Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity by Gerald Horne

Author:Gerald Horne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Asia, HIS000000 History / General, Japan, Modern, History, 20th Century
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2018-01-15T01:01:45.540000+00:00

Negroes are not surprised at these turnabouts employed by the white Americans in evaluating and devaluating the Chinese and Japanese. . . . [Negroes] know that anytime white Americans praise colored people it is only a temporary move at best and furthermore, from actual experience Negroes know that the average white man is out to [feather] his own nest.35

That is, Chinese were now being hailed as allies and Japanese denigrated—but it would not take long, it was thought, for a reversal of fortune to occur. There was little surprise when during the war, Chinese students were allowed to study aviation at a Georgia university while Negroes were barred.36 While think tanks in Virginia were conferring with Chinese, Thais, Indians, and other Asians about Tokyo’s attempt to “promote racial friction between the white race and Asiatics,” Negroes, per usual, were being segregated invidiously.37 Such stances did not enhance patriotic cohesiveness during the war.

***

In July 1942, as pro-Tokyo Negroes were under surveillance and under arrest, C. L. Dellums, chair of the NAACP Legal Committee and a trade union activist, felt compelled to address Walter White, the group’s leader. “Early last month,” he began, “several Day Coaches were filled to capacity with Japanese, most of whom were Americans and sent to San Antonio”; the cars were “not air-conditioned” and the detainees were “not . . . allowed to have any windows raised” as they “suffered terribly” for “four full days” before arriving at their destination. Yet “the guards, soldiers who went along with this trip, had a Pullman with every comfort. Even white people now are talking, [since] all restrictions were removed from not only the Italian and German Americans but Italian and German aliens.”38

Moving promptly, White told U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle, “I greatly fear that stories” such as that recounted by Dellums “could and would be used by the Japanese” to “create bitterness against the United Nations.”39 But this intervention had little impact on U.S. policy. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem warned that “race haters” were “fomenting dissension not only against Japanese Americans but against Negroes” too on the Pacific Coast with the aim of seeking to create a “white” coast cleansed of both stigmatized groups.40

Herbert Hill, a leading NAACP official, collected documents on the internment, perhaps alert to the precedent that it created for his constituency. His collection included a May 1943 “confidential” memorandum from the U.S. military on the Pacific Coast that conceded that “some suspension of the civil rights of the United States born Japanese” was occurring, but since it “was an orderly suspension,” it was presumably acceptable. The memorandum’s author asserted that “Axis propaganda was now wholly ineffective on this count,” an overstatement at best; thus, “if Japanese were returned to the coast there would doubtless be rioting and bloodshed with a consequent disorderly suspension of civil rights having the flavor of a race war” (emphasis in the original).41 In the language of the law, this was not only handing a “heckler’s veto” to those opposed to civil liberties but a murderer’s veto as well.

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