by Gerald Horne
The fruits of Afro-Asian solidarity, especially in the arts, were not perceived by all, and herein rests an essential contradiction. As the jazz critic Leonard Feather noted, the Japanese American intellectual S. I. Hayakawa was a jazz aficionado. “Visiting Japan in 1935,” Hayakawa acknowledged, “I heard American jazz being played constantly on the bathing-beaches between Osaka and Kobe.”75 But decades later, Hayakawa was catapulted into prominence when he vigorously attacked African American students at San Francisco State University, which he then headed, when they fought strenuously for the establishment of a Black studies program.76 His enhanced notoriety helped him win election as a U.S. senator. By November 1976, the arch segregationist senator James Eastland of Mississippi extended “warm congratulations” to his new colleague,77 who soon toured war-torn Rhodesia and declared this notorious white supremacist land to be an “open and free society.”78 Unsurprisingly, Hayakawa created an uproar when he declared that it was “perfectly understandable” that Japanese Americans were interned during the war.79
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Trans-Pacific kinship, which had been a fixture for decades, had frayed to an extent, but had not disappeared altogether. In 1957, for example, Makaru Sakamoto, an official from Kobe, came to the United States to study Negro life in Chicago.80 The next year, Harry Levette spoke of “the great Japanese middleweight boxer,” the “Tokyo-born ‘Young Togo,’” who taught him “the self defense tricks” that had served him well.81
These maneuvers may have come in handy when Black and white troops in Japan were engaged in what seemed to be a favorite pastime: brawling. Negro soldiers had been protesting racial discrimination on military bases, but matters deteriorated rapidly.82 This was not an unusual occurrence, as there had been a turnabout of Japan’s prewar policy of displaying preferential treatment to Negroes; apparently, some in Japan were led to believe that accommodating the U.S. occupation also meant bowing to Jim Crow. A refusal to bend the knee to Jim Crow was an apt characterization of the six Negro marines who beat to death a white counterpart and injured another as Congressman Powell was carping.83
Though the Japanese and Ethiopian royal families did not merge through marriage, U.S. Negroes sought to compensate. As early as 1952 it was reported that “hundreds of Negro GIs are defying military red tape to marry Japanese [women].”84 Silas Mosley was among them. This Negro marine taught English in Japan, then married a Japanese woman.85 He was part of a larger trend suggesting bonds of peculiar intimacy that did not perish in the flames of Hiroshima-Nagasaki. In 1963 a reported three hundred Negro soldiers married Korean women, a figure comparable to that in neighboring Japan.86 These close bonds were also underscored when a few years earlier, a Negro couple driving in Japan—he was a soldier—spotted an abandoned child roadside and chose to adopt her.87
Unfortunately, interactions between Japan and the occupying power were not always so uplifting. Writing from the archipelago in early 1946, Robert Bennett, a U.S. military man from Georgia, reported excitedly that “you can buy a wife for about $65.” “She’s every bit a wife,” he continued exultantly, “yet no divorce is necessary, when a soldier gets ready to leave,” he simply departs.88
Nevertheless, the incident involving an adoptee may have been further reflection of a still poignant Negro-Japanese alliance. The Black-led anti–Jim Crow movement was both a beneficiary and engineer of the reworked race relations that this alliance had helped to foment—and this movement would knock down barriers for Asians too, leading by 1965 to a restructuring of the exclusivist U.S. immigration laws that had so infuriated Tokyo in the 1920s.89 The Asian American population increased dramatically, opening up opportunities for countless individuals and, in a sense, affirming the mutually beneficial relations that had developed decades earlier between U.S. Negroes and Tokyo.
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After the war, the territory whose bombardment had driven the conflict—Hawaii—was entangled in a battle for statehood, which raised some of the racial issues brought by Pearl Harbor. The colony had a plurality of Japanese Americans, who were thought to be opposed to Jim Crow. This meant that Dixie was hostile to the movement for Hawaiian statehood, which emerged in 1959 precisely when the anti–Jim Crow movement had begun to percolate.90
A good deal of this focus on Japan and Hawaii was driven by Frank Marshall Davis, who was formerly employed by Claude Barnett in Chicago but moved to Honolulu in 1948. There he sought to continue the prewar bond between Negroes and Japanese—Okinawans in Honolulu, in this case—whom he analogized to African Americans. “Close your eyes,” he wrote in 1949, “listen to the thoughts expressed in serious discussion by Okinawa Japanese and you can imagine you’re in Harlem.” They “occupy the same inferior status as the Negro in America” and “several told me privately they felt a strong bond of kinship with me as a Negro.”91
This mutuality between Negroes and Asians, which was much more pronounced in the fiftieth state than on the mainland, continued even as ordinary Japanese were protesting in great numbers the arrival of President Eisenhower in Japan and the despised bilateral security treaty he epitomized. The esteemed Negro attorney Raymond Pace Alexander found the Japanese people to be “so gracious that it is almost unbelievable that the recent demonstrations against the United States . . . could have occurred.”92
Alexander may have misjudged the depth of true concord between a predominantly “white” United States and Japan. Recently the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote about asking a prominent pollster whether he ever found “things in polls that he wasn’t looking for and that surprised him.” His answer was “yes. . . . The American people don’t like the Japanese.”93 Perhaps if she had written “Euro-American” instead, this comment would have been more precise. Remarkably, this opinion persists despite the fact that Japan is today seen as an anchor of U.S. strategy in Asia designed to contain China, ruled by a Communist Party, an entity that was thought to be Public Enemy Number 1.94
Hugh and Mabel Smythe, the Negro couple residing in postwar Japan and teaching respectively at Yamaguchi National University and Shiga University, were convinced that the road ahead would not be smooth for the Pacific rivals only recently at war. Hugh Smythe thought that the “type of racialism common in the United States is unknown in Japan,”95 and as a consequence, Japan had “never forgotten the racial slights she suffered” at the hands of the United States over the decades. “This feeling necessarily had to be repressed during military occupation,” the couple wrote. “Doubtless it will figure in her future plans once she has again become a strong and independent nation.” After all, as they cautioned during the early stage of the postwar occupation, “time is on her side and the Japanese have had 2600 years of learning how to be patient.”96
Notes
Introduction
1 Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove, 1965), 106, 108. For one of the most recent explorations of the tie between Islam and Black America, see, e.g., Sally Howell, Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Readers should note that I often cite sources of that era that use racist epithets, including “Jap.”
2 George Q. Flynn, “Selective Service and American Blacks during World War II,” Journal of Negro History 69 (Winter 1984): 14–25; Robin D. G. Kelly, Theolonius Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (New York: Free Press, 2009), 82.
3 Walter White to Walter Karig, 14 August 1941, Box II, A432, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
4 Fumiko Sakashita, “Lynching across the Pacific: Japanese Views and African American Responses in the Wartime Antilynching Campaign,” in Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective, ed. William D. Carrigan and Christopher Waldrep (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 192–93.
5 Ibid.; Gerald Horne, “Tokyo Bound: African Americans and Japan Confront White Supremacy,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 3, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 22.
6 Walter Karig to Walter White, 2 September 1941, Box II, A432, NAACP Papers.
7 Dempsey Travis, An Autobiography of Black Chicago (Chicago: Urban Research Institute, 1981), 93, 94. See also Roi Ottley, New World A-Coming (New York: Arno, 1968), 342. A “reporter . . . told Mrs. [Eleanor] Roosevelt . . . that he had attended Negro meetings ‘where Japanese victories were slyly praised and American defeats at Bataan and Corregidor brought amused and knowing smiles.”
8 Gerald Horne, Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 105.
9 “Japanese Racial Agitation among American Negroes,” n.d., 145.81.84–91, 1942–Apr. 1943, Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, AL.
10 Randy Weston, African Rhythms: The Autobiography of Randy Weston (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 15, 34.
11 Release, Associated Negro Press (ANP), April 1942, Reel 24, #69, Part I, Series A, Claude A. Barnett Papers/Associated Negro Press, North Carolina State University, Raleigh (hereafter Barnett Papers). Subsequent citations of ANP press releases are all from the Barnett Papers. Materials from this microfilm collection can also be found at the Chicago History Museum, along with the original hard copies.
12 Release, ANP, December 1942, Reel 25, #122, Part I, Series A.
13 Ibid.
14 See the many letters to this effect in Box 300, William Colmer Papers, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg. See also Joe Grant Masaoka to Carey McWilliams, 20 October 1943, Box 7, Carey McWilliams Collection of War Relocation Authority Materials, Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, CA (hereafter McWilliams Collection): “In the Selective Service registrations, separate files are allegedly kept of Negroes and Whites. A Negro selectee has started a lawsuit because he was called out of turn. By reason of these distinct files he was inducted earlier than he would have been. . . . Negro officers are conspicuous by their scarcity, . . . [also] certain bias to the Jew.”
15 Horne, “Tokyo Bound.” See also Gerald Horne, “The Revenge of the Black Pacific?,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 24, no. 1 (2001): 94–96. The literature on Afro-Asian solidarity includes, e.g., Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Fred Ho and Bill Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Ernest Allen Jr., “When Japan Was Champion of the ‘Darker Races’: Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism,” Black Scholar 24 (1994): 23–46; Ernest Allen Jr., “‘Waiting for Tojo’: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932–1943,” Gateway Heritage, 1995, 38–55; Helen Heran Jun, Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Marc Gallichio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Shana Redmond, “Extending Diaspora: The NAACP and Up-’Lift’ Cultures in the Interwar Black Pacific,” in Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production, ed. William H. Bridges IV and Nina Cornyetz (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015). See also Greg Robinson, After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). This book offers an insightful analysis of relations between Japan, Japanese Americans, and African Americans before, during, and after the war. The roots of Afro-Asian solidarity extend deep into the history of the advent of European colonialism. See, e.g., Note in The Indonesia Reader: History, Culture and Politics, ed. Tineke Hellwig et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 158: in the mid-eighteenth century the planting of cloves in Mauritius was facilitated when seedlings were smuggled from what is now Indonesia. See also Gerald Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009). On the other hand, as early as the 1890s certain Euro-Americans worried about an adverse Japanese reaction to lynching of African Americans in Dixie, which aided in the retreat of this macabre phenomenon. See, e.g., Sarah L. Silkey, Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Trans-Atlantic Activism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 125.
16 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World,” in Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomason, 1982), 330 (from Collier’s Weekly, 20 December 1906).
17 Arnold Shankman, “‘Asiatic Ogre’ or ‘Desirable Citizen’? The Image of Japanese Americans in the Afro-American Press, 1867–1933,” Pacific Historical Review 46 (1977): 567–87, 587.
18 Booker T. Washington to Naoichi Masaoka, 5 December 1912, in Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 12, 1912–1914, ed. Louis Harlan and Raymond W. Smock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 84. Alert African Americans may have noticed that it was in the early twentieth century that a Japanese entrepreneur developed cultured pearls, which served to undermine the deployment of enslaved Africans as deep-sea divers who retrieved pearls from oysters in the Arabian Gulf. See Matthew S. Hopper, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 10; and Robert Eunson, The Pearl King: The Story of the Fabulous Mikimoto (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1964).
19 Charles Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008).
20 Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000 (New York: Viking, 2000), 94.
21 Elliott M. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis: July 2, 1917 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 261, 121. Perhaps coincidentally, an iconic photograph of racist violence targeting African Americans in Chicago in 1919 during one of the bloodiest massacres of that conflicted era was snapped by Jun Fujita, born in Hiroshima, who migrated to the United States in 1915 and then worked for the Chicago Evening Post as a photographer. See David F. Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 111.
22 Release, ANP, n.d., Reel 8, #593, Part III, Subject Files on Black Americans, Series I: Race Relations, Barnett Papers.
23 Horne, Race War!, vii. For a fuller exploration of these issues, the volume in hand should be read in conjunction with this earlier book. See also Buck Clayton, Buck Clayton’s Jazz World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 66–67. Ernest Clarke, another Negro musician, spent eight years in China, Japan, India, and the nation then known as Malaya. He was interned by Japanese forces in Hong Kong, where he claimed that he was not maltreated, a claim many Europeans and Euro-American prisoners there would find difficult to make. See clipping, uncertain provenance, n.d., circa 1943, Box 8, McWilliams Collection.
24 Memorandum from Portland Field Division, circa 1942, in The FBI’s RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States during World War II, ed. Robert A. Hill (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 382.
25 Article by Lucius Harper, n.d., Reel 12, #36, Part II, Organizational Files, Barnett Papers.
26 William “Billy” Mitchell, “The Pacific Problem: Strategical [sic] Aspects,” 1924, Box 46, William Mitchell Papers, Library of Congress.
27 John Dower, Japan in War and Peace: Essays on History, Culture and Race (London: Fontanta, 1996), 258–59.
28 Release, ANP, May 1942, Reel 24, #93, Part I, Releases, Barnett Papers. For more on the Associated Negro Press, whose archive may be the richest in the entire field of African American studies, see, e.g., Lawrence D. Hogan, A Black National News Service: The Associated Negro Press and Claude Barnett, 1919–1945 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984); and Gerald Horne, The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett’s Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). The ANP was a consortium incorporating scores of writers
and analysts in virtually every nook and cranny of Black America and numerous sites abroad. It also employed at various times such luminaries as Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston.
29 A. J. Maphike, letter to the editor, Guardian (Cape Town), 25 July 1940, 4.
30 “True Democracy the Only Safeguard: Pro-Jap Sympathy Danger,” Guardian (Cape Town), 12 March 1942, 5.
31 Ahmed Kathrada, Memoirs (Cape Town: New Holland, 2004), 35.
32 I. O. Horvitch, letter to the editor, Guardian (Cape Town), 26 March 1942, 6.
33 See the pamphlet by Moses Kotane, General Secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa, “Japan—Friend or Foe?,” April 1942, Box 1, Communist Party of South Africa Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford University: “So many non-Europeans (leaders and ordinary people) seriously believe that if the Japanese were to come here, the worst that they (the Japanese) could do to us Africans, Coloured and Indians, would be to treat us as England treats the Afrikaners and other white races in her Dominions and Colonies.” The African American intellectual and future Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche found striking parallels with his homeland during a visit in 1937 to South Africa. See Robert Edgar, ed., An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche, 28 September 1937–1 January 1938 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 89–90. Just as U.S. Negroes who were pro-Tokyo tended to be dismissive of the suffering of China under Tokyo’s lash, on 24 October of that fateful year Bunche encountered in South Africa “a young Garveyite (formerly an African National Congress member) preaching race chauvinism to another small group. All of the Garveyite speeches I’ve heard there, including this one, were praising Japan’s rape of China on color chauvinism grounds.” Unfortunately, contributing to this often hostile attitude toward China was what the African American officer James B. McMillan discovered while stationed in Calcutta during the war: He was informed curtly that “Madame Chiang Kai-shek didn’t want any blacks in China,” speaking of U.S. Negro soldiers. See R. T. King and Gary E. Elliott, eds., Fighting Back: A Life in the Struggle for Civil Rights: From Oral History Interviews with James B. McMillan (Reno: University of Nevada Oral History Program, 1997), 60.