by Gerald Horne
In early 1943 a federal grand jury in East St. Louis indicted two leaders of the Peace Movement of the Eastern World on charges of sedition (as earlier discussed in chapter 3). David D. Erwin, a cook, and General Lee Butler, a janitor, were the designated culprits. Erwin was also listed as bishop of the allied Triumph Church of the New Age, which could fairly be described as broader in scope and membership than the PMEW, with which it was affiliated and which, in part, was designed as a transmission belt to propel Negroes into the PMEW. (The analogy was to the post–Nation of Islam Malcolm X, and his organizing both a political and religious arm.) They were accused of asserting that the “Pacific Movement should pay $1 a week to help Japanese soldiers” and seeking to “accumulate guns and ammunition to aid the Japanese when they invade the United States.” Moreover, they were said to have devised “passwords and signs” in league with the presumed invaders. The PMEW was national in scope and claimed sixteen thousand members.18 As often happens with conspiratorial groups, the passwords and signals were elaborate.19
By early 1942 Negro leaders in St. Louis described as “responsible” were alarmed by what they perceived as the rising popularity of the PMEW among African Americans. The doctrine that Negroes had no stake in the war and that, if anything, might be better off if the United States lost, was hardly a marginal viewpoint. Further south in Cairo and the Missouri boot-heel, large “secret” meetings of pro-PMEW Negroes were being held.20 William Pickens had heard “Negroes saying that the colored citizens of the United States should emulate the people of India” in boycotting the war effort or otherwise backing Tokyo.21
Apparently there was overlap between New Orleans and its upriver companion, East St. Louis, in that Boraster was said to have traveled to the latter city to preach a rigorously antiwar sermon. A police officer from East St. Louis attended a PMEW meeting on 11 July 1941 where he heard Boraster speak. There were twenty men and six women present, and the message was to avoid joining the military. “He said he would prove by his Bible and the Constitution” that “no dark race with 1/10 Negro blood in them would be compelled to serve in the war” and said “eventually the white race was going to devour itself” and “the colored race if they stayed out of the war, they would rule the world.” At a meeting two days later, Boraster was said to have “told people to buy guns for their protection in their homes.”22
Boraster also counseled the Negroes in the Land of Lincoln to “collect arms and ammunition.” The Reverend L. V. Huff of Mounds, Illinois, who defected from the PMEW, said that Takis—also known as De Guzman—also advised that Negroes arm themselves and “promised . . . free transportation in Japanese ships to Brazil for anyone who contributed to the movement $10 and a weapon.” Another defecting member pointed out that the PMEW had “international” linkages with the “dark and colored peoples of the world.”23
A contemporary observer concluded that the “spread of pro-Japanese propaganda among Negroes” had “caused quite a stir.” A leader of the moderate National Negro Business League asserted that the PMEW had been a “nightmare” for years. “Japanese, German and Italian agents were trying to stir up unrest among Negroes,” it was said, though Tokyo was in the forefront in this regard. Its slogan, “Asia for the Asiatics—Africa for the Africans,” had struck an anti-colonial chord.24 The influence of the East St. Louis-St. Louis axis was so pervasive that Mittie Maude Lena Gordon of Chicago was said to have become attracted to their form of sedition “while under the influence of secret activities in St. Louis.”25
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Perhaps the most insightful way to comprehend these defendants is as simply the leading edge of a broader phenomenon: alienation among bludgeoned U.S. Negroes combined with catering by Tokyo to this same community to propel an organized body capable of committing sedition, draft dodging, and the rest. Another aspect of alienation was espied in 1944 when three students at Howard University, the historically Black school in Washington, D.C., engaged in a suicide pact in order to protest unfair treatment of Negroes in the armed forces and the maltreatment generally accorded Negroes in the United States. One of these men—twenty-two-year-old Norman Spaulding—was also a champion tennis player.26 The defendants on trial chose not to pursue the path of suicide, but instead contemplated homicide. That same year there emerged the sad case of the Negro pilot Charles Ashe, who, his skills notwithstanding, could not find work; as had happened in the previous decade, there was apprehension that he would defect to the side of the adversary of the United States.27
Tokyo well knew that this lamentable state of affairs was the aching Achilles’ heel of Washington. Earl Brown, who went on to become an anticommunist city councilman from Harlem, noticed that in late January 1942 Japan “did a very strange thing. They broadcast through the Far East the story of how . . . in Sikeston, Missouri, an obscure American town,” a young “Negro named Cleo Wright had been seized by a mob and burned to death.” Tokyo, Brown asserted, knew that “there are millions of colored people, yellow and brown, who have had all the white man’s rule they ever want to see.” The “record of the white man’s relations with the colored man is so bad,” he said insightfully, “that it requires no particular skill to exploit it.” Coincidentally enough, U.S. observers on the scene reported that as “the British retreat got under way” in Burma, “killings of white people by natives began.”28
Coincidentally enough, Sikeston was in the vicinity of what had become a citadel of pro-Tokyo sentiment among Negroes: the Missouri boot-heel and the area stretching eastward to Cairo, Illinois, and northward to East St. Louis. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch lamented that the “Sikeston lynching has been widely exploited by enemy agents.”29 “Interracial conflicts have been said to have increased significantly since the war began,” complained one reporter, who added, the “Sikeston Lynching has not helped.”30 Publicizing this murder would not only discredit the United States in Asia but also sow discord at home among U.S. Negroes. Curtailing such outrages would improve U.S. national security.
Particularly in the early stages of the Pacific War, it was unclear as to who would emerge triumphant, and it was not unreasonable to suspect that the victor would be Tokyo. In that case, the Negroes tied to Tokyo would not have to worry about unemployment, unlike Ashe, nor fret about opportunities in the military, unlike Spaulding.
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In September 1942 federal authorities took into custody eighty Chicago Negroes, including, according to press accounts, members of the “‘Peace Movement for Ethiopia’, ‘The Brotherhood of Liberty for the Black People of America’ and the ‘Temple of Islam.’” They were said to be “appealing to the very ordinary element” among Negroes. The PME was reported to be “reminiscent of Marcus Garvey days,” while “members of the ‘Temple of Islam’ sported red fezzes as they stalked about the streets.”31 An editorialist reassured the nervously frazzled that there were “277,731 Negroes in Chicago,” whereas the scores who had been arrested were from organizations that contained “no more than 2000 members.”32
No amount of reassurance could erode the impact of these indictments. A number of the detained declared that they were “not citizens of this country but are Asiatics,” and should be grouped with Japanese. A dumbfounded observer noted, “they claim that their race was created first and from them stem the Japanese and therefore they are related to the Nipponese.”33
Mittie Maude Lena Gordon and her comrades stood trial, accused of seeking to foil enlistment of soldiers; she was said to have remarked on 7 December 1941 that “one billion black people” had just “struck for freedom” and “that the Japanese were going to redeem the Negroes from the white men in this country.” She was also said to have asserted that “the spoils of the United States would be equally divided among Hitler and the Japanese.” These comments, said prosecutors, were made to a “large number of individuals” assembled at a meeting of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia held at Boulevard Hall, 366 East 47th Street in Chicago. She reportedly told the audience that it was “im
possible for America and Britain to win this war” and that the PME “owe[d] no allegiance” to Washington in any case. “When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor they wrought vengeance against the United States” and, in any event, there was “nothing worth fighting for here.” Thus, “the only hope for the American black is Liberia” and they “were going back to Liberia regardless of whether they had to spill blood to do it.” Rather unfortunately, Gordon was reported as stating, “The greater the Japanese victories the less victims for us to deal with.” She pleaded not guilty to the charge of “intent to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny.”34
By then she was residing at 4451 State Street in Chicago and termed herself prosaically as a “housekeeper” and “unemployed for more than three years.” She also claimed that her spouse “has no money or property or income . . . except his Old Age Pension,”35 effectively refuting the notion of lush Japanese subsidies.
Her co-defendants—William Gordon, David James Logan, and Seon Emmanuel Jones—were accused similarly. William Gordon was said to have told Negroes that the PME would show them “how to build planes, tanks, submarines and battleships with which they could fight all white people like hell.” His spouse was said to have stated in June 1942 that she “had heard on the radio that half the people of India had joined up with Japan” and that “Seattle had just been bombed.” In August Jones reportedly averred, “now is the time for the Negroes to act; because if they wait until after the war, they will be back in slavery again; but if they act wisely, they will free themselves now and they will be free.” African Americans, he said, “should not fight the Japs because the Japanese are not fighting us [the Negroes]; that the Negroes should do their fighting here because the white man is their enemy.”36 The prosecutors did not see these words as protected speech under the First Amendment but, instead, dangerously seditious statements worthy of imprisonment.
Seon Jones resided at 3511 Wabash in Chicago and by the time of trial was fifty-one years old and working as a carpenter; however, he had not been employed since his arrest on 20 September 1942 (and even when he was working, his wage was a mere $5.20 per day). However, he had served in the British military, giving added credibility to his and his group’s assessment of the military capabilities of Pacific War combatants.37 He too endorsed Senator Theodore Bilbo’s legislation to resettle U.S. Negroes in Africa, terming it “wonderful,” the “best thing ever proposed favoring the black people of America.” The Dixiecrat was “not a Pharaoh,” he said generously, “but most graciously a Moses.”38
In the prelude to mass arrests in Chicago, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was told that “there is considerable activity and unrest among the Negroes in Chicago.” It was not just the PMEW and the PME but the UNIA, the MST, the Allah Temple of Islam, and others. There were “several meetings a week” of such groups with “in attendance 50 to 400 Negroes.” The gatherings were “very strongly pro-Japanese” and it was “stated that the Japanese are coming to America to free the Negroes” and those “Negroes who do not join their group will be killed by the Japanese when they conquer America,” an incentive to join the growing consensus. In fact, “some Japanese” had “been in attendance at some of these meetings held since Pearl Harbor.” There were “rumors, not yet verified that Japanese have been active in these groups during the past three months.” At a meeting of the precursor to the Nation of Islam, an “unknown Japanese” spoke “for approximately two hours urging the colored persons to work for a Japanese victory.” The worried FBI informant pointed to the “seriousness of the Negro situation in the Chicago area”; thus “the investigation as outlined above is being vigorously pursued.”39
The FBI believed that the man who came to be known as Elijah Muhammad asserted that “the Japanese will slaughter the white man” and “the Asiatic nation is prepared to destroy the white man.” “The Asiatic race is made up of all dark-skinned people,” he was reported to have declared, “including the Japanese and the Asiatic black man. Therefore, members of the Asiatic race must stick together. The Japanese will win the war because the white man cannot successfully oppose the Asiatics.” The authorities also believed that his organization was stockpiling weapons, including carbine rifles, and that such weapons were being “stockpiled in black ghettos in nearly every major American city.”40
Chicago’s Linn Karriem, also known as Linn Freeman, was said to have asserted that “members of the Temple of Islam should not go into the army” and “if a member of the Temple of Islam joins the Army against his instructions, he is sure to be killed.” Speaking publicly, he was cited for the proposition that “the devil [the white man] is lying about the number of Japanese ships being sunk” and “the devil . . . cannot defeat the Japanese.” Tokyo had “constructed a very powerful bomb which will be used against the devil” and “when the Japanese invade the country the Moslems should fall on the ground as a sign to the Japanese that they are not their enemies.”41
Ironically, as attempts were made to improve the material conditions faced by Negroes—often as a matter of happenstance, rather than intention—impetus was given to pro-Tokyo forces. For example, Dempsey Travis, who was quite conversant with Black Chicago, noticed during the war that “there now existed a thirst for black laborers” that had not been paralleled since World War I; as Euro-American workers departed for “cleaner jobs in the stockyards and for positions in the defense industry, blacks were pulled in as their replacements at Armour & Company as well as other industries.”42 This led some to think that widespread Euro-American apprehension of Japan buoyed this “reform,” thus contributing to pro-Tokyo sentiment among Negroes.
It was a slight step from this perception to the larger proposition that the war was beneficial to Negroes; this combined with the long-held companion notion that Japan was “champion of the darker races” helped to drive the idea that it was desirable that Tokyo should be bolstered so that the war could be prolonged. According to the Baltimore Afro-American, it was common wisdom that “colored races as a whole would benefit” from the Pacific War, a position that the FBI considered so outrageous that it considered an Espionage Act indictment in response.43
Yet the press was simply reflecting attitudes within the community it covered. Charles Newby, also known as Charles Lubby, was similarly perceived as seditious at a public meeting held in Chicago’s Washington Park on behalf of the Colored American National Organization. There assembled, said prosecutors, a “large number of persons” who heard him proclaim, “Negroes would fare better under the Japanese than they have under the white people” and that “the only good white man was a dead white man.” In fact, “the more white people [that] were killed in this war, the better chance the colored man would have to come out on top.” It was “to the Negroes’ advantage to side with the Japanese in its war” and “those Negroes who did not sit with the Japanese should have their heads cut off.” Tojo and Hitler were “the light of the world for Negroes” and Negroes “need not worry if Hitler or Tojo” prevailed; rather, they should “worry” about “Sam” (meaning “Uncle Sam”), for if the latter prevailed, “the Negroes would go back into slavery conditions worse than that which existed before Reconstruction.”44 Newby, who had served a term in prison in Leavenworth for stealing a car, threw caution to the winds—as did others—in tempting the authorities to imprison him again.45
As things turned out, Newby was a mistaken prognosticator, as a dynamic was created that was to lead to what was often called the “Second Reconstruction” and a step toward enfranchisement for Negroes. Yet because of the numerous lynchings and murders of Negroes, prosecutors were not able to dismiss Newby’s inflammatory words as a mere exercise in free speech, since there was reason for beset Negroes to take him seriously.
Joining with Newby at Washington Park was Stokley Delmar Hart, also known as S. D. Heart. “There is a common bond between the Japanese and the Negroes,” were his reported words, “because both are members of the colored race”; indeed, Tokyo “will lib
erate the Negro from the white man’s yoke” and “Tojo will be the savior of the American Negroes.” When Japanese forces invaded the United States, he advised aid to them. “Those Negroes who are not in his organization”—the CNO—“will be killed” upon the arrival of Tokyo’s forces. Hence, Hart’s “prayers to Tojo” were “answered by the bombing of Pearl Harbor.” Thus, “the Negroes’ only interest in this war” was “to seek a Japanese victory”; indeed, he insisted, “the Negroes’ freedom depends upon a Japanese victory.”46
As U.S. forces became bogged down in the Pacific basin, a “large number” of Negroes, said prosecutors, gathered at Bacon’s Casino in Chicago at 49th and Wabash Avenue, where they heard the words “God Bless Hitler.” Hart supposedly “did not want the [United States] to win this war” for that would “preserve race hatred and discrimination”; “he would rather wear the uniform of a convict” than a military uniform—a wish the authorities were keen to fulfill.47 Hart and his comrades exhibited a certain logic. When race hatred of Japanese was combined with that of Negroes during a murderously bloody war, it was easy to extrapolate in the way Hart did. And because he and others did not envision the impact of the alliance with Moscow on U.S. domestic fortunes, it is easier to comprehend why they failed to grasp the fundamental change that was soon to occur.48
Of course, Hart was joined in his subversive colloquy by others, including Frederick Harold Robb, alias Hammurabi Robb, alias Fidepe Robb.49 Reputedly born in Africa, Robb had studied at the University of London and earned a law degree from Northwestern.50 Intriguingly, after he was convicted, Edith Sampson—who became a chief anticommunist spokeswoman for the United States on the global scene after the war—pledged her extensive property on behalf of his bond.51 In a story replete with ironies, it is striking that a number of leaders in the NAACP orbit who to a greater or lesser degree had boosted Tokyo—Sampson, Pickens, Channing Tobias, Walter White, and others—and apparently saw some domestic value in doing so, after the war concluded proceeded with vigor and élan to savage those who were boosting Moscow because of like domestic considerations.52