Among the most pro-Tokyo organizations to arise among U.S. Negroes was the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey. Since the UNIA had formidable outreach in the Western Hemisphere and in Africa, Garveyism may have been the most significant incubator of the pro-Tokyo groupings that emerged before 1945. Ironically, the UNIA was to clash with Ethiopia, one of the few noncolonized African nations, in the 1930s. Still, at least initially, Garvey’s group was to serve as a template for the Black Nationalist groupings that were to emerge in the 1930s, with varying levels of devotion to Addis Ababa and Tokyo and skepticism about the presumed beneficence of the leading North Atlantic powers, which included in their ranks the leading colonizers of Africa and the Caribbean. This chapter concerns, inter alia, the distinct possibility of a diplomatic alliance emerging in the 1930s between Ethiopia and Japan, and how this influenced Black Nationalists in the United States, particularly in their fondness toward Tokyo.
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As early as 1920, a small group of Negroes who allegedly styled themselves “Abyssinians” arrived at 209 East 35th Street in Chicago. One of the leaders produced a U.S. flag and deliberately set it afire. He then began to destroy a second flag in the same manner. Two Euro-American police officers remonstrated with the men but were intimidated by threats and a brandishing of pistols. Then a Negro cop and a sailor were shot, at which point a remaining group of Negroes obtained rifles from an automobile and killed a nearby clerk. In all, about twenty-five shots were fired during the fracas. This was a coming-out party for what was described as the “Back to Africa” movement, which had been in existence for at least two years. The group, the Star Order of Ethiopia and Ethiopian Missionaries to Abyssinia, was viewed as “an illegitimate offspring” of the UNIA. Helping to ignite this protest was a recent visit to the United States by an Ethiopian delegation and the presumed lack of satisfaction it obtained.1 This confrontation was a harbinger of the militancy that was to characterize overlapping pro-Ethiopia and pro-Japan organizations.
When in the succeeding decade it appeared that Japan would come to the aid of Ethiopia in its confrontation with Italy, there was a surge of pro-Tokyo sentiment among Black Nationalists generally. Certainly the UNIA paved the way for this movement; beginning in the early 1920s, it highlighted events in Japan and their impact on U.S. Negroes. “Japan may attack America in 1922” was a typical headline in its journal.2 Apparently one of the UNIA’s members resided in Yokohama, for it was from there that Emanuel McDonald hailed the “great cause” of the UNIA and the “Moses of the race,” “our great Hon. Marcus Garvey”; he expressed the hope that “in the near future we may have ships running to and from the Orient.”3 Subsequently, a writer identified as Emanuel McDowell (who may have been the same man who had been corresponding from Yokohama) this time was in Hong Kong, where he hailed the “Japanese people,” who “are respected and feared,” notably “here in the Orient.” As he saw things, “especially in Japan, there is no opposition to the UNIA. Here a man is a man and there is no discrimination”; more to the point, the UNIA’s Black Star Line was “met with a hearty welcome.”4
“Race war threatens world” was yet another blaring headline in the UNIA journal from the early 1920s; in that article, the former secretary to the “late Premier Ito of Japan” was quoted at length from Honolulu, as he reproved the anti-Tokyo bias of California.5 This was a prelude to lengthy reports on a disarmament conference where Japan’s role was spotlighted as being “very sensitive on the color question”—and “justly so too.” Again, California was pointed to as problematic “for Uncle Sam,” though “there is a possibility that he will [ultimately] convince England, France and Italy that the California idea” of anti-Japan bias “is right and then Hades will break loose.” Tellingly—and unlike other Black Nationalists—the UNIA journal did not invoke the example of European colonialism in order to justify Japanese incursions into China. “Japan is in Shantung upon the same principle that Great Britain is in Africa and she should get out on the same principle which should force Britain out of Africa”; likewise, the UNIA should not “let Great Britain thrive upon that which we deny the Japanese.”6
This concern about the impact of disarmament was not unique to the UNIA. The Negro press—in this case the Savannah Tribune—thought Tokyo was being targeted and, thus, “plainly the white races of the world are deeply concerned” about Japan. “Whites everywhere,” it was reported, were considering what “the darker people of the world are up to,” a consideration that prompted President Warren Harding to make conciliatory “utterances in Birmingham” on the matter of racism “due to the clear vision of fact that the world cannot go on and oppress darker people.”7 The Negro press recognized earlier than most that the retreat from white supremacy in the United States was propelled in no small measure by global considerations.
The UNIA was alert to the point that as early as the 1920s, Japanese encroachment in China had commenced. This reality also had dawned on a proliferating number of jazz musicians from the United States who began moving to Shanghai particularly during this time. Though this metropolis was wracked with conflict, compared to what these U.S. Negroes had experienced back home, it was paradisiacal. When this reverie was disrupted, typically Euro-Americans were singled out as the culprits, as, it was thought, the harassment of African Americans was part of their birthright.8
Still, this evenhandedness toward Japanese and British colonialism did not include any ambiguity on the bedrock point as to who was responsible for the ominous war clouds then gathering. If “anti-Japanese” propaganda did not cease, it was said, Tokyo would have little choice but to “unite the Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Mohammedans, Negroes and even Bolshevists in a colossal alliance. What then will be the superiority of the white race?”9 Lest there be any doubt, more praise was heaped upon the “little brown diplomats” of Japan, who were seen as resisting the hegemony of white supremacy.10 Hubert Harrison, the Negro Socialist who aligned with the UNIA, was among those who as early as 1922 predicted a war between Japan and the United States, with racism lurking as a motive force.11
Tokyo was praised by the UNIA, since it “squashes [the] race inferiority complex.” The focal point was Umeshiro Suzuki, a parliamentarian in Tokyo, and his “amazingly frank brochure on the relation of the races.” This member of the Diet foresaw the “white race’s abandonment of its dream of world control” in the face of stiffening opposition, which was deemed to be an “amazing doctrine.”12 The UNIA made it clear that it was “opposed” to “the white race organizing to dominate the world.”13 Garvey noted that “though not liked, Japanese are respected.”14 Japan’s excoriation of the United States was adopted by the UNIA, which agreed when Tokyo “score[d] American morals” and charged that “men and women” in the republic were “depraved.”15
Numerous Euro-Americans were also concerned about what might well be termed the racial correlation of forces. In the wildly popular novel The Great Gatsby, early on a character asserts, “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” The rise of the “Coloured Empires” was a pre-eminent concern.16
The UNIA appeared to take great pleasure at the idea of worsening bilateral relations between the United States and Japan, auguring, it was thought, a setback for the former and a weakening of white supremacy. As the Negro World reported, the attorney general of California found the “Japanese problem more threatening than [the] Negro problem”; he termed the “racial problem on [the] coast more serious than that of [the] Civil War. . . . As the Japanese line advances, we retreat and we do not like to retreat. . . . We have already lost the Philippines. The Japanese dominate there now.”17 The Los Angeles Examiner argued that the Golden State was on track to have a larger population of residents of Japanese descent than those defined as “white,” signaling an oncoming era of Asian domination.18
Unsurprisingly, when a massive earthquake hit Japan in 1923, the Negro World was quick to report on the sympathy and financial support offered by African Americans: “$500 [was] subscribed by the members of the UNIA to give aid to the sufferers.” At UNIA headquarters in Harlem, “thousands of members of the race came out” in support of this humanitarian venture. A telegram was sent to the emperor of Japan signed by Garvey declaring that “the Negro peoples look . . . to the Japan[ese] as a friend in the cause of racial justice.” His Imperial Majesty in reply expressed his “deep gratification for your sympathetic message.”19 So buoyed, the UNIA seemed to broaden its portfolio, taking on the added assignment of defending Japanese abroad, for example, when journalists from the archipelago were “rebuffed and insulted in South Africa.”20
Upon the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which barred immigration from Japan to the United States, the UNIA reported on the response in Japan. The “Japanese people” were “greatly offended” by the exclusion act, and Washington was reminded of what befell Russia in 1905 when it offended Japan.21 As the Negro World reported, the Diet condemned the exclusion law, and “patriotic societies last evening placarded virtually every telephone and telegraph pole” in Tokyo with angry words of protest. Police officers were recruited to guard the U.S. embassy and consulates as well as hotels where U.S. nationals were thought to reside.22 Washington was warned that Japan was “lining up Asia for coming race conflict,” and that “utmost resentment” toward the United States was a driving force. Once more, 1905 was invoked. “We regret that this war of races is coming, but it was promised when the Peace Conference [Versailles] denied Japan’s demand for racial equality. Those who sow to the wind reap the whirlwind.”23 Repeatedly, Versailles and California’s exclusionary policies were tied together as indicative of a downward (racist) spiral.24
While these immigration provisos were being debated, one Slovakian American journalist agreed with the anti-Japanese restrictions, arguing that Japanese “are not assimilable. They are of the yellow race and we are white.” In some ways, this legislation was a gift to Tokyo, since it barred not only Japanese immigration but all immigration from Asia, helping to promote nascent ideas of Pan-Asianism and the related idea that Japan was the “champion of the colored races.” Tokyo protested vainly that it had not been granted a quota like those of European nations; a Japanese periodical termed the bill “the greatest insult in our history,” as a ritualized disemboweling took place outside the U.S. embassy. Domestically, this biased bill gave further impetus for Italians, Poles, Greeks, and the like in the United States to trumpet their “whiteness,” distinguishing themselves from Asians—and Japanese particularly—thus intensifying racial polarization.25
In 1924 the Japanese intellectual Sugita Teiichi denounced the United States as barely containing “those with the strongest racial consciousness and the strongest sense of the omnipotence of imperialism,” as reflected in the “history of the brutal, cruel and inhuman treatment meted out to the black slaves”; “for people easily moved to tears, it is outrageous.”26
When the celebrated Negro journalist T. Thomas Fortune visited Japan shortly thereafter, like many other African American sojourners he was overwhelmed. It was a “revelation,” he informed readers of the Negro World. “I seemed to be very much at home in Japan,” where “everybody was so polite,” wholly unlike his homeland. He raved about Nagasaki and saluted “glorious Japan.”27
The UNIA maintained a keen interest in a critically important “Pan-Asiatic Congress” that took place in Nagasaki in 1926.28 Japan returned the favor. Haruji Tawara, of Japanese origin though residing in Brazil, proclaimed that “every young Japanese knows the name and work of Marcus Garvey”; his message was that the twentieth century would witness “the rise of the colored peoples of the world.” “American Negroes,” he asked beseechingly, “do you know how eagerly your Asian friends are awaiting the success of Garveyism?”29
As the 1920s unfolded, continuing sympathy was expressed in Japan toward African Americans and their sorrowful plight. There was a tendency in Tokyo to use the republic’s racist conflicts as evidence that the so-called colored races would overcome worldwide bias under Japanese leadership. Others argued that lynching simply demonstrated the “cruelty of white people.” There was a tendency to see a connection between exclusionary immigration measures targeting Japan and the concomitant rise of anti-Negro violence. Revealingly, Japanese diplomats in the United States reported to the Foreign Ministry about anti-lynching legislation. Few were shocked when there were attempts in California to lynch Japanese migrants.30 A number of Japanese intellectuals saw African Americans as a key anti-imperialist constituency. This view tended to come from the left, but what was striking about pre-1945 Japan was the sympathy for U.S. Negroes that spanned the entire ideological spectrum.31
Nevertheless, as “Garveyism” was being hailed, it was already declining in the United States, as Garvey himself was indicted, tried, imprisoned, and then deported. However, as so often happens, the ideas that he propounded did not depart with him, for they reflected a deeper malaise then besetting U.S. Negroes. In any case, the popularity of Garvey’s ideas preceded his own fame. Garvey had studied in London with Duse Mohamed Ali, who also established a popular journal and who had been backed by Tongo Takebe of Japan. Ali’s fictional creations confronted the complex matter of “race war.”32
As noted, the tentacles of Garvey’s influence stretched to Africa. The international import of Garveyism was revealed in 1927, when Arthur Gray of the Oakland, California, branch of the UNIA shared a platform with Edgar Owens of the U.S. Communist Party, along with representatives from movements with ties to India and China; other than the Communists, all there assembled had varying ties to Tokyo, including the representative of the recently deceased Sun Yat-Sen. Later a Japanese diplomat visited this UNIA branch and saluted Garvey as a “prophet” while hailing the determined struggles of the “colored race” throughout Asia and Africa.33
Oakland was a harbinger of a national trend. In April 1932 a leader of the Communist-backed League of Struggle for Negro Rights reported on a “very important matter”: Garvey’s UNIA was “holding mass meetings with Japanese speakers,” stressing the “unity that should exist between the colored races against the whites.” Chicago and Gary, Indiana, were the primary sites for this seditious propaganda. It was said that there were “250 Japanese students touring the country and everywhere speaking under the auspices of the UNIA.”34 However, by this late date those who held U.S. national security dear were seemingly more concerned with Moscow than Tokyo, which facilitated the flourishing of the latter’s acolytes, just as it hampered the ability of the former’s supporters to serve as a counterweight to the latter.
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Nonetheless, as pointed as the UNIA might have been in its orientation toward Tokyo, this militant viewpoint did not emerge from whole cloth but instead had roots in a U.S. Negro community deeply skeptical about the nation in which they found themselves and thus susceptible to looking abroad—be it to Japan or Ethiopia or Africa generally—for sustenance. To a degree, Germany during the Great War had created the template in making appeals to U.S. Negroes in order to undermine the United States itself. However, Tokyo—being “colored” itself—was in an even more advantageous position than Berlin from which to pursue this stratagem. Germany, for example, during World War I had sought to make a special appeal to Muslims in pursuit of its larger ambitions.35 Tokyo acted similarly in the prelude to World War II.36
The logic of Pan-Asianism, an ideology avidly pursued by Tokyo, perforce meant making appeals to predominantly Islamic Indonesia, not to mention the sizeable Muslim minorities in British India—to the detriment of the Netherlands and Britain.37 As Islamic tendencies spread among African Americans, this too provided fertile soil for the rise of pro-Tokyo sentiments.
Religion generally was a card played by Tokyo in its multipronged attempt to destabilize European colonialism. Mohammed Baraktullah, an Indian political activist resisting British control of his homeland, taught in Tokyo as early as 1909 and promoted “Pan-Islamic” ideas that were congruent with Japan’s own Pan-Asianism.38 “What has happened to the descendants of the people who brought Buddha into this world?” asked Seigo Nakano in 1917. “They are the wheels on the road, while the passengers all have fair skin and blue eyes.”39 As Hajime Hosoi of Japan saw things in 1932, “the white countries in fact occupy 87% of the world’s land area and rule over 69% of the world’s population,” which was “like having a person sitting in a crowded train, where there are people unable to get a seat, who stretches his arms and legs over the other seats and who, if anybody tries to sit even on the edge of a seat, immediately starts berating them as an ‘invader.’”40 Inevitably, this potent sympathy between Japan, India, and Islam was echoed among African Americans, not only in terms of the Muslim groupings that arose during this era but also in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois.41
In 1930 Mehmet Ali of Detroit, rapidly becoming the headquarters of Islamic groups among U.S. Negroes, presented Mustapha Kemal Pasha, Turkey’s leader, with a petition calling for the founding of a Negro colony there. “In the name of 28,000 Moslems suffering from racial prejudice in America,” he petitioned for “land on the shores of the Bosphorus where we may create a Negro city”; most of the petitioners were “born in the South. Recently in both Detroit and Chicago they have had clashes with the police.”42
The group that came to be known as the Nation of Islam—whose leaders were indicted in 1942 for alleged pro-Tokyo sentiment—helped to popularize the idea of the “Asiatic Black Man.” Japan was at the core of its theology and cosmology, notably in the case of the “Mother Plane.”43 It too had roots in Detroit. It is unclear whether Nation of Islam members were included in the aforementioned petition, though assuredly all emerged from the same militant root. Just as fascist Italy was preparing to invade Ethiopia, “the ‘Muslims’ in Chicago,” wrote a subsequent critic of the NOI,
attracted momentary attention in 1935 when fifty or sixty of them attended the trial of a female member who was charged with having broken a white woman’s glasses in a quarrel. The Faithful disapproved of the court’s procedure and accordingly picked up chairs and went to work. A captain of the Chicago police was killed, a bailiff was seriously wounded, and twelve policemen and six bailiffs were injured.
This critic, Revilo Oliver, spoke of an “individual with the euphonious name of Wyxsewixzard S.J. Challouchilcziliczese who claimed to be a special envoy sent by the Emperor of Ethiopia to the ‘Black Nation of the West,’” who was said to have allied with the Nation of Islam.44
Thus, when the man known variously by the authorities as Elijah Mohamed, alias Elijah Poole, alias Gulan Bogans, alias Mohammed Ressoull, was placed on trial in 1942 because of his reluctance to endorse the war against Japan, he was accused of asserting that “Moslems [i.e., the Negro members of the Allah Temple of Islam] are not citizens” of the United States;
they have no flag [they] can call their own but the flag of Islam. That the flag of Islam and the flag of Japan are the same because they both offer freedom, justice and equality. . . . The Japanese are the brothers of the Negro and the time will soon come when from the clouds hundreds of Japanese planes with the most poisonous gases will let their bombs fall on the United States and nothing will be left of it.
According to the Allah Temple of Islam, the precursor of what is known today as the Nation of Islam,
The Asiatic race is made up of all dark-skinned people, including the Japanese and the Negro; therefore members of the Asiatic race must stick together; that the Japanese will win because the white man cannot successfully oppose the Asiatics. That the white man is nothing but a devil; that this is the devil’s war and let the devil fight it himself. . . . That the black man owes no respect to the American flag because under the American flag the Negro is oppressed, beaten, and lynched; that the only allegiance a Moslem owes is to the flag of Islam. . . . That the Japanese are fighting to free the colored people. . . . The Japanese flag is similar to our flag of Islam and the likeness is because the Japanese are our brothers. . . . By the end of the year Moslems will have 7,000,000 followers and then with the help of their brothers in the Far East the Moslems will control the United States.45
A harbinger of the Allah Temple of Islam was another group, known as The Development of Our Own, also rooted in Black Detroit. A Negro woman born Pearl Barnett in Alabama in 1896 and eventually known as Pearl Sherrod married a Japanese national, Satokata Takahashi, and under their leadership, TDOO was said to have amassed a membership of ten thousand, including those of African, Indian, and Filipino descent.46 Sherrod, unlike the UNIA, was supportive of Japan’s military incursions into China and sought to financially support this intervention.47
However, her views were hardly singular. The combustible combination of militant Islam, Filipino insurgency, anticolonialism in India, the rise of Japan, and the existence of an independent Ethiopia was becoming an alternative Weltanschauung challenging white supremacy. From Tokyo’s perspective, there was a V-shaped formation attacking white supremacy and European and Euro-American colonialism, with Japan at the point of attack.
Thus, it was William Pickens—not a Muslim but a leading Negro intellectual close to the NAACP—who argued in December 1931 that
Secretary [Henry] Stimson has learned that he must use more respectful and circumspect language when talking about the Japanese “army” than [he] uses when talking about Mexican or Nicaraguan “bandits.” Of course, Japanese nerves are not a bit more sensitive than Haitian nerves, but Japanese guns are bigger and longer and Japan’s warship tonnage is heavy. . . . [Japanese] are in fact just as “colored” as are the people of Liberia, but nobody in Washington is giving “orders” to Japan [despite its intervention in China].48
In sum, the idea was emerging that white supremacy was even more fraudulent than first thought; this seemingly inviolably inflexible doctrine seemed to lack rigidity when confronted with a powerful force. This insight carried grave implications for the future viability of white supremacy in the United States.
Pickens’s view was that “Japan in Manchuria takes [a] leaf from the book of ‘occupation’” developed by the United States in Haiti.49 Sounding triumphant, Pickens claimed that “‘white supremacy’ was slain in Manchuria and its funeral celebration is being held in Shanghai” and “the Japanese killed it.” The “best fighting man on earth today is the trained Japanese soldier.” Pickens was sufficiently perceptive to note that “in the immediate future the resisting Chinese are going to be a far greater threat to white domination in Asia than Japan ever could be.” Repeating a commonly held position among U.S. Negroes, Pickens interpreted the Japanese invasion of China as actually an attempt by Tokyo to toughen fellow Asians so they could better confront white supremacy. “China will no longer be helpless,” he said, “after they get through this ‘training match’ against the Japanese.”50 Pickens was not alone in this view. The Baltimore Afro-American described China as a “kind of ‘Uncle Tom’ of Asia” and asserted that Japan was providing backbone by instructing the Chinese to “stand up straight and be a man.”51
Pickens declared that “if an intelligent American Negro goes to Japan or China, he is lionized,” unlike the routine maltreatment endured in the United States. “No visitor,” he assured, “gets quite the hearty reception that a black American gets from the Orientals.” Pickens wrote about a Negro soldier who had fought in the Philippines and now cowered in “shame and chagrin” at the prospect that a Filipino might ask him, “Why you come here, help white man treat us like you?” Indeed, said Pickens, “When a Moro warrior said that to me, I confess that I felt small.” His conclusion? “Hindered races should make common cause, just as the oppressed classes of all races should make common cause.”52 However, this noble assemblage did not include Chinese fleeing Japanese aggression.
Pickens—neither a leftist nor a Black Nationalist, but a centrist with ties to the NAACP—was probably the most articulate pro-Tokyo intellectual among U.S. Negroes. He was bedazzled by Hawaii, marveling that the “Japanese are the largest single racial element here.” Importantly, “one likes them: they are intelligent, industrious, friendly. There is nothing more agreeable than to go into a restaurant or other shop where Japanese are rendering the services. ‘Can I give you a lift?’ a Japanese woman will say to a strange black man who she sees”; he knew that “people cannot be so friendly in New York—they dare not,” while in Honolulu, by way of contrast, “criminals and dirt cannot flourish here.”53
Months after Pickens’s endorsement of aggression in China, news reports indicated that U.S. Negroes were seeking to enlist in the Japanese air force. Similarly, a Japanese ship set sail for home from Belgium staffed by a Negro crew. “Give us jobs and we will not go to Japan,” was the plea of these prospective pilots. The journalist on the scene saw this as confirmation of the “gradual consolidation of the colored races of the world in opposition to the whites,” though “the instance above is the first in which relations between the Nipponese and Negroes have been disclosed.”54
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What was driving “Nipponese and Negroes” closer together was also an idea that also had arisen in the 1930s: Ethiopia, one of the few independent African nations, would preserve its independence by dint of alliance with Japan. That U.S. Negroes were moved in large numbers to stand in solidarity with Addis Ababa in the face of Italy’s invasion is well-established.55 What is relevant for purposes here is that in 1932 the idea was bruited of a formal alliance—through marriage—of the royal families of Japan and Ethiopia.56 Of course, to even hint at a merger between elite families in Washington and Addis Ababa might have ignited a lynching—or worse. What this suggests is that as Ethiopia gripped the consciousness of U.S. Negroes, alliance with Ethiopia served to further differentiate Tokyo from its European and Euro-American competitors. Even after it became clear that no such betrothal would occur, the rumor continued to resonate. And even after the formation of the Anti-Comintern alliance that linked Tokyo with Berlin and, yes, Rome, in the eyes of some U.S. Negroes this assumed marriage proposal served to distinguish Japan from other imperialist powers. Predictably, many of the pro-Tokyo forces that arose among Negroes were also in fervent solidarity with Ethiopia.
Thus, in 1942 among the U.S. Negroes indicted as a result of their pro-Tokyo stances were those who led a group called—revealingly—the Ethiopia Pacific Movement. According to the indictment, the EPM argued that “Japan is going to win the war and the next leading power in the world will be [the] ‘Rising Sun.’” Thus, “when they tell you to remember Pearl Harbor, you reply ‘Remember Africa.’”57 Then there was the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, organized in 1932 purportedly for the purpose of migration to Liberia. Its leader, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, was also indicted in 1943 for alleged pro-Tokyo activity.58
The ties of intimacy arising between Ethiopia and U.S. Negroes were indicative of a growing identification with Africa, thus buoying Black Nationalism generally. For example, in 1936 a baby named Haile Selassie Stewart was born in Jackson, Mississippi.59 The preceding year, Malaku Bayen, a close relative of the emperor and a graduate of the medical school at Howard University, the capstone of U.S. Negro education, married a U.S. Negro, Dorothy Hadley, formerly of Evanston and Chicago.60 Daniel Alexander, a U.S. Negro, had been in Ethiopia for three decades by 1930. Born in Chicago, he went there as a missionary and married an Ethiopian woman.61
In August 1919 a high-level delegation from Ethiopia arrived in Harlem to confer with a number of leading African American entrepreneurs and scholars. The visitors were pleased to “express the satisfaction we have felt on hearing of the wonderful progress the Africans have made in this country,” while adding memorably, “we want you to remember us after we have returned to our native country.” Eight years later yet another delegation met with the bibliophile Arthur Schomburg and extended an invitation to “American blacks” to come aid this East African nation with their skills as “mechanics, professional men, farmers” and the like.62
In sum, there was a broad and diverse coalition of forces backing Addis, which was made abundantly clear when a thousand clergy in New York City pledged a Sunday of Prayer against Italian aggression in August 1935.63 The popular cleric Daddy Grace urged his 200,000 followers to pray for His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie.64 That same month 20,000 marched through Harlem, one of the largest manifestations in this Negro community in years.65 The “biggest seller in New York” on that day was the tricolor flag of Ethiopia, according to one observer.66 William Pickens declared that actually there were “at least 100,000” on the march in Harlem, while “other hundreds of thousands observed”; this was, he stressed, “the greatest PROTEST AGAINST THE ITALIAN ATTACK ON ETHIOPIA” to be held “anywhere in the world.” There were “at least five miles” of marchers—the “raw stuff out of which revolutions are made.”67
Also in August 1935, fifty North Carolinians of African descent were reported to have “enlisted for service” in Addis: “most of the recruits were former members of the regular army units.”68 Ethiopia’s consul in Manhattan thanked Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for its energetic fund-raising for Addis’s forces.69 John Robinson, a Negro from Chicago, took his piloting skills to Addis, where he became a leader of Ethiopia’s air force. “Scores” more of “American aviators,” as reported in the Negro press, wanted to volunteer too.70 By April 1936 Robinson was touted in the Negro press as the “head of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force.”71 Robinson’s fellow Chicagoans were in the forefront in supplying Ethiopia with medical supplies.72 The Chicago Society for the Aid of Ethiopia sought to send “10,000 cablegrams” to the League of Nations summit on Ethiopia.73
“Sepia Harlem has gone mad,” observed the Negro press in May 1936. “The announcement that Italy has annexed Ethiopia” was the reason. “Nearly every corner of Lennox and Seventh Avenue” was filled with “great crowds assembled to listen to the roar and splutter,” while “yelling ‘Don’t buy from the Wops [sic].’” A “monster parade” ensued.74
Yet also on the military front, it was reported in the Negro press in 1935 that Japan was to provide “arms” and “ammunition” to Addis: “there are many Japanese in this country,” readers were told.75 In 1933 the Negro press had reported that there was a Japanese “plan” for a “coalition with Abyssinia” and to that end, His Imperial Majesty “has surrounded himself with Japanese agricultural, mineralogical and commercial experts.”76 Also featured in the Negro press was the point that not only “Egyptians” but “Japanese” too were “clamor[ing] to get in [the] Ethiopian army.”77 Similarly highlighted was the assertion that Tokyo was to send Addis “as many airplanes or other necessities as are desired and with no strings attached.”78
William Pickens rationalized that “to protect itself from the great ‘White Peril’, Japan has built up a veritable Frankenstein in its Army,” which now could be deployed in Africa.79 The Red Cross unit maintained by Japan in Ethiopia was singled out for praise.80 To that end, the Associated Negro Press (ANP), a consortium of Negro periodicals in the United States, opined that the “utter domination” of Ethiopia by London “would mean better control of her Asiatic possessions and another threat to Japanese expansion,” while “Japanese control of Ethiopia would menace Britain in India and Africa.”81
In St. Louis, in some ways a central headquarters of pro-Tokyo sentiment among Negroes, Toyohiko Kagawa, a famed Japanese Christian leader, addressed an assemblage of ten thousand on the Italian conquest of Ethiopia; he included a critique of Communists for good measure.82
Just as the 1924 immigration exclusion law in the United States served to polarize relations within the republic between those of Japanese origin on the one hand, and Italians, Greeks, and Poles on the other, the war in Ethiopia exacerbated tensions between Italian Americans and U.S. Negroes.83 This was particularly the case after the Negro press reported that Italian Americans in New York City raised a hefty $100,000 for the invaders, along with sleek ambulances.84
In New Orleans Negroes vigorously protested the sight of Italians marching in favor of the invasion. The protesters included the leading Negro academics St. Clair Drake and L. D. Reddick; reportedly, three thousand gathered alongside them to consider “economic sanctions against local Italian merchants in a sign of protest.”85 Such clashes may have driven Denis Sullivan in London to conclude that an “army of 500,000,000 blacks roused because Italy conquered Ethiopia” now threatens “white civilization.” This led him to believe that not the “Yellow Peril” represented by Tokyo but the “Black One”—which included India—was the main danger.86
This polarization had a religious tinge too, which simultaneously tended to forge a kind of Black Nationalism or commonality between Ethiopians and U.S. Negroes. Thus, said the Negro press, “Wahib Pasha, Turkish military genius”—and a Muslim—“who directed Ethiopia’s defense because he hated Italians” was invaluable. “Abyssinia was not conquered by gas, bombs or other modern weapons but by internal revolution.” Thus, said Pasha, “the majority of the chiefs succumbed to Italian bribery and propaganda”; the Negro commentator continued, “If nothing else, this trait of selling out—so often in evidence in America by Negro misleaders—ought to convince skeptics that Ethiopians and Duskyamericans [sic] are members of the same race.”87
Meanwhile, from Johannesburg the U.S. Negro press reported that “the Italo-Ethiopian conflict” could mean “the coup de grace of white imperialism or the beginning of the revolt of the docile [sic] blacks against the encroachment of the land grabbing whites;” this could occur since “pro-Ethiopian feeling [was] pervading all Africans—literate and illiterate,” not unlike the United States itself.88 The war in Ethiopia was the “cause of many attempts at greater cooperation among Africans” in South Africa, according to the U.S. Negro press; “the war has whetted the appetite for reading. It has spurred the quest for information” and was “encouraging the fight against imperialist oppression,” forging “greater solidarity.” Yes, it was noted with satisfaction, “Black South Africa is becoming one.”89 This polarization tended to place Tokyo alongside Addis, Africans generally, and U.S. Negroes particularly against Italy and its European enablers.
Tellingly, decamping to Ethiopia were—unusually—a number of UNIA members. This was unusual because Garvey himself derided His Imperial Majesty as “misguided.”90 Still, this growing list of migrants included Augustinian Bastian of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Harlem, who had been living in Ethiopia since 1933 and had traveled there in a party that included a number of Virgin Islanders.91 The chief motor mechanic in Addis, James Alexander Harte, had lived there for five years though he hailed from British Guiana.92 His presence did not seem to be happenstance when the fact emerged that back in Guiana, plantation workers went on strike in protest against the invasion and were described as “in a tense mood” because of the conflict.93
This tenseness also gripped U.S. Negroes generally and did not bode well for the United States as tensions simultaneously gripped Tokyo-Washington bilateral relations.