138. Established in 1921 by Antiguan George Alexander McGuire, the African Orthodox Church was an international religious order, which taught a blend of Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, and Garveyism. The church generally attracted West Indians who were sympathetic to Anglicanism and others who embraced Roman Catholicism and the teachings of the Episcopal Church. See Richard Newman, “The Origins of the African Orthodox Church,” in Black Power and Black Religion: Essays and Reviews (West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1987).
139. “Fred A. Toote Takes Stand in Convention,” Negro World, September 7, 1929, in Hill, Marcus Garvey and the UNIA Papers, VII:327.
140. Hill, Marcus Garvey and the UNIA Papers, VII:315–17.
141. Kenneth Barnes, Journey of Hope: The Back to Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1880s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
142. John McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 34; Claude A. Clegg, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); Allan Yarema, American Colonization Society: An Avenue to Freedom? (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2006).
143. Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 21–22.
144. Barnes, Journey of Hope, 3–12; James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York: Penguin, 2006).
145. Barnes, Journey of Hope, 2.
146. Mary G. Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 24, 26. Also see Claudrena Harold, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918–1942 (New York: Routledge, 2007).
147. Mittie Maude Lena Gordon’s Statement to Richard W. Axtell and James E. Conerty, September 21, 1942, Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Investigative Files on the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, File No. 100-124410, RG 60, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
148. George McCray, The Universal Negro Improvement Association: As an Expression of Caste and Class Relations in a Negro Community (unpublished work), Box 57, St. Clair Drake Papers, 1935–1990, Schomburg Center for Black Research, New York, N.Y.
149. Statement from Mittie Maude Lena Gordon to Richard W. Axtell and James E. Conerty, September 21, 1942, Records of the FBI, Investigative Files on the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, File No. 100-124410, RG 60, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
150. Amy Jacques Garvey to Hilbert Keys, April 5, 1944, Amy Jacques Collection, Box 1, Charles Blockson Collection, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pa.
Chapter 2
1. Brief History of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia to President Roosevelt Pamphlet, March 1939, Reel 243, American Colonization Society Records, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
2. McCray, The Universal Negro Improvement Association.
3. Anonymous informant, June 19, 1942, Chicago, Ill., Records of the FBI, Investigative Files on the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, File No. 100-124410, RG 60, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
4. Taylor, “Street Strollers,” 153–71. Taylor’s conceptualization of “street scholar” mirrors an “organic intellectual.” See Antonio Gramsci, “The Formation of the Intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 134–47.
5. Taylor, “Street Strollers,” 155.
6. Mittie Maude Lena Gordon to Earnest Sevier Cox, October 27, 1939, Box 5, Folder 2, Earnest Sevier Cox Papers, 1821–1973, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.
7. Gordon to Cox, October 27, 1939, Box 5, Folder 2, Cox Papers.
8. Katharine L. Dvorak, An African-American Exodus: The Segregation of the Southern Churches (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1991).
9. Gordon to Cox, October 27, 1939, Box 5, Folder 2, Cox Papers.
10. Tunde Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 92, 99.
11. Gordon to Cox, October 27, 1939, Box 5, Folder 2, Cox Papers.
12. Koritha Mitchell, Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Anne P. Rice, Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
13. Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1900), Ancestry.com subscription database, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed April 24, 2012).
14. Gordon to Cox, October 27, 1939, Box 5, Folder 2, Cox Papers.
15. James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Joe William Trotter Jr., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions on Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). On African Americans’ involvement in World War I, see Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Chad Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
16. Gordon to Cox, October 27, 1939, Box 5, Folder 2, Cox Papers; Statement of Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, September 21, 1942, FBI Investigative File No. 100-124410, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
17. Harper Barnes, Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Walker, 2008); Charles L. Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008).
18. Cook County, Illinois Death Index, 1878–1922, Ancestry.com subscription database, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed October 28, 2011).
19. Marcus Garvey, “The Conspiracy of the East St. Louis Riots,” in Ain’t but a Place: An Anthology of African American Writings About St. Louis, ed. Gerald Lyn Early (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1998), 300–306.
20. Garvey, “The Conspiracy of the East St. Louis Riots,” 300–301, 306.
21. Davarian Baldwin, “Making the Black Metropolis: African Americans in Chicago, 1910–1985,” in African American Communities (London: Adam Matthew Digital Ltd., 2015).
22. Baldwin, “Making the Black Metropolis.”
23. McDuffie, “Chicago, Garveyism, and the History of the Diasporic Midwest,” 5; Wallace Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 19.
24. Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
25. Gordon to Cox, October 27, 1939, Box 5, Folder 2, Cox Papers.
26. United States of America v. Mittie Maud Lena Gordon, Reply Brief for Appellants, Box 34, Cox Papers. On William Gordon’s genealogy records, see 1920 U.S. Federal Census, Ward 6, Cook County, Chicago, Ill., Ancestry.com subscription database, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed October 28, 2011).
27. United States of America v. Mittie Maud Lena Gordon, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Reply Brief for Appellants (Prepared by Attorney Lloyd Bailey), Box 34, Cox Papers. Statement of William Green Gordon, September 20, 1942, FBI Investigative File No. 100-124410, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
28. Gordon to Cox, October 27, 1939, Box 5, F
older 2, Cox Papers. On Moore, see McDuffie, “ ‘I Wanted a Communist Philosophy,’ ” 181–95.
29. Bair, “ ‘Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands unto God,’ ” 41, 45.
30. Some of the largest UNIA branches were located in Chicago. See Martin, Race First, 17.
31. Duncan, “Efficient Womanhood,” 121–22.
32. United States of America v. Mittie Maud Lena Gordon, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Reply Brief for Appellants (Prepared by Attorney Lloyd Bailey), Box 34, Cox Papers.
33. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), 51.
34. Matera, Black London, 100–144.
35. Ernest Allen Jr., “When Japan Was Champion of the ‘Darker Races’: Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism,” Black Scholar 24 (1994): 23–46.
36. Robert A. Hill, The FBI’s RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States During World War II (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 517, 523–24.
37. Hill, The FBI’s RACON, 523.
38. Hill, The FBI’s RACON, 517; “Dayton, O. Div. Is Reorganized,” Negro World, February 6, 1932; “Ethiopian Club,” Negro World, January 2, 1932.
39. Erika Lee, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian Exclusion in the Americas,” Pacific Historical Review 76 (2007): 537–62; Eiichiro Azuma, “Japanese Immigrant Settler Colonialism in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands and the U.S. Racial-Imperialist Politics of the Hemispheric ‘Yellow Peril,’ ” Pacific Historical Review 83 (2014): 255–76; Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
40. Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 3.
41. Walton Look Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies 1806–1995: A Documentary History (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1998); Ho and Mullen, Afro Asia, 3.
42. Ho and Mullen, Afro Asia, 45; Also see Kathleen M. Lopez, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
43. Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 72–75.
44. United States of America v. Mittie Maud Lena Gordon, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Reply Brief for Appellants, Box 34, Cox Papers; Ernest Allen Jr., “Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932–1943,” Gateway Heritage 15 (Fall 1994): 38–55.
45. United States of America v. Mittie Maud Lena Gordon, Reply Brief for Appellants, Box 34, Cox Papers.
46. Hill, FBI’s RACON, 524.
47. United States of America v. Mittie Maud Lena Gordon, Reply Brief for Appellants, Box 34, Cox Papers.
48. Allen, “When Japan Was Champion of the ‘Darker Races,’ ” 28–29; Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, 18–30.
49. Peace Movement of Ethiopia Constitution, 14.
50. Gordon to Cox, October 27, 1939, Box 5, Folder 2, Cox Papers.
51. Peace Movement of Ethiopia Constitution, 2.
52. William L. Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 24–29; “UNIA Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,” New York, August 13, 1920, in Hill, Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, II:571–80.
53. Peace Movement of Ethiopia Constitution, 2–3.
54. Michael Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 212–13, 230.
55. Gomez, Black Crescent, 68, 72–73.
56. Newman, “The Origins of the African Orthodox Church.”
57. Martin, Race First, 70. Garvey also drew some of his ideas from black Muslims. See Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 81–86. On the religious dimensions of Garveyism, see Randall Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement: The Institutionalization of a Black Civil Religion (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978); Burkett, Black Redemption: Churchmen Speak for the Garvey Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978).
58. Quoted in PME Report, May 28, 1942, Exhibit No. 53, FBI Investigative File No. 100-124410, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Also see D. S. Kemp Bey to Gordon, April 7, 1933, Exhibit No. 227, FBI Investigative File No. 100-124410, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
59. This biography of Ali is based on Moorish Science tradition. However, historian Judith Weisenfeld’s research reveals that Ali’s real name was likely Thomas (rather than Timothy), and he was likely born in Virginia and not in North Carolina. See Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 46–47.
60. Ali initially established the Moorish Holy Temple of Science in 1923 and later renamed it the Moorish Science Temple of America in 1928.
61. Turner, Islam in the African American Experience, 92.
62. Turner, Islam in the African American Experience, 93.
63. Turner, Islam in the African American Experience, 93.
64. McDuffie, “Chicago, Garveyism, and the History of the Diasporic Midwest.”
65. Edward E. Curtis IV, “Debating the Origins of the Moorish Science Temple: Toward a New Cultural History,” in The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions, ed. Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 82. Michael Gomez points out that Ali may have also been a member of the UNIA. See Gomez, Black Crescent, 211.
66. Elijah Muhammad, who became one of the founders of the Nation of Islam, was one of Noble Drew Ali’s followers. See Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas, eds., Preaching with Sacred Fire: An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 378.
67. Charles Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Trenton, N.J.: African World Press, 1994), 48.
68. Peace Movement of Ethiopia Constitution, 3.
69. Statement of William Gordon, September 20, 1942, FBI Investigative File No. 100-124410, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
70. Gomez, Black Crescent, 210, 213, 230. On Noble Drew Ali’s teachings and links to mainstream Islam, see Curtis, “Debating the Origins of the Moorish Science Temple.”
71. Peace Movement of Ethiopia Constitution, 12–13.
72. Turner, Islam in the African American Experience, 78; Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming, 19. For a gendered perspective on the MSTA, see Marcia Chatelain, South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), chap. 2.
73. Gramsci, “The Formation of the Intellectuals.”
74. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine, 19.
75. Douglass S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 116.
76. Erik Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Black Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 21.
77. Other communist-affiliated radical groups attracted black men and women during this period. The most significant was the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a relatively small leftist group of black intellectuals and activists. Established in Harlem in 1919, the ABB had an estimated eight thousand members during its peak. See Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 45.
78. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and Af
rican Americans, 1917–36 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998); Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007); Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
79. On communism in Chicago, see Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928–1935 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
80. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 3–4; Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads, 12.
81. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 46.
82. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 21.
83. On Garvey’s view on Marxism, see Marcus Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, or Africa for the Africans (Dover, Mass.: Majority Press, 1986), 69–70.
84. A number of scholarly works have debunked the strict black communist/nationalist dichotomy, underscoring how activists often embraced both ideologies. These include Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998); McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom; Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads.
85. Black women faced a number of reprisals for allying with communists. See LaShawn D. Harris, “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party During the Great Depression,” Journal of African American History 94 (2009): 21–43.
86. Peace Movement of Ethiopia Constitution, 4.
87. Indrias Getachew, Beyond the Throne: The Enduring Legacy of Emperor Haile Selassie I (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Shama Books, 2001); Harold G. Marcus, Haile Selassie I: The Formative Years, 1892–1936 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Theodore M. Vestal, The Lion of Judah in the New World: Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the Shaping of Americans’ Attitudes Toward Africa (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2011).
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