by Gerald Horne
Negroes are not surprised at these turnabouts employed by the white Americans in evaluating and devaluating the Chinese and Japanese. . . . [Negroes] know that anytime white Americans praise colored people it is only a temporary move at best and furthermore, from actual experience Negroes know that the average white man is out to [feather] his own nest.35
That is, Chinese were now being hailed as allies and Japanese denigrated—but it would not take long, it was thought, for a reversal of fortune to occur. There was little surprise when during the war, Chinese students were allowed to study aviation at a Georgia university while Negroes were barred.36 While think tanks in Virginia were conferring with Chinese, Thais, Indians, and other Asians about Tokyo’s attempt to “promote racial friction between the white race and Asiatics,” Negroes, per usual, were being segregated invidiously.37 Such stances did not enhance patriotic cohesiveness during the war.
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In July 1942, as pro-Tokyo Negroes were under surveillance and under arrest, C. L. Dellums, chair of the NAACP Legal Committee and a trade union activist, felt compelled to address Walter White, the group’s leader. “Early last month,” he began, “several Day Coaches were filled to capacity with Japanese, most of whom were Americans and sent to San Antonio”; the cars were “not air-conditioned” and the detainees were “not . . . allowed to have any windows raised” as they “suffered terribly” for “four full days” before arriving at their destination. Yet “the guards, soldiers who went along with this trip, had a Pullman with every comfort. Even white people now are talking, [since] all restrictions were removed from not only the Italian and German Americans but Italian and German aliens.”38
Moving promptly, White told U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle, “I greatly fear that stories” such as that recounted by Dellums “could and would be used by the Japanese” to “create bitterness against the United Nations.”39 But this intervention had little impact on U.S. policy. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem warned that “race haters” were “fomenting dissension not only against Japanese Americans but against Negroes” too on the Pacific Coast with the aim of seeking to create a “white” coast cleansed of both stigmatized groups.40
Herbert Hill, a leading NAACP official, collected documents on the internment, perhaps alert to the precedent that it created for his constituency. His collection included a May 1943 “confidential” memorandum from the U.S. military on the Pacific Coast that conceded that “some suspension of the civil rights of the United States born Japanese” was occurring, but since it “was an orderly suspension,” it was presumably acceptable. The memorandum’s author asserted that “Axis propaganda was now wholly ineffective on this count,” an overstatement at best; thus, “if Japanese were returned to the coast there would doubtless be rioting and bloodshed with a consequent disorderly suspension of civil rights having the flavor of a race war” (emphasis in the original).41 In the language of the law, this was not only handing a “heckler’s veto” to those opposed to civil liberties but a murderer’s veto as well. Given this precedent, could Negroes be forced to evacuate from areas where certain Euro-Americans found their presence repulsive or even discomfiting?
The U.S. authorities argued that “because of their physical characteristics,” Japanese Americans “would be most easily observed, [far] easier than doubtful citizens of the Caucasian race, such as naturalized Germans, Italians or native-born Communists.” Left unsaid was that German Americans, for example, could operate more effectively by subterfuge precisely because of their “physical characteristics.” Again, Euro-American marauders were given a veto that carried ominous import for U.S. Negroes in that “violent anti-Japanese feeling among Caucasians of all classes” and “anti-Japanese agitation by the Yugo-Slav fishermen who frankly desire to eliminate competition in the fishing industry” were allowed to prevail.42
Not all U.S. conservatives backed the internment. Tellingly, George Schuyler, the doyen of Black Conservatism, viewed this abuse of civil liberties with skepticism and disgust, averring at one juncture that the internment was a “scheme to grab [Japanese American] holdings and hand them over to white people,” which was “shown by the efforts to prevent Negroes from taking them over.” Like Hill, he too thought that “this may be a prelude to our own fate. Who knows? . . . Once the precedent is established with 70,000 Japanese Americans,” it would be “easy to denationalize millions of Afro-American citizens.”43
Decades earlier, the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells had asserted that a motive force for the bloody crime that she fought was the desire of some Euro-Americans to eliminate business competition from African Americans.44 If this outrage against Japanese Americans were to hold, would not this jeopardize African Americans? Thus, in 1942—again, as Negro witnesses were being interrogated by a East St. Louis grand jury—a carpenters’ union in Long Beach sought to “amend” the U.S. Constitution so that “citizenship” of Japanese Americans could be revoked, that they “be forever barred from again becoming citizens and owning property” in the United States, and that “all such persons” be “deported to their Mother Country” at war’s end.45 Moving picture projectionists in San Diego made a similar initiative, except that, less delicately, it referred to “every Jap.”46 The applicability of such draconian measures to Negroes may have occurred to Herbert Hill, who retained this remarkable document.
In 1944 the Negro trade unionist Willard Townsend sought to save the jobs of fifty-nine Japanese American employees at the Illinois Central Railroad, their proposed sacking spearheaded by the segregationist Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, who maintained a Jim Crow policy against Negro workers too.47 The crusading Black radical attorney Loren Miller deployed his formidable legal skills on behalf of those slated for internment in Los Angeles.48
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Nevertheless, U.S. Negroes’ stance of solidarity with Japanese Americans was not as straightforward as it appeared. All along the Pacific Coast, as Japanese Americans were removed, U.S. Negroes from the Texas-Louisiana corridor particularly migrated to take their place; in Los Angeles, for example, “Little Tokyo” quickly became “Bronzeville.”49 A Negro woman took over a café formerly controlled by a now removed Japanese American.50 By May 1942 Augustus Hawkins, a prominent Negro legislator in Los Angeles, was being importuned to “prevent the importation of Mexicans to California to take the place of the Japanese truck growers who have been interned,” since now “the path has been smoothed for Negroes to enter that type of farming.” Claude A. Barnett huffed that elites might “prefer Mexicans” since “they can ship them back home when they get troublesome. ” He wanted Negroes to “leave the [urban] lights and go to the truck farms—as owners or workers”51 and expressed little concern for the interned.
As the internment was being launched, the prominent Negro entertainer Etta Moten insisted that “this is our country”; unlike many, she exhibited no sympathy for Tokyo or Japanese Americans: “The competition and rivalry for jobs which always existed with Orientals [sic] occupying many posts that normally would have been colored, neutralized any thought that the Japs belonged to the great area of colored races. In fact, the colored Californian knows the Jap well and intimately and frequently has not held him in the highest regard.”52
Of course, Moten was one of the more affluent Negroes and—as was enunciated as a rationale for eroding Jim Crow after the war—had a stake in the system, making her less susceptible to heeding the appeals of foreign powers, unlike many other Negroes. Moreover, there was a material basis for her view. By April 1942 the Negro press reported that “twenty colored students [per] day” had chosen to “register to replace Jap farmhands.”53
In mid-1944, when the NAACP branch in Los Angeles launched a campaign on behalf of evacuated Japanese Americans, it was not greeted with unanimous approval.54 “Negroes may lose most of Little Tokyo if Jap . . . freed” was a typical press account.55 Yet restraining these more unfortunate anti-Nisei attitudes was the idea peddled by Lo
s Angeles’s mayor, who advocated restraining the further influx of Negroes, which reminded those who had forgotten that there might be a larger foe to confront.56
Then there was the dilemma of Charles Williams, a Negro photographer in Los Angeles, who chose to be evacuated with his spouse of Japanese origin. He worked with the Negro periodical the California Eagle. In the morning of a spring day in 1942 an officer of the FBI knocked on the door of their abode with the aim of providing them orders that they be ready to depart by the evening. “All day Sunday in the colored district where many Japanese have been living for years,” according to one observer, “there were scenes of hasty moving.”57 Rather than face internment, the couple fled to Chicago.58 Williams and his spouse, Yoshi Kuwahara, resided there for years, and the photographer had to relinquish his chosen profession to work in a steel mill to support his family, which included a young daughter.59
The case of this couple was not unusual for Los Angeles: in Jefferson High School, where 64 percent of the student body was Negro, many warm relationships had developed between the students and their teachers, many of whom were of Japanese origin. These ties, said one reporter, were “closer than those with whites.”60
One commentator reprimanded “careless colored persons” in the City of Angels who “are occasionally overheard to praise the Japs, to express regrets for their confinement.” Many were “expressing confidence that they would not have harmed colored citizens had they invaded the country,” which was a rumored possibility in early 1942. The hand of the Black Dragon Society was detected in shaping these opinions, however. “There were Japanese schools in almost every colored section of the city,” it was said, with “one of the largest attended being in a large house at 23rd and Stanford. Just two blocks away there was another. Until a few months ago the big sign still remained,” it was reported in October 1943, “across the front in Japanese letters.”61
By January 1945 one observer in Black Los Angeles was reproving the “anti-Japanese American campaign” he saw unfolding, about which “the press which is generally so rabid and emotional on race issues has been strangely soft-spoken.” These “anti-Japanese Negroes,” he noted, “contrary to the general belief,” were “not ignorant and unlettered” but instead tended to “pack a powerful sentimental argument to justify their position. They point out that the present occupants of Japanese homes are good war workers, their sons are fighting and dying for America.” But this observer warned, “there is dynamite in that charge”; proponents “should stop and consider that Japanese sons are also dying for the ideals of democracy as are Negro sons.” Stunningly, “many prominent and so-called liberal Negroes have demonstrated anti-Japanese tactics.” Fortunes could be reversed once more and Negroes could easily find themselves in the near future imploring Japanese Americans to ride to their rescue. “Loyal Japanese Americans opened their doors to colored people indiscriminately when the best educated whites and Chinese were hanging out ‘no colored trade solicited’ signs.”62 But this sympathetic view contrasted with the furor that erupted when Negroes were ordered to depart from property owned by those of Japanese ancestry as the civil liberties panic eased.63
Seemingly, the influx of Negroes into the Far West was igniting dreams of further expansion. John Larremore of Seattle, who described himself as a “meta-psychologist,” pressed Senator Theodore Bilbo to arrange to send Negroes not to Africa but to “Sonora and Baja California” in Mexico, since they had a “desire to remove themselves as speedily as possible from close proximity to white people.” Ambitiously, he also desired the “relocation of all white citizens now residing in the state of Arizona as well as California from the Mexican border to a line drawn from San Luis Obispo on the coast to the Nevada line,” all of which “would be formed into a Negro Autonomous State known as Afro-America, a protectorate of the United States of America.” Though there would be no “exclusion” of Negroes from the United States or Euro-Americans from “Afro-America,” this move would “greatly increase the waning prestige of the United States.” The plan would be funded by “levying of a one cent tax on tobacco and liquors,” which would be “regarded as a belated payment to Negroes for more than two and a half centuries of unrequited toil and eighty years of semi-slavery.”64
Just as some white supremacists thought the desire for repayment of war debts by London and Paris could be leveraged into land for deported Negroes, Charles Wills of Chattanooga thought deporting Negroes to Mexico could be used as leverage for seizure of that nation’s oil interests.65 These nonstarters were nonetheless indicative of how the war had jumbled the chessboard, causing new and divergent—and not always progressive—thinking.
Still, in Jim Crow Virginia, Governor Colgate Darden was concerned with another kind of evacuation. He denied the existence of “Eleanor Clubs” aiming for the “wholesale evacuation from southern kitchens of Negro servants,” at a time when racial skittishness was soaring.66 This was an ironic complement to the Pacific Coast evacuation, with one feeding upon the other to create a cyclonic racial hysteria. In the short term, this phenomenon contributed to a remarkable spate of apprehension afflicting African Americans; as shall be seen shortly, this was notably the case within the U.S. military, which was not conducive to a military victory over Japan.
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In May 1942 an official report from Alexandria, Louisiana—locale of an important military base—pointed apprehensively to “racial disturbances” and “serious problems.” There was “three way friction” in such key sites generally, “between the whites, Southern Negroes and Northern Negroes. Southern Negroes resent the ‘high and mighty ways’ of the northerners of their race and are jealous of their better financial situation”—and, perhaps, resentful that their frequent reluctance to accept the unique folkways of Dixie complicated life unduly. Then there was unspecified “subversive activity” that “feeds on and is fomented by existing conditions”; this overall problem was “expected to become more dangerous rather than improve.”67
The U.S. military had been deluged with complaints, it was said, “from various members of Congress and citizens of various cities protesting the stationing of colored troops in their community,” which hardly placed these soldiers in the proper mood to head westward to confront Japanese troops.68 By June 1942, as the Pacific War hung in the balance, Major General George V. Strong reported that “race riots and cases of Negro disaffection have occurred at Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, Camp Davis, Fort Dix, Mitchel Field and in Alexandria, Louisiana which is near Camp Livingston, Claiborne and Beauregard”; worryingly, “most of these disturbances have been between Negro troops and white soldiers or civilians.” Inevitably, the Negro press was accused of “carrying numerous articles which might possibly foment discord between the races”; the Pittsburgh Courier, “reported to have a large circulation in this camp,” was singled out. It remained true that “the Negro press wields a tremendous influence among Negro troops,” as “76% of the troops read a paper of the ‘Afro-American’ chain, while 56% read the ‘Pittsburgh Courier.’”
Actual interracial “gun battles” were reported. Though the Communists were on the same side as Washington in the war, they were blamed for these worrisome conflicts while Tokyo, which had been engaged in a concerted campaign for years to influence Negroes, was exonerated. It was as if the latter was much too awesome to consider—or that the authorities realized instinctively and altruistically that while Tokyo merely jeopardized life itself, Moscow threatened something more important: property relations. “No evidence has been found of Japanese responsibility,” it was said with relief; anyway, “the 6.5% of the Negroes who favored Japanese rule” (it was unclear from where this figure was plucked) were not formidable, though there was a “fertility of the field in which the Japanese have been working.” Moreover, “the violent German racial propaganda of racial superiority has killed its ability to influence the Negroes,” it was announced with premature relief.69
Major General Strong’s words were conf
irmed by Major Bell Wiley, who went on to become a leading historian. He too stressed the “subversiveness of the press” and detailed numerous racial conflicts, particularly between Euro-American and African American soldiers. He focused on the “369th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Regiment originally from New York,” composed heavily of Negroes “who had served in Hawaii where they had been well treated by the natives and the nonbelligerent Japanese,” and there was “raised the question of whether the Japanese would . . . treat them better than the Georgians”—a query that probably could be answered affirmatively. It was in the Peach State that he found that “for several weeks” during the war “the Negroes surreptitiously collected weapons and ammunition” for a final conflict.70
Due south, in Florida, June 1942 found officialdom in Miami Beach reacting angrily to “rumors of possible colored squadrons being sent” there. “This naturally disturbed them,” wrote John Duff, president of the Miami Beach Hotel Association. “As you may know,” he confided to Major General Walter Weaver, “colored people have never been permitted to sleep on the Beach. To have colored troops occupy a hotel, or a number of them, would almost mean the end of those hotels when the war is over.” John McCloy, a member in good standing of the U.S. ruling elite and a principal figure in the internment of Japanese Americans, supposedly had assured that he “would do everything possible to see that colored troops were not sent there,” and now this solemn vow seemed to be disintegrating.71 Miami Beach was joined by Jackson, Mississippi. “We definitely do not want any Negro soldiers stationed in Jackson,” sniffed Mayor Walter A. Scott.72
In southern Arizona, the military brass reported in a secret July 1942 analysis that “we have the Negro problem definitely in our laps,” a reference to the “Negro riot at Tucson.” This prompted what could only be described as an “anti-antidote”: stricter racial segregation, or “absolutely segregated camps.”73 To prescribe a cure that was arguably worse than the illness and was worsening the underlying malady in a way that Tokyo would find worthy of exploitation was suggestive of the cascading hysteria that was warping sound thinking.