appealed to Cox to lend his support to her organization and her cause: “We ask you, therefore, to take up our appeal.”40 Impressed by Gordon’s “dignified and moving petition to the President of the United States,” Cox eagerly accepted the invitation.41
Interestingly, once Cox expressed a willingness to support Gordon’s plans, the tone of Gordon’s letters shifted drast
ically. Moving from a rather neutral tone in her initial letter, Gordon’s subsequent letters took on a more submissive tone, which underscores her attempts to coax her new white ally. Now addressing her new ally as “my dear Mr. Cox,” Gordon skillfully asserted, “Let me give expression to my heartfelt gratitude for your continued interest in the welfare of our people. Please be assured that your benevolent attitude will spur us on to greater effort and greater hope in its ultimate success.”42 In a subsequent letter, Gordon continued to praise Cox, noting, “Words are inadequate to express our appreciation . . . accept my personal thanks together with the great appreciation from all our good and humble members, for the kind interest you are showing on our behalf.”43 Gordon’s statements to Cox, as well as the tone in which they were expressed, capture the activist’s concerted efforts to secure a new political ally through a series of performances.44 Gordon’s change in tone and description of her supporters as “good” and “humble” reveal, among other things, a conscious attempt to perform an act of submission and deference to white male control.
FIGURE 10. Earnest Sevier Cox. Earnest Sevier Cox Papers, Box 39, 1821–1973, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.
Gordon’s strategy worked. In return, Cox appeared especially eager to offer advice and direction, clearly moved by Gordon’s apparent admiration. “No one could receive a higher compliment than you have paid me,” Cox noted. Responding to Gordon’s initial letter, Cox went on to outline a list of steps for Gordon to take to secure federal support for emigration plans. In addition to contacting the American Colonization Society (ACS), Cox advised Gordon to make arrangements to see FDR, seek endorsement from the Liberian government, and work toward an emigration petition through the Virginia General Assembly.45 However, Gordon was two steps ahead of Cox—she had already attempted to obtain support from FDR and had initiated a letter-writing campaign directed toward Liberian officials months prior. In her response to Cox in September 1934, Gordon offered him thanks for his suggestions but carefully explained her own attempts to secure Liberian support through a series of letters sent to politicians in Cape Palmas. After acknowledging her failed efforts to obtain support from Edwin Barclay—who assumed the Liberian presidency in 1930—Gordon made one request to Cox: “It would be a great move if you succeed in getting President Barclay of Liberia to send his approval of our petition to the President of the United States.”46
Set the World on Fire Page 14