by Gerald Horne
In Evansville, Indiana, not distant from Dixie, a journalist reported that “sinister rumors of race war were circulated throughout the city.”40 In Jackson, Mississippi, there were resonant fears about what one observer termed the “sanctity of white womanhood” when Euro-American men trooped off to war, leaving, it was thought, more Negro men around with unfulfilled fantasies.41
In East St. Louis, Illinois, pro-Tokyo Negroes were accused in 1943 of attempting to blow up the Eads Bridge, which connected the city with the larger St. Louis, Missouri. Their “secret password” was said to be “BYB” or “Black, Yellow and Brown” people united against white supremacy. According to one observer, “arrangements would be made for colonization projects,” especially to Brazil, which already contained sizeable populations of Japanese and Africans, and “trade treaties” would be forged “between the two races after the Japanese had conquered the United States.”42
Dixie may have had reason to fret about the proliferation of pro-Tokyo sentiment among Negroes. A presumed “white southern moderate” during the war alleged that “like the natives of Malaya and Burma, . . . American Negroes are sometimes imbued with the notion that a victory for the yellow race over the white race might also be a victory for them.” In fact, according to historian John Dower, “in parts of the American South, fears among white people of a Japanese-Negro alliance were apparently fairly commonplace from the 1930s on.”43 The Pacific War involved for the most part an inter-imperialist rivalry, as Japan sought to displace European (and Euro-American) colonial powers in Asia and the Pacific, while Berlin, for the most part, attacked sovereign states. This often forgotten factor undergirded pro-Tokyo sentiment among U.S. Negroes, many of whom saw themselves as colonized too.
Of course, Dixie was not alone in apprehension. As is well known, there were ongoing Japanese efforts during the war to destroy oil installations in Southern California and to ignite forest fires in Oregon. There were plans for Japanese submarines—after Pearl Harbor’s devastation—to proceed to the West Coast for similar purposes.44
Ironically, Japan’s attack on colonialism, along with the racial challenge that it represented, may have inflamed passions even more. Lester Granger of the National Urban League maintained that “we tend to hate the Japanese more than the Nazis”—tellingly ratifying his perception by not referring to “Germans”—“because they are not of our race.” That is, it was harder to object to Japan’s project of overthrowing colonialism in Asia (as opposed to Germany’s project of overturning sovereignty in Europe). It was necessary to direct more anger at Tokyo in order to justify the heavy lift that was war. This was having a paradoxical impact on U.S. Negroes, who often had been conflated with Asians, and some of whom referred to themselves as “Asiatic.” Granger sensed that the hysterical racial chauvinism that was mounted against Japanese was creating a simultaneous backlash against Negroes, though there was a contrasting trend that sought to allay bigotry against domestic “minorities” in the United States in the interest of national security. There was a race between these two powerful trends.45
The Midwest and the South—and the routes followed by those migrating from the latter to the former—were prime recruiting sites for Negroes inclined to back Japan. Tracing the serpentine course of the Mississippi River from the Gulf heading northward in some ways tracks the violent persecutions inflicted upon Negroes, and sheds light on why so many were ready to throw in their lot with Tokyo. As shall be seen, East St. Louis, Illinois, and Elaine, Arkansas—restive sites of atrocious post–World War I pogroms against Negroes—were also factors helping to explain the growth of pro-Japan movements among African Americans. Mississippi had a well-deserved reputation as a hotbed of racist chauvinism, and as African Americans fled northward, they took their nervous apprehension with them, making them more susceptible to Tokyo’s appeals.46
It is fair to infer that Negroes looked to Tokyo not least to gain backing in the event of another pogrom. It is also fair to suggest that the Pacific War inscribed another chapter in a long-running story of Negro armed resistance in the United States.47
If racist rulers in South Africa and elsewhere had been able to consult with their counterparts in the Philippines, their fears would have been substantiated. Manny Lawson, a proud graduate of Clemson University in Jim Crow South Carolina, was captured by Japanese forces in the Philippines and was subjected to the horrors of the brutal Bataan Death March. As his group of once haughty Euro-Americans marched—defeated—past sullen Filipinos, he wondered about their “sympathy and loyalty. After all,” he mused, “we had been overpowered and captured by an enemy generally thought to be inferior. Defeated and humiliated, we had been on display as the inferiors. Had we permanently lost face?”48 The answer—generally and emphatically—was yes, not just in the Philippines but in countless sites where white supremacy had reigned theretofore.
***
This is a book about pro-Tokyo sentiment, particularly among Black Nationalists—for example, the precursor of the Nation of Islam; Marcus Garvey’s forces; the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World; the Moorish Science Temple; the Ethiopia Pacific Movement; and those within their orbit (notably the forces that arose in great number during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s, when it seemed that Tokyo would come to the aid of Addis Ababa).49 Though this book is principally about the response of Black Nationalists, it would be a mistake to view the ideological tendency they have represented as the sole vector of pro-Tokyo sentiment. Instead, they should be viewed as a vanguard force—the leading but not the sole detachment—instead of the exclusive repository of this sentiment. These Black Nationalists were in the forefront. They were the advance guard, the spearhead. They were the trendsetters, the groundbreakers, the opinion molders. However, they were not alone in their fondness for Tokyo. They were able to influence many others.
The fact is, as shall be seen, some of the most fervent pro-Japanese views came from those like the NAACP leader William Pickens, a notorious fan of Tokyo.50 “Think how these Japanese work!” he enthused to the influential P. L. Prattis of the Pittsburgh Courier in 1934. Yasuichi Hikida had come to visit him and “had with him a copy of every editorial I have written on Japan and the Japanese question,” all “mounted on paper—evidently from some PERMANENT FILE,” he stressed, “perhaps Hikida’s own file.”51 Five years later, Pickens was saluting Tokyo’s occupation of Manchuria. Using the Japanese name for this territory, he argued that “Manchukuo in near future has a much better chance for practical as well as technical freedom in the near terms, than has Abyssinia,” then languishing under Italian rule.52 Pickens was among those who were not keen on backing another world war in any case; in 1940 he encountered “intelligent” African Americans who purported to be “happy and hopeful ‘because those white folk are killing each other off’” in Europe.53
Indeed, the ideological tendency in Black America that was most immune to Japan’s charms—the Communist Party and those allied with this group—was precisely the tendency that received the most adamant and resolute opposition from U.S. rulers, which in a sense helped to further bolster pro-Tokyo stances. (A similar trend operated in racist South Africa.) This book is only coincidentally about pro-Negro sentiment in Japan. In sum, this is a book about trans-Pacific racism—not “racisms.”54 That is, this book only incidentally concerns the pre-1945 chauvinism that was so prevalent among the Japanese ruling elite.
This is a book about the acceleration of “Afro-Asian solidarity,” a tendency that preceded the rise of Japan,55 but assuredly this trend attained warp speed in the decades leading up to the final surrender on the battleship Missouri in 1945. This book is also part of a larger argument that I have made over the years, that because slavery and Jim Crow—and the malignant attitudes both embodied—were so deeply entrenched in U.S. society, it required external forces, global currents, to alter profoundly this tragic state of affairs.56
This is a book about the roots of “Afro-Asian solidarity,” which
manifested most dramatically when anti–Jim Crow forces in Dixie creatively adapted the doctrine of “passive resistance” honed in India.57 However, the taproot and flowering of this capacious phenomenon can be traced to the tie between Black Nationalists and Tokyo during the interwar years—or, perhaps, even back to the eighteenth century, when settlers in North America feared that Japan, then in self-imposed isolation, was mustering thousands of hard-bitten troops to invade this continent in solidarity with Native Americans.58
***
The conflation of Negroes and Japanese was aided by the subordination of the latter, notably along the Pacific Coast, in the years leading up to 1941 and the fact that both groups were barred from the hallowed halls of “whiteness.” This conflation could also be found in the popular genre of science fiction.59 The revulsion by Euro-Americans toward Japan was so pervasive that even the “Yellow Peril” character Dr. Fu Manchu, though ostensibly from China—a nation with which Tokyo had warred repeatedly—was often interpreted in the United States as being Japanese.60
It remains unclear how many people were enrolled in the PMEW, the Allah Temple of Islam (which became the Nation of Islam, one of the sturdier Black Nationalist formations), and the other pro-Tokyo groups.61 However, it is fair to suggest (as shall be seen) that they were more popular among U.S. Negroes than their primary ideological competition—those enrolled in the Communist Party.62
For example, in December 1942 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover estimated that in Detroit alone “the combined membership at the peak of these movements,” referring to the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World (PMEW), the Moorish Science Temple (MST), the Eastern Pacific Movement, the organization of the late Marcus Garvey, and others, “was around 15,000.” They were, it was said, “actively engaged in an underground pro-Japanese movement.”63 The membership of the Moorish Science Temple in Detroit alone, according to the FBI in 1943, was “estimated at between four and five thousand.”64 Overall, according to the FBI in 1944, there were 30,000 believers in the MST, “with 11,000 of them in the Chicago area,” which was hardly minor given that there was pervasive “Japanese infiltration” of their ranks.65
In the early 1940s a St. Louis journalist reported that several thousand had joined the PMEW there and “tens of thousands elsewhere.”66 The Black Dragon Society of Japan, the assumed sponsor of many pro-Tokyo Negro groups, was said to have “100,000 followers ready to take up arms in support of a Japanese assault upon U.S. shores,” according to the FBI.67 In Detroit, Satokata Takahata, a former officer in the Imperial Japanese Army and member of the Black Dragon Society, had a U.S. Negro spouse, Pearl Sherrod, and they were the motive force behind the group The Development of Our Own, which partially shared roots with the Allah Temple of Islam of the same city: one press account said that “at one time” TDOO “claimed more than 20,000 members.”68 In 1943 a judge in the case of pro-Tokyo defendants in East St. Louis said of the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World that “at its peak” the “membership” was “more than [one] million.”69 Extraordinarily, claimed one observer, “there were about 10,000” members of the ultra-patriotic Black Dragon Society of Japan residing in California “prior to Pearl Harbor.”70
Of course, it is probably more appropriate to look at these figures as suggestive of the inflamed state of mind of the assessors, afflicted by a guilty fear of retribution. That is, reflected in these assessments is nervous recognition of how atrociously wrongheaded the maltreatment of U.S. Negroes had been and thus how ready they might be to take up arms against the government that had betrayed them and ally with every foreign foe. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to dismiss peremptorily the extent of pro-Tokyo sentiment among U.S. Negroes.
It would be similarly foolhardy to downplay the influence or the ambitions of these groups. First of all, they were taken seriously by Tokyo in that officialdom paid close attention to such important issues as the number of African Americans in the military; the racial breakdown of various states; rates of Negro illiteracy and mortality, as well as lists of “influential Negro leaders” and “important Negro publications.”71
Robert Jordan, a leader of pro-Tokyo Negro forces, told Tokyo that “we the dark race of the Western Hemisphere through the Ethiopia Pacific Movement . . . are putting our entire confidence in the Japanese people with the hopes that in the very near future, we will desire a very close relationship with the Japanese government.” On his stationery a Japanese national was listed as the group’s “chief business advisor.”72 Jordan claimed that he had served with Tokyo’s maritime fleet and had been an agent of Tokyo since 1922; like others in this movement, his comrade James Thornhill had been a UNIA member, while others had roots in the Caribbean.73
One reason for the difference in membership totals between Black Nationalists and Black Communists is that even during the war, when Moscow and Washington were allied, certain authorities seemed more preoccupied with monitoring Communists than pro-Tokyo nationalists. Certainly this was the case in Alabama, where a “confidential” 1943 report from the State Council of Defense detailed CP activity among Negroes and had nothing to say about pro-Japan forces, even though the CP and the Council were presumably sharing the same trench.74 This was all the more remarkable given that the local press in Montgomery tried to caution that the main danger came not only from the “Yellow Peril” but also from a “White Peril,” that is, Berlin and Rome.75 Perhaps Communists were perceived as presenting more of a systemic threat than pro-Japanese forces, who at worst threatened mere lives and did not necessarily threaten the all-important capitalist system. It is also fair to infer that in the war’s aftermath, the concentrated focus on Black Communists helped to uplift their major competitor for the title of champion of a radical reworking of the republic: the Nation of Islam most notably.
Seeing the Pacific War as a “race war” may have helped to motivate a number of Euro-Americans (and their racial comrades in Africa too) to make the ultimate sacrifice for their homeland, but it did not seem to have a similar impact on their “colored” brethren. During the height of the war the Harlem Bard, Langston Hughes, reminded Black Chicago that “the same America that for generations has mistreated the Negro, lynched him, Jim Crowed him physically, humiliated him spiritually, packed up all the West Coast Japanese citizens (I didn’t say aliens—I said citizens) and put them in concentration camps.”76 Hughes’s fellow writer Richard Wright concurred with the idea that U.S. Negroes and Japanese Americans were in the same rickety boat.77 Likewise, Hughes and U.S. Negroes generally were in the forefront of those raising pointed questions about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.78
This concern was not unilateral. Grave concern was expressed at diverse levels in Japan about the sorrowful plight of U.S. Negroes. Among pro-war factions in Tokyo, this concern was utilitarian in that it was felt that such expressed sympathy would translate into pro-Japan sentiment among Negroes with potential far-reaching consequences during war. But even antiwar activists of the left in Japan also expressed sympathy for the oppressed of North America, making the cause of the U.S. Negro exceedingly popular across the ideological spectrum in Tokyo. It was claimed in Tokyo that it was routine in Negro homes to see displayed portraits of both Abraham Lincoln and Baron Nobuaki Makino, whose proposal for racial equality in Versailles after World War I was seen as a step forward not only for Japanese but for U.S. Negroes too.79
***
In some ways this is an abortive history, in that it focuses on the tremendous amount of pro-Tokyo rhetoric among U.S. Negroes, which was translated into meaningful action only intermittently. But this rhetoric had consequences, as the dissembling of Malcolm Little suggested: after all, he was not conscripted, and thus was unavailable to fight U.S. foes. There were other U.S. Negroes who also were Muslims who were indicted as “draft dodgers” during the war, though the precise number is unclear.80
Retrospectively, it is not easy to gauge the impact of threats by pro-Tokyo Negroes on those who were not as enamored
with the cause. Apparently, Robert Jordan, a premier pro-Tokyo Negro, had assailed Walter White of the NAACP and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. as “Dumb American Negroes” who were slated to be “beheaded” because of their unwillingness to break with Washington. An FBI agent claimed that he had attended a party in the home of one of Jordan’s comrades, where “the guests cheered radio reports of [Tokyo] victories.”81 It was hardly reassuring when the mainstream press published lurid accounts during the war of “weird human sacrifices and strange blood rituals” that were “practiced by fanatical members of the [Tokyo]-directed ‘fifth column’” among Negroes.82
One scholar has suggested that Tokyo aimed to recruit spies among “American Negroes,” a massive force of largely disgruntled citizens, many of whom had a special axe to grind.83 This was a common view among many Negroes during the war. “The present Pacific movement and the Ethiopian movement,” wrote one Negro journalist in 1943 of two of the principal pro-Tokyo groupings, “both are outgrowths of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA.” In fact, “Japanese spies took full control of the organized mass through their paid Filipino and radical Negro-West Indian henchmen,” both driven by anticolonial fervor. Tokyo’s main agent among Negroes, Satokata Takahashi, “photographed and diagrammed many sections of the United States, in company of various Negro women, of whom he was exceptionally fond”; his “lavish gifts of cash with which he was abundantly supplied won for him innumerable naïve, Negro feminine companions. . . . The American Negro has always been the focal race in Japan’s bid for alliances with darker races of the world.”84