by Gerald Horne
Yet with the formal declaration that Jim Crow was no longer the law of the land, pro-Tokyo Negroes in disarray and pro-Moscow Negroes under fire, the idea was rapidly disappearing that continued external pressure would be necessary if such retrograde views were to disappear. It was then—once again ironically—that Negroes deeply influenced by M. K. Gandhi and New Delhi arose to fill the resultant vacuum in the person of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., confirming the still (sadly) contested proposition of the importance of global trends for U.S. Negroes—not to mention opening yet another chapter in the illustrious story of Afro-Asian solidarity.82
8
Aftermath
It was February 1965 when the man who had come to be known as Malcolm X was shot in Manhattan. Cradling his head as he expired was the Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama.1 The assassination came in the wake of sharp conflict between the New York–based minister and more traditional forces.
In 1963 Revilo Oliver, a harsh critic of the Nation of Islam, had written disparagingly of Elijah Muhammad’s arrest during the war (“the Messenger of Allah was finally discovered hiding under his wife’s bed wrapped in a carpet”). After this abrupt dismissal, Oliver pointed out accurately that the group’s “spectacular growth did not begin until May 1954,” with the juridical attack on Jim Crow and the concomitant attack on activists like Paul Robeson, which created an ideological vacuum that was filled by the Nation.2 The man once known as Malcolm Little had risen and fallen in this vibrant context: from dodging the draft in order to evade fighting Japanese forces to becoming a resonant symbol and organizer for the group that became the Nation of Islam, fixing the group’s identification firmly with a rising Africa, then—in a sense—coming full circle: slain at the behest of erstwhile NOI comrades while being cradled in his final moments by a woman of Japanese origin.
After being abandoned by a prostrate Tokyo, Black Nationalists in Malcolm’s old faith continued to refer to themselves as “Asiatic” officially and in inner sanctums, but it was Malcolm who had led the way to nationalists’ renewed identification with Africa, where they remain to this very day. Indeed, now—tellingly—they often see themselves as “blacker than thou,” more resolute and uncompromising in their asserted alignment with the “motherland.”
Beginning with the Scottsboro case in the 1930s and for the next few decades, left-led organizations like the Civil Rights Congress had led monumental struggles against Jim Crow, but by 1956 the CRC had been compelled to liquidate.3 In contrast, the group with which Malcolm X had been associated in his heyday, the Nation of Islam, had survived and flourished in the postwar era, despite the imprisonment of its leader, Elijah Muhammad.
In 1957 members of the Nation of Islam marched for seven hours in Harlem protesting a police beating of one of their members and impressing onlookers with their discipline and fortitude. A journalist noted that “they believe that in the days of antiquity, all Negroes were Moslems.”4 By 1958 the Nation was meeting in what was called a “monster convention,” deemed to be a “strategic development” and a “turning point.”5 In 1960 Elijah Muhammad returned to his native Georgia, where a journalist without exaggeration described the diminutive leader as “America’s Most Powerful Black Man.”6 Just before that, it was estimated that the Nation had “250,000 followers but other sources credit him with only 70,000.” Both figures may have been high in retrospect, but were indicative of the weight of the group in public consciousness.7 As those, notably pro-Moscow Negroes, who had stood with Washington during the war and excoriated pro-Tokyo Negroes in turn, were sidelined, harassed, and jailed, the ideological balance among African Americans was influenced significantly to the benefit of the Nation of Islam.
The Nation of Islam continued to be plagued with questions about its supposed Pacific origins, however. Elijah Muhammad offered a $100,000 reward to detractors who could prove that his faith was founded, as a commentator put it, by “Wallace Dodd, a white, New Zealand born ex-convict . . . who posed as a Negro”; Dodd allegedly had a “white English father and a Polynesian [mother].”8 Defying those who characterized his faith as racist, Elijah Muhammad asserted in 1963 that, yes, there were no “whites” allowed in its gatherings, but, he insisted, “this does not include the Turkish people, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, those of Pakistan, Arabs, Latin Americans, Egyptians and those of other Asiatic Muslim and non-Muslim nations.”9 In other words, he and his comrades were focused on those defined as “white” U.S. nationals, those perceived as being responsible for slavery, Jim Crow, and other horrors, a point often lost and obscured.
Nevertheless, from the moment the Pacific War ended on the deck of the battleship Missouri, a readjustment was necessary in the United States. Japan’s pre-1945 racial crusade had exposed a serious flaw in the fabric of U.S. national security. If a substantial group of U.S. Negroes were eagerly expecting an invasion on 24 November 1942 in which they planned to join—on the side of the invaders—it was apparent that racial policies needed to be reformed. This was easier proclaimed than implemented, however.
***
The nation in which the erstwhile Malcolm Little resided had evolved similarly: from “race war” with Tokyo to “Cold War” with Moscow. The dilemma was epitomized by the postwar musings of Robert Browne, later a distinguished economist, who wrote in 1945 that he “genuinely participated both emotionally and intellectually in the upsurge of anti-Japanese feeling which my patriotism demanded,” though “it was not without an undercurrent of satisfaction that a non-white people had at long last slapped the face of the arrogant whites.” Like many Negroes, he found it easier to get along with Euro-Americans overseas than at home, a testament to the warped racial atmosphere in the United States. But now with the defeat of Japan, he sensed that “the Soviet Union is the only western power to indicate that it may have grasped this racial aspect of international politics,” which was to bring Moscow a kind of grief that Tokyo had experienced. He thought that the United States and its allies owed “a debt of gratitude to the Soviet Union for having provided . . . an impetus to realistic thinking as regards the colored world.” That was not the dominant perception in Washington, obviously, though it carried weight with intellectuals like Robeson and Du Bois, once ballyhooed and now besieged.10
Browne’s words about Moscow—though perceptive—were not necessarily indicative of the temper of the times: ironically, Tokyo’s defeat served as a predicate for the rise of once reviled pro-Tokyo Negroes. Suggestive of the importance of Malcolm X to the fortunes of the Nation of Islam was that the Moorish Science Temple did not flourish the way the NOI did. Still, a member, Robert Bey of Newark, captured headlines in 1953 when he successfully flouted Jim Crow practices in Raleigh. “I am not a Negro,” he proclaimed. “I am a Moorish-American, and a human being.”11
Hence, the remnants of “race war” did not perish in the ashes of Nagasaki, not least because the colonialism that had helped to propel war in the first instance had not disappeared in the postwar environment. Thus, when there was a concretizing of Afro-Asian solidarity in a historic gathering in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, Du Bois and Robeson—deprived of passports—were unable to attend. Though Japan sent a sizeable delegation of thirty-four notables, Tokyo’s emerging role as U.S. ally prevented it from reaping the full benefits of Bandung. Arguably, however, Japan’s historic role was a major factor in bringing this solidarity into being in the first place. “Bandung was at least five hundred years in the making,” said one commentator at the time, a reference to the now fading era of European colonialism and the still resonant era of settler colonialism that created the United States; left unsaid was that Tokyo was then being viewed not as an avatar or harbinger of the emerging era of Afro-Asian solidarity that was soon to take flight in the Non-Aligned Movement and the United Nations, but as an ally of those now being targeted by this new epoch of militant solidarity.12
Though this profound gathering was held just as the U.S. war in Korea was winding down from its hottest phase
and just as the concomitant war in Vietnam was heating up, African American investment in Afro-Asian solidarity was not necessarily accelerating. Washington had learned a painful lesson during the Pacific War and had chosen to make agonizingly halting steps away from the more horrendous aspects of Jim Crow. As a consequence, U.S. Negroes had less cause and reason to seek allies abroad for domestic leverage, though it would be an error to suggest that this solidarity had disappeared altogether, given the impact of India on events in Dixie.13
After he had left office, former secretary of state Dean Acheson conceded the obvious when he told Claude Barnett that “the existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States is a handicap in our relations with other countries.”14 The problem was that this praxis was so deeply ingrained in U.S. culture—as a candid Tokyo could have attested—that gutting it was easier said than done. Yet an attempt to gut it had to be considered.
A Rip Van Winkle awakening after being asleep for two decades might have expected that African Americans—like the younger Malcolm Little and his soon-to-be coreligionists years earlier—would continue their close relationship with Tokyo. Generally, this was not the case. The atomic bombing, combined with painful defeat and U.S. occupation, had transformed Japan and profoundly eroded Tokyo’s historic role as “champion of the darker races.” In fact, in 1963 a Negro reporter registered his disappointment with the “condescending attitude” taken by Tokyo to racism in the United States. There was a “playing down of the racial implications” of violent unrest in Mississippi and Alabama, and “scenes depicting the Birmingham riots were not published,” though the Japanese also “suffered discrimination in the U.S.” The conclusion was a turnabout from the pre-Hiroshima history: “Japanese don’t feel any emotional ties with the American Negro.”15
This may not have been true of Japanese visitors to the United States during this time, for those in Chicago were said to be familiar with the lyrics of Negro spirituals, especially those rendered by Paul Robeson. Yet the point could not be evaded that as the anti–Jim Crow movement surged, Tokyo—once keen to capitalize on U.S. racial difficulties—was no longer in the frontlines. The Associated Negro Press, the most comprehensive chronicler of Tokyo’s incursion into Black America before the war, was struck by the postwar pell-mell retreat.16
***
Even before the war concluded, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi predicted—perhaps promised—that the “relationships between the white and black races are going to get worse especially when the war is over and those Negroes who are trained to shoot come back home.”17 After the war ended, he assured true believers in apartheid, “I shall continue my fight for white supremacy and for the preservation of the American way of life as long as God gives me the strength to do so.”18 Holding aloft the still fluttering banner of white supremacy, Bilbo took time to tutor J. B. Stoner, who was to emerge after the war as his most bloodthirsty pupil.19 Stoner asked his mentor to “help me deliver a severe blow to the evil Jewish race,” whom he called the “Jew-devils” and who were supposedly proven “by the Bible” to be “the children of Satan.”20 Fortunately, Stoner and Bilbo were to find that the postwar climate for their vituperation had been changed, not least because of the continuing reverberations from the “race war” in the Pacific basin.
The opponents of Bilbo and Stoner were able to capitalize on this changing climate only in part. Unfortunately, just as Negro-Nisei tension rose as the internment unfolded in Los Angeles, a similarly riddled process unwound when the internees returned home. Days after the United States and its allies triumphed in Europe, the Washington Post reported on “recent outbreaks in California against Japanese American citizens,” including “about 15 terrorist attacks on returned Nisei” and “four cases of attempted arson.” There was “only one instance,” in rural Placer County, where the “terrorists [were] brought to justice,” though at trial the defense argued passionately that this was a “white man’s country” and should be kept so. The jury freed the defendants.21
Just before this disturbing report, Senator Bilbo, whose vitriolic racism tended to attract the like-minded, even when not in Dixie, was informed that “California is being overcrowded with Negroes and it will not be long, not many years, until there will be a race war here.” Bilbo’s correspondent, J. A. Watkins, believed that “the Negroes must be sent back to Africa, their homeland, or America is doomed to be populated by a yellow or brown race in four hundred years from the Declaration of Independence,” the outcome of a “Jewish plot against America”; already in the Golden State there were “more than fifty thousand white women” who were “living with Negroes or Negroids—Philipinos [sic], Chinese,” and the like.22
Likewise, Mike Masoaka of the Japanese American Citizens League reported that “arson, intimidation and shooting” greeted the return of Nisei and their compatriots to their erstwhile neighborhoods.23 This hostility was found in Dixie particularly, for when Hawaii-born Yukiko Tomashiro applied for a seventh-grade teaching post in the Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia, she was rejected on racist grounds.24 A few years earlier, a Japanese national was barred from attending the historically Black Langston University in Oklahoma, which determined that these Asians were somehow defined as “white.”25 Ironically, this decision may have been an aspect of the postwar thrust to redefine Japanese Americans as a “model minority”—so as to undermine and complicate their previous ties to U.S. Negroes.
California, the site of returning Nisei and continuously arriving Negroes, was notably combustible. As early as June 1945, Charles Krause of Los Angeles was lamenting the arrival of Negroes who were “poisoned by the virus of Communism or were under the influence of NAACP propaganda.” He wondered nervously what would occur “when the war against Japan is over, when the war industries close down, when veterans return in ever increasing numbers.” The “outlook is dark and menacing,” he declared gloomily, as he encouraged Senator Bilbo to redouble his efforts to oust African Americans altogether from the United States.26 Bilbo did not have to be reminded; even before D-Day he was telling a constituent with asperity that “we are going to have so many race riots after [the war] is over and [as] these Negro soldiers get back home that they will all be glad to go after the battle is over.”27
By December 1945 Senator Bilbo was irate about the “awful crimes that are being committed by these Negroes who seem to have gone wild when they reached the Pacific Coast.” After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he had “had to stop my [repatriation] campaign” of dispatching U.S. nationals back to Africa; “but now that the war is over,” he contended, he planned to “introduce the bill and make a great drive” for it; for “if the Negro is permitted to stay in this country some have said that in less than 300 years we will all be yellow.” He did not mean Asian, but it was unclear whether he meant intimidated or mulatto.28 What the senator had neglected to note was that those Black Nationalists who had provided grassroots energy for his resettlement campaign in the prewar era were either languishing in prison or ideologically undermined by Tokyo’s defeat and the coming rise in anti–Jim Crow measures.
However, Bilbo’s supporters proceeded as if nothing had changed. “This government recently deported some Japanese back to their home island,” wrote Luscious Casey to Bilbo that same month, which was a possible precedent, he thought, for the resettlement of U.S. Negroes in Africa.29 In December 1945 Grover Brewer in Oregon reported that “since the war started” more Negroes had been “imported” to “work in war plants”; angrily, he asserted, “you would have no idea of the crime that has been committed up and down this Pacific Coast such as murder, rape, robbery” as a direct result of this migration. “Sending the Negroes back to Africa” was a keen idea, he thought. This self-confessed “Southerner” and “descendant from Scotch and Irish” also detested the arrival of another “race of people here in our country” whom he perceived as “parasites” who “live off one sort of graft or that never produce anything”—“that is th
e Jew.”30
Meanwhile, in Chicago the city’s population of Japanese origin, which was less than four hundred in the prewar years, was up to twenty thousand by 1948, as a goodly number from the Pacific coast fled eastward. “Is this a threat to Negroes?” asked a Negro reporter, given their efficiency and industry as workers.31 The answer was likely no, though the question itself exposed a radically transformed landscape.32 The aforementioned “condescending attitude” now seemingly adopted by Japanese toward racial matters was all the more jarring since Tokyo was all too aware of the realities of the United States’ halting retreat from the excesses of Jim Crow.
***
Ironically, with maximum chutzpah and minimal self-awareness, Washington—the pioneer in crafting Jim Crow and articulating white supremacy—was breathing rhetorical fire in the International Military Criminal Tribunal for the Far East, which tried Japanese leaders. Those in the dock, the prosecutors asserted, “systematically poisoned . . . the mind of the Japanese people . . . with harmful ideas of the alleged racial superiority of Japan over other peoples of Asia and even of the whole world.” It was as if the implicit gravamen of the indictment was that ideas of racial superiority were the unique province of the North Atlantic nations. Some in Tokyo and India and in certain precincts of Black America where the idea of Afro-Asian solidarity continued to illuminate, saw this proceeding as illegitimate, a kangaroo court, the justice of victors.33