by Gerald Horne
Robb was lucky to have Sampson in his corner; his many co-defendants were mostly left bereft after their predictable convictions. In contrast, when the man known as Elijah Muhammad appeared in court in Chicago to be sentenced, he was accompanied by a delegation of women garbed in brilliant red and green cloaks and outfits described as “burnooses.” They looked on impassively as he and his coreligionists were convicted. Previously when testifying, rather than taking an oath to tell the truth in the usual manner, these defendants stolidly faced Mecca and mumbled quietly, “I do.” An observer counted sixty-eight defendants.53
After the war and under drastically changed racial conditions, the Allah Temple of Islam was to emerge as a still existent Nation of Islam, while the others—the PME, the PMEW, and the like—either disappeared or had their ideas folded into a larger Black Nationalism of which the NOI was a chief beneficiary.
The man born as Elijah Poole, who came to embody the Nation of Islam, was jailed along with scores of others. However, for reasons relating to her authoritative influence—or simply male chauvinism—the sentencing judge was more expansive in addressing Mittie Maude Lena Gordon. She was a “shrewd, intelligent woman.” He complimented her “well composed” letters, since “their diction was as good as most of the people with whom I am acquainted.” She had “done an excellent job in self education.” But he was remorseless in castigating her for “trying to incite her people against the country of which she is a citizen.” Yet Judge William R. Holly made what was an amazing analysis for that era when he said, “I cannot impose the same punishment on a colored person, whom I have found guilty under the statutes involved in this case that I would inflict upon a white person who is guilty of the same offense.” In sum, the judge was conceding that Gordon—and presumably others—might have had reason to join with a foreign foe against white supremacy in a manner that would not apply to a presumed beneficiary of white supremacy. It was only a slight step from that realization to the recognition that, perhaps, eroding Jim Crow could cause even Gordon to shun the Tokyo of the future. She received two years’ imprisonment on a conspiracy charge and three years’ probation. Her spouse received three years’ probation.54 Charles Newby received a three-year sentence, a term similar to that accorded other Chicago defendants.55
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Downstate, in Springfield, the Moorish Science Temple was said to be proclaiming that “when the Japs take over this country, those belonging to this organization will not be molested.”56 Further south, in Jackson, Mississippi—which in its manifest horribleness was in some ways the fountainhead of pro-Tokyo attitudes among U.S. Negroes, spreading ripples northward to Cairo and East St. Louis—the MST was said by the FBI to be “organizing a local chapter among the Negroes and teaching them that the Japanese are fighting a war of liberation for the Asiatic race of which race Negroes are members.”57
Shockingly, Senator Bilbo was told that in neighboring McComb, Mississippi, in mid-1943, a total of 265 Negroes were “mowed down with machine guns after trying to get swell-headed.”58 Due east, in Richmond, Virginia, a Negro group was said to be “inspired by the Japanese and whose ultimate purpose was the overthrow of the white race.”59
Yet Jim Crow disciples thought they had reason to jeopardize national security by continuing to repress Negroes in the midst of war. In mid-1943 one correspondent, Charles W. Wade, wrote to Senator Bilbo of the “disgusting acts of Negro soldiers at Centerville [Mississippi],” who “openly stated they were going to clean out” the state, “causing grave concern among the white population here.” For “white domination must be protected and vigorously asserted. If the colored people all over the world should be organized by the Japs into a cooperative force,” he warned, “the entire white race will be in a hell of a fix.” Wade had “spent two years in the Philippines Islands” and knew that every inhabitant there “hates our white skin,” as “does every other yellow and black man and no amount of kindness and coddling will make them like us.” “The Jap side of [this] war is strictly a race matter,” he counseled, and “this Negro Question in the South, is not as local as the government wishes us to believe. It’s going to be a worldwide race movement” quite soon, “and you people who call the turns had better get your ears to the ground if you wish to continue to enjoy the advantages of white supremacy. I know that this letter sounds absurd,” he acknowledged, “but so should a story like Pearl Harbor two short years ago.”60
In some ways, white supremacists reacted to this conflict the way their ancestors had reacted 150 years earlier amidst the turmoil unleashed by the Haitian Revolution.61 In sum, there were those who thought that, as the saying goes, in order for everything to remain the same, everything must change. In other words, to perpetuate white supremacy, the African slave trade should be curtailed; or in order to perpetuate white supremacy and slavery, the harsh edges of Jim Crow should be softened. There were others, in contrast, who felt that advocates of white supremacy should dig in their heels in the face of a revolutionary and/or wartime challenge.
The incarceration of leaders apparently did not squash the sentiment they represented. In late 1944 the NAACP was told that a “combined committee of colored people and Japanese with headquarters in Chicago” was “working to upset things generally.” The NAACP was asked pointedly, “What is being done to counteract the harm that this may do to your own people”?62 The NAACP could have pointed vainly to the convictions in reply.
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As noted earlier, the St. Louis–East St. Louis region was perceived widely as being the bastion of pro-Tokyo attitudes among Negroes. There too leaders were charged with seeking to foment insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, and refusal to duty among Negro soldiers and sailors. They were accused of asserting that with the United States weakened by war with Japan, Negroes should seize the time and revolt in order to aid Tokyo and liberate themselves. This was expected to unfold during the first half of 1942. Given the attack on Pearl Harbor and the fall of Singapore, the idea that Japan would attack the U.S. mainland was not beyond the realm of possibility. Thus, PMEW members were told to stockpile weapons, among the “overt acts” cited to effectuate the conspiracy.63
The judge in the trial of David Erwin and General Lee Butler observed that a “large volume of evidence was admitted” against these defendants, though Butler contended that force and coercion were deployed by the FBI to extract damaging admissions. Nonetheless, the judge found that the defendants’ “unvarying purpose” was “to put the interests of the colored races of the earth above the interests” of Washington. Defendant Butler, said the judge, “in particular seemed to be obsessed with the idea of another race riot,” though it was unclear if this was a reference to what occurred in East St. Louis in 1917 or what was to come during the war in sites as diverse as Harlem and Detroit.64 The judge may have sensed the ongoing trend that eventuated in an estimated two hundred wartime racial clashes.65
Irrespective of the answer to this inquiry, exhibits in this case included Swiss rifles, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and “wooden dummy guns.”66 There were also undated photographs of Negro men in uniform drilling with what appeared to be weapons.67 Harrison Fair of East St. Louis, a PMEW member since 1934, was part of this military unit, also known as the Pacific Movement Legion. He was a major general, he told the court, and confirmed that arms were used in training.68 There were also brochures touting the virtues of “travel comforts in Japan,” including commodious hotels and railways.69
K. D. Branch of East St. Louis, a member of the PMEW since 1933, testified that by 1934 the group had a military unit that included five or six women. Though somehow he lost his sight at the beginning of the war, he admitted that the above noted brochures were his. He also owned books on shooting. He knew De Guzman or Takis, who, he said, sought to teach members the Spanish language. Still, the record reveals there was “some laughing” as he testified, given the circumlocution of his testimonial evasions.70 He was born in Louisiana and had a third grade educat
ion. The military unit he joined “used to meet every Friday night”; he had a “black uniform,” a “cap that was brown,” though he “dyed it black.” His unit had almost thirty-five members. The accusatory prosecutor replied, “You know a lot of members of the [PMEW] bought guns a year ago.”71
FBI agents testified that on 15 September 1942 they detained Butler as he “was beginning to cross the Eads Bridge” carrying “400 rounds of ammunition” that were “laying on the floor in the back of the car.” They said that he cursed them.72 With Butler was PMEW member Finis Williams. The authorities thought they had reason to believe that the men were on their way to blow up the bridge, which crosses the Mississippi River. Henry Bishop of the local police said, “We pulled them into the curb and I put my pistol on them and said, ‘police officers’, ‘put up your hands’ and both of them came out with their hands up.” He had received an anonymous tip about their intentions.73
On 18 December 1941 another local police officer, Edgar Sherrod, went to a PMEW meeting where, he said, a Japanese national spoke; he then trailed the speaker to St. Louis. He was asked how he knew this person was Japanese—as opposed to Korean or Chinese or Thai—but the clear impression was left that days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the PMEW was moving toward more active internal subversion.74
Frank P. Townsend of St. Louis, who had joined the PMEW in 1934, was then told that the group was “sponsored by the Japanese.” He served as both vice president and secretary before leaving in 1939. The peripatetic David Erwin, he said, had been recruiting in Mississippi and Oklahoma—and London. In Europe “he had met many representatives of the different dark countries of the world,” for example, “the Japanese, Chinese, Indians.” They pledged, he said, to “lend their assistance to straighten out affairs with the colored people in the United States.” Erwin also visited California and Mexico to confer with Japanese leaders, Townsend said. There was a local Japanese contact in St. Louis “who operated the Pacific Restaurant on Jefferson Avenue just a few doors north of the National Office Building. This Jap was named Benny.” There had been discussions about the PMEW colonizing U.S. Negroes in Brazil. Yes, Townsend said, the PMEW had “passwords and signs” for “protection of the colored people in case the Japanese ever invaded.” Though the PMEW had an affiliated religious grouping—the Triumph Church—Townsend was a member of a Baptist church in St. Louis.75
L. B. Huff, who joined the PMEW in Charleston, Missouri, and had ties to Cairo, Illinois, met Takis or De Guzman in Mounds, Illinois, in 1939. He too was told that this Filipino leader “was planning a colonization of the colored people in America in South America,” Brazil to be precise. “He said bring all [your] guns and pay $10.00 for transportation to New York” and “there we would get a Japanese ship and [it] wouldn’t cost anything to South America.” As for arms, he confirmed that Negroes were well supplied with “ordinary guns, shotguns and pistols.”76
A number of PMEW members were passionately interested in self-determination and self-governance. Sidney Winston of Tamms, Illinois, who had been a member since 1936, was intrigued after being told by Takis that “if we got a colony we could trade like other nations, not only with the Japanese but with the West Indies and France.”77 Winston had once resided, he said, along the “state line of Missouri and Arkansas,” though he was born in Jim Crow Alabama. He had fathered eleven children but as of 1942, sadly, there were “nine dead” for reasons that unfortunately were normative in Black America. He recounted a meeting in the winter of 1940 at Mounds, Illinois, where “something like 150” were present for a PMEW meeting. Takis/De Guzman was present and “said the other people had arms and the Negroes should have arms.” There was a PMEW military unit of twenty-five in Mounds and, yes, he had owned a “Winchester pump gun” since 1917, the year of the racist conflagration in East St. Louis.78
Takis or De Guzman confirmed the worst fears of Washington when he declared that the Immigration Act of 1924 was a “national insult and the American people are going to pay for it.” He said that “Japan had prepared for this war against the white powers ever since the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese war.” Takis saw the UNIA as an inadequate vessel for his purposes, necessitating the rise of the PMEW; he felt that playing on “dissension” between the two was the optimal course. He organized the PMEW in New York City from the ranks of both the UNIA and the MST, and “from the different Communist organizations.” He also recruited within the Ahmadiyya, a dissident Islamic sect that had attracted a number of U.S. Negroes too. His contested conclusion was that this sect was “controlled by Japanese disguised [as] Mohammad movement.” Takahashi, he said, was close to the highest levels of the Japanese Navy and well-positioned to transmit funds and messages from Tokyo. At every PMEW meeting, it was said, a collection was taken for a contribution to aid the cause of the Japanese military in China. There was also a “Hindu” named “Mangusta” working with the PMEW, and an African in Mounds, a “tall, skinny man. . . . he is a Captain or Lieutenant.”79
As the United States fought a determined foe in the Pacific War, concern arose that the home front was not necessarily invulnerable. Given the hellish maltreatment of U.S. Negroes, there was even more reason for concern, which was not allayed when testimony was given in open court about this group conspiring with Tokyo. Ultimately, the far-sighted among the U.S. ruling elite, in an agonizing reappraisal, came to realize that national security demanded and dictated that this maltreatment be at least eased.
6
Japanese Americans Interned, U.S. Negroes Next?
Did the PMEW plan to dynamite the Eads Bridge connecting St. Louis and East St. Louis in September 1942? Certainly the authorities thought so, though what may have been involved was simply militant grousing, a staple even now of African Americans and a frequent trait among oppressed peoples generally. Was the PMEW well-armed? Yes, though members while being grilled by prosecutors declared that the weapons were for hunting. Did the PMEW contain military units engaged in drilling? Yes, without a doubt. Was the PMEW suffused with pro-Tokyo sentiment? Yes, without a doubt. Was the PMEW alienated from the United States and, thus, looked askance at the Pacific War? Yes, without a doubt. Did the PMEW expect a Japanese invasion of the United States on 24 November 1942, two days before the Thanksgiving holiday? Yes, many members expected this. The U.S. authorities looked at these answers and decided that an abundance of caution dictated prison terms for PMEW leaders.
Especially damaging was the press report claiming that PMEW leaders had told their followers that instead of buying U.S. war bonds, Negroes should contribute to a fund for Japanese soldiers, which would be presented to them once they invaded.1
Simultaneously, the mass internment of Japanese Americans and the concomitant maltreatment of Negro troops in the United States itself was complicating mightily Washington’s war, especially in the early months of 1942, when the conflict’s ultimate trajectory appeared unclear.
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Before the trial of Butler and Erwin, on 22 September 1942 a federal grand jury was convened in East St. Louis in Room 238 of the federal building at 7th Street and Missouri Avenue. The prosecutor, Barry Blanton, was from Sikeston, site of an infamous lynching, and events there had helped to drive the initiation of this proceeding. This was not because there was a desire to capture the perpetrators of this heinous misdeed, but because there was concern over the level of “organization” among “colored folks” supposedly initiated by a “couple of gentlemen whose nativity is somewhat in question,” one of whom was Takis. There were, said Blanton, “two thousand members” of the PMEW in the Missouri boot-heel and the region ranging east to Cairo and Mounds and north to East St. Louis. “They had quite an organization,” he said with seeming admiration. “Organizing the darkies” was their chief priority, but since there were “8000 un-naturalized alien born people in St. Louis,” and among them were Japanese, this latter group was seen as their secondary priority. Blanton was especially interested in Tetsu Ueda, “sometimes known a
s ‘Thomas Uyada,’” who had been working at a St. Louis country club, a frequent haunt for Japanese agents seeking to pick up bits of intelligence dropped unknowingly by local elites.
Uyada was “on the pay-roll of the Japanese government,” said Blanton; “to show how well he had done his work, when we gave him this hearing, a large number of people including leading individuals” vouched for him, despite the fact that he often spoke to the “darkies,” as many as two hundred assembled. “They organized the darkies and built up the proposition that they were not accorded social equality.” The PMEW and its backers asserted that “the world was divided into just two classes, the white race and the colored,” in dramatic contrast to their ideological opponents, who represented a contrasting potent narrative—with global muscularity—who spoke of the ruling class and the working class or the capitalists and the proletariat. After the war, concessions were made to blunt and blur the former narrative while the latter articulators, who had stood with Washington during the war, were repaid by being battered into submission.
Uyada’s Japanese comrades had established a base of support in Sikeston, where “they made their homes” in Negro areas. “Sometimes [they] went around with colored women” and “they usually worked through a colored preacher.” Of course, they had “different passwords and hand shakes” for their underground work. Naturally, they “encouraged” the Negroes to “accumulate arms and ammunition.”2
This grand jury was a necessary precursor to the 1943 trial of Butler and Erwin. At the 1943 trial of PMEW leaders in East St. Louis, other than Erwin and Butler, a chief witness was Finis Williams, because he had been close to both. This railway worker too was from Mississippi and by the time of the trial was thirty-two years old. He was married, had two children, and had not been in the PMEW long before the detention of Erwin and Butler. He claimed that it was after Pearl Harbor that he and Butler began having “secret meetings.” The prosecutor asked him whether Erwin said, “It would not be long until the Japanese invaded and conquered the United States and everything the organization has been trying to attain would be accomplished”? The answer: “Yes sir, he said that” after Pearl Harbor. He was asked, did Erwin say, “He wouldn’t mind dying if he could carry ten or twenty white men with him?” Answer: “Yes, sir.” Did Erwin say, “After the Japanese had fought the United States for awhile and had weakened us then the Negroes in this country should rise up?” Answer: “That’s right.” And, yes, said Williams, “Butler said what damage he could do if he had about 40 sticks of dynamite to stick under the [Eads] bridge.”3