“Yellow” and “Black”: Japanese-Inspired Sedition
Among African Americans Before and During World War II
Joshua Lee Lewin
Jacksonville University
It was January 25, 1942, less than fifty days after Japan’s “day of infamy,” the attack on Pearl Harbor. That cold Sunday morning a furious group of whites forced Cleo Wright, a black, twenty-six-year-old cotton-mill hand, from his jail cell in Sikeston, Missouri. Wright had been jailed for the attempted rape of a white woman, Mrs. Dillard Sturgeon.[1] The enraged mob dragged Wright behind a car through the city’s streets, stopping briefly at each of the black churches in town. The driver finally stopped the car near the railroad where the mob burned Wright’s dead, torn body. A month later, on February 22, the President of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and editor of the monthly, The New Negro World, James R. Stewart exhorted, a crowd ,”We will remember Missouri and then Pearl Harbor…To hell with Pearl Harbor.”[2]
Such seditious talk frightened patriotic Americans. It certainly frightened the founding director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover. Eager to find out what lay behind this audacious call to subvert America in her hour of need, on June 22 Hoover commissioned the Survey of Racial Conditions in the United States. For this report he asked federal agents to look for “racial disturbances or potential racial outbreaks which may have an effect upon the national security” and for “racial disturbances which may receive national notoriety.”[3]
The FBI particularly feared that a Japanese fifth column had infiltrated the United States. The August 23, 1941 issue of the Hour, a “confidential bulletin” edited by Albert E. Kahn, shows that the fear had merit, “The purpose of such fifth column activity, which seeks unscrupulously to capitalize upon legitimate grievances of the Negroes,…[is] to split Americans into opposing camps, white against black, and thus to weaken the country as a whole and hamper the defense effort.”[4]
In fact, the Bureau had long set its sights on black organizations that were involved in pro-Japanese propaganda. In 1940 the United States Military Intelligence Division had reported that the Chicago Defender, an important black newspaper, contained “propaganda which might hinder the Government in securing registrations from Negroes who come within the draft age.” [5] While the FBI feared the influence of such newspapers, the truth was that the black press was only reporting on their communities where pro-Japanese propaganda had flourished for at least forty years.
After the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905, many of the world’s “colored” peoples recognized Japan’s victory over “white” Russia as their own. For the first time in modern history, a non-western nation had humbled a first-rank European power. Oppressed peoples throughout the world began to see Japan as their future liberator. Black Americans joined the adulation.
Marcus Garvey of the UNIA greatly admired Japan, and Garvey’s ideas helped mold the thoughts of many others. As early as 1918, he had warned that, “ The next war will be between the [N]egroes and the whites unless our demands for justice are recognized…With Japan to fight with us, we can win such a war.”[6] Observing their growing power in the Pacific, Garvey believed that the Japanese were as tired of western domination as were African Americans.
Openly angry at the repression of black culture, many African Americans began to speak forcefully not only for their Civil Rights during the 1930’s, but also with a growing sense of African nationalism. Some black Americans even sought racial independence, African redemption and colonization of their African homeland, and Afro-Asiatic racial solidarity. Horance Cayton, who succeeded Garvey as head of the UNIA, boldly stated that, “Black America is ready for a nationalistic movement such as Garvey’s when the right demagogic leadership presents itself.”[7]
Garvey’s ideas became the foundation for many of the pro-Japanese groups that fell under the FBI’s gaze during the1930s and 1940s. From the national headquarters of the UNIA, located in Cleveland, Ohio, the organization sought to return African Americans to Africa. After Japan’s attack, Stewart’s “To Hell with Pearl Harbor” admonition resonated through UNIA meeting halls across the country.[8] At 300-person meetings of the Detroit UNIA, a Reverend Wheat urged African Americans to reject the white man’s ideas and to think independently. Blacks, he said, could take advantage of the war to secure their rights.[9]
After a 1943 indictment of two leaders of the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, (PMEW), one Naka Nakane, who was “an apparent Japanese government operative,”[10] claimed that during 1933 and 1934 there were Japanese agents working for the UNIA throughout the United States. Nakane himself started many of these organizations, including Development of Our Own. While leading this organization, Nakane had assumed the alias, Satakata Takahashi, a major in the Japanese Army. He also claimed to represent the Black Dragon Society in the United States.[11] A Tokyo native born, Nakana had emigrated to Victoria, British Columbia, about 1903. There he married a Englishwoman, Annie Craddock. In 1922, Nakane moved with his family to Tacoma, Washington. After hard times he abandoned his family and dropped out of sight to re-emerge in 1932 at a UNIA meeting in Chicago.[12] On April 20,1934, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service deported him to Japan. Five years later, on January 11, 1939 he re-entered the United States through Buffalo, New York, and became active in a new organization, the Onward Movement of America, with the same old agenda. After attempting to bribe an immigration inspector, he was arrested on June 22. Six days later he was sentenced to three years and fined $4,500.[13]
One friend and ideological compatriot of Nakane’s, Policarpio Manansal, who used many aliases, including Ashimo Takis and Mimo De Guzman. Apparently of Japanese ethnicity, he had been born in the Philippines in 1900. He began speaking for the UNIA in the early 1930’s.[14] Ultimately, he was sentenced to three years by a federal judge for forging a postal money order. During questioning, De Guzman admitted to having received funds from Nakane, whom he presumed to have been backed up by Japan. De Guzman had distributed these funds to organizations influential among African Americans.[15]
During the 1930’s in the New York area, many successors to the deteriorating UNIA sprang up under different names. The FBI considered these new factions of Garverism as anti-white, with many individual members reported to have made seditious, pro-Japanese statements. One was Robert O. Jordan. Jordan had met De Guzman in 1935 and within six months the two had established the Ethiopian Pacific Movement, (EPM). During the war, Jordan stated that he had been commissioned by De Guzman to organize Negroes in the Eastern Unit ed States. He wanted to “line up the colored people for the Japanese, so that when they take over the country the colored people will be all one.”[16]
The EPM sought to resettle African Americans in Africa. Between 1935 and 1937, the organization was heavily engaged in the Harlem area, only to fade out for two years. Jordan revived the organization in 1939, when he began to harangue street meetings, generally on Sunday evenings at 113 Lenox Avenue, New York. Usually 50 to 125 “uneducated” blacks attended, with the majority from the British West Indies.[17] Some in the FBI doubted the true commitment of the EPM’s leadership to their stated goals.[18]
In a January 25, 1942 address, Jordan claimed that his Japanese contacts stretched back to his Japanese training in 1922. Since then he had been their agent and had even served three years as a second officer in the Japanese navy.[19] These claims are doubtful. It is true however, that Jordan had written Japan’s foreign minister on May 12, 1936, seeking “unity between AFRICA and ASIA,”[20] and that six months later he again had written, this time requesting that Japan lead the “Dark Races” to freedom.[21] In June 1941, Jordan visited the Japan Institute, located in New York. He bore a letter of introduction from Kyuya Abiko, the Executive Secretary of the Japanese Association. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the EMP met behind closed doors at its Lenox Avenue office. There Jordan turned his organization more radically toward the Japanese. He proclaimed that he would be ashamed to wear a United States Military uniform and that he would fight for Japan with every drop of his blood.[22]
Jordan claimed that Japan was only waiting for the opportunity to establish 20,000,000 African Americans as masters of Africa. On January 18, 1942, he declared that the Japanese were trying to establish nations around the world for the “Dark Races” of the world, “and have the black man rule the black man.” He added, “This is going to be a race war and you must be ready. When you are drafted start a whispering campaign among your comrades.”[23] Jordan believed that Japan would defeat the United States: “The thing to do now if the Negroes have any sense at all, instead of fooling around with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Randolph movement and all that sort of thing, is to join up with the Japanese.”[24]
Jordan was arrested and charged with the conspiracy to violate the Alien Registration Act. He was found guilty on three counts, and on March 11, the court sentenced him to three consecutive sentences of ten days each.
Later, the United States government charged members of the EPM with sedition under Title 50, Section 33 of the United States Code:
In that on or about the fifth of July, 1942…these defendants, when the United States was at war, did unlawfully, willfully and knowingly cause and attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty in the military and naval forces of the United States; that the said defendants stated to a person wearing the uniform and distinctive insignia of a member of the United States Army and to others, in substance, that Negro soldiers should not fight for the United States against Japan and the other Axis Powers with which the United States was at war.[25]
Jordan was arrested with four other members of the EPM. On September 15, 1942.[26] Jordan pugnaciously asserted, “I expect to be put in a concentration camp soon. The people who put me there, I shall order their heads to be chopped off when the new order is in control.”[27] The only white man arrested with Jordan was Joseph Hartley, a enlisted army man. From November, 1941 to June 7,1942, Hartley had spoken often at the EPM’s Sunday meetings. In one speech he had asserted that there was a “pro-Japanese conspiracy to destroy the morale and unity of the armed forces.”[28] Another of the arrested, James Henry Thornhill, had stated that if the United States Government was, “foolish enough to give him a gun” he would shoot his own commanding officer.[29]
When Jordan was sentenced to ten years in prison, many in Harlem were relieved to see this West Indies black man off their streets. Even though African Americans had good reasons to follow Jordan, most in the community were repulsed by the idea of becoming a traitor. A local New York judge observed, “Fortunately, that loyal community, of which many of us are so very proud, remained disaffected. However, the people must be protected from the acts of men such as these.”[30]
Many others had contact with Jordan and met similar fates. For example, Mittie Maud Lena Gordon, founder of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, was arrested and charged on September 20, 1942, with eight counts of violating the Sedition Code. With her, the government arrested her husband, William Green Gordon, David J. Logan, and Seon Emanuel Jones. When taken into custody, Mr. Gordon held a membership card signed by “Sato Kata Takahaski, President General, Kito, Japan”, and Logan possessed the specifications of the Curtiss, Packard and Whirlwind airplane motors.[31] Brought to trial on a cold January 25, 1943, the defendants were found guilty on February 15. The Supreme Court upheld their conviction on the charges of “ conspiracy to cause disloyalty and refusal of duty in the United States military and naval forces.”[32]
The Federal investigators who investigated America’s racial situation often showed great insight. The FBI compiled their reports at that time when America was fighting a war for freedom and self determination throughout the world. At home America was fighting a parallel battle; African Americans were fighting for their own freedom at home, as well. Often the FBI investigators acknowledged the legitimacy of African American grievances. Agents genuinely feared the pro-Japanese sedition they had discovered, whether perpetrated by grifters and frauds, or by genuine believers. What ought to amaze us is how many black Americans rejected Japanese leadership, and chose, instead, to fight for their place in the American dream.
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[1] Ernest Allen, Jr., “Waiting for Tojo, The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932–1943,” Gateway Heritage (Fall 1995): 39.
[2] Robert A. Hill, ed., The FBI’s RACON: Racial Conditions In The United States During World War II (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1980), 101.
[3] Ibid., 16.
[4] Ibid., 6. The FBI also feared that the Communist Party could exploit civil rights issues. An editorial in the communist Daily Worker, for example, had described the government’s handling of the grand jury’s investigation of Cleo Wright, and concluded that the government had to uphold the constitutional rights of all Americans, including those of African decent. Failure to do so would only play “into the hands of the defeatists and fifth Columnists.”
[5] Ibid., 22.
[6] Ernest Allen, Jr., “When Japan was “Champion of the Darker Races” : Satakata Takahashi and the flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism,” The Black Scholar ( vol. 24, no. 1) : 29.
[7] RACON, 33.
[8] Ibid., 108.
[9] Ibid., 113.
[10] Allen, “Waiting for Tojo,” 40.
[11] The most notorious of Japan’s superpatriot groups, the Kokuryu Kai is more properly called the “Amur River Society,” but generally was known in English by the more sinister-sounding “ Black Dragon Society.”
[12] RACON, 515.
[13] Ibid., 516.
[14] Allen, “Waiting for Tojo,” 40.
[15] RACON, 531.
[16] The New York Times, Dec. 17, 1942.
[17] RACON, 532.
[18] Ibid., 531.
[19] Ibid., 532. Upon his arrest in 1941, Jordan Claimed that he had been employed on a Japanese merchant ship, the S.S. Maru. This is suspicious as “Maru” merely means “ship.”
[20] European Pacific Movement, Inc., New York, Ro. O. Jordan, President, to Japanese Foreign Secretary, Tokyo, May 12, 1936: Record Office (Tokyo) ETI1–2 vol. 2.
[21] Robert O. Jordan, President General of Ethiopian Pacific Movement, Inc. of New York to Hachiro Arita, Foreign Minister, Tokyo, Nov. 18, 1936: Record Office (Tokyo) A461 ET/I1 vol. 8.
[22] RACON, 186. De Guzman later told the FBI, “that Jordan may have been contacted by the Japanese and was in their employ.” De Guzman added that Nakane used Jordan and that the Japanese were trying to develop people who could rally American Negroes. De Guzman disclosed that Jordan had claimed in the fall of 1941 that he was about to get financial aid from Japan. This money would enable Jordan to pay De Guzman to join the EPM thereby validate the organization. Ibid., 532.
[23] Ibid., 7. Jordan added in Garveyesque tones: “Japan is going to liberate the dark races, and all intelligent people should realize now that the battle Japan is fighting against the Western Powers is the battle of Africa, the battle of Asia, the battle of the dark man here in Central America and West Indies.”
[24] The New York Times, Dec. 17, 1942.
[25] RACON, 535.
[26] The New York Times, Sept. 15, 1942.
[27] Ibid., Sept. 16, 1942.
[28] Ibid., Sept. 26, 1942.
[29] Ibid., Dec. 17, 1942.
[30] Ibid., Jan. 15, 1943.
[31] Ibid., Feb. 5, 1943.
[32] Ibid., Dec. 14, 1943.