After Camp by Robinson Greg

Author:Robinson, Greg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

Another reason for [their] indifference to the Japanese removal was more subtle but was more profoundly felt. The Japanese were not whitefolks. Their eyes, language, and customs belied the white skin and proved to their dark successors that since they didn't have to be feared, neither did they have to be considered. All this was decided unconsciously.15

Meanwhile, the institutional leadership was silent. The vast majority of black newspapers, like their mainstream white counterparts, failed to speak out on behalf of Japanese Americans in the weeks following the proclamation of Executive Order 9066. As Cheryl Greenberg points out, neither the NAACP nor the National Urban League took any official position against the order. Like many liberal church groups, Jewish groups, and civil rights organizations (including the American Civil Liberties Union), the national NAACP declined to oppose the Roosevelt administration in a time of war. Indeed, when Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas, the only nationwide political figure to oppose mass removal, asked NAACP executive secretary Walter White to sign a petition to President Roosevelt protesting Executive Order 9066, White put him off with the excuse that he would have to be granted permission by the association's board of directors to take such a step. The NAACP's 1942 annual convention considered a resolution calling attention to the racial bias inherent in the evacuation, but did not formally approve it.16

In fact, a number of local blacks initially welcomed mass removal. John Robert Badger, West Coast correspondent of the Chicago Defender newspaper, approved the imprisonment of “disloyal” Japanese as a chance for native-born citizens to show their loyalty.17 Other African American supporters of removal were motivated by economic considerations, as was the case in 1924. The directors of the Los Angeles National Negro Business League opportunistically seized on the dispossession of the Issei and Nisei as a chance for blacks to take their place and gain a foothold in California agriculture. Editor Charlotta Bass of the California Eagle, the leading black paper in Los Angeles, served as a platform for this view (a stand she later recanted), as did the smaller Los Angeles Sentinel. William Greenwell, head of the NAACP's Salinas branch, favored the recruitment of African American farmers to replace confined Nikkei, and he invited Assistant National Secretary Roy Wilkins to visit the West Coast in spring 1942 to facilitate the process. Wilkins soon decided that such a policy would be impracticable as well as undesirable, since it would not increase overall African American economic opportunity.18

Notwithstanding the lack of collective action, individual blacks, especially those from cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York where there was prewar contact between the two groups, began fighting on behalf of Japanese Americans even before Executive Order 9066 was declared. A few individuals, such as longtime resident Samuel Thompson of Los Angeles, spoke out publicly in favor of equal treatment for Japanese Americans The weekly Los Angeles Tribune, smallest of the three African American newspapers in the City of Angels, speedily opposed the order.19Los Angeles attorney Hugh E.

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