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157 8. African American Responses to the Wartime Confinement of Japanese Americans Scholars of United States history and literature have devoted increasing attention over the past generation to the study of past encounters between African Americans and Asian Americans. Beyond the importance of the question in academic terms, the rediscovery of the history of black-Asian relations has a particular urgency about it. Even after the end of the twentieth century, in a world of changing global alliances and power relations, people of African and Asian ancestry in the United States remain widely stereotyped in popular thought as “naturally” and fundamentally opposed, an image that results in good part from simplistic mass media accounts of episodic hostility and violent conflict between black and Korean communities in Los Angeles and elsewhere during the early 1990s. As the United States transforms itself into a society that is no longer majority white Anglo, historical discussion of the various complex ways in which members of the different groups have seen each other and formed intergroup coalitions can help correct some serious and ultimately dangerous misconceptions that foster racial tension and stall joint efforts against discrimination.1 A central element of the historical narrative of interracial connections is missing: the response of African Americans nationwide to the mass exclusion and incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II. Despite the efforts of a handful of scholars who have uncovered various pieces of the question, it remains largely obscure. Not only is it worth looking closely at the reaction of African Americans, the primary racialized group within American society, to the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans, a classic instance of official discrimination informed by race, but the disproportionate support that black communities and individuals offered Japanese Americans proved crucial to the postwar alliance between the two groups in movements for civil rights. In order to address 158 / African American Supporters this gap, I will provide a summary history, and then offer some suggestions of areas for further investigation. In order to put into context the wartime encounters between blacks and Japanese Americans, it should be noted immediately that members of these two groups have come into contact since the dawn of Japanese migration to the United States. For example, Joseph Heco, who was the first Japanese to become an American citizen, saw black slaves during a visit to a plantation near Baltimore in the 1850s, and was fascinated by their strange manners and eccentric dancing.2 Mazumizu Kuninosuke, who came to California in 1869 as a member of the Wakamatsu colony, the first Japanese settlement in the continental United States, married an African American woman in the 1880s, following the settlement’s dissolution.3 Jenichiro Oyabe, who arrived in the United States in 1888, studied alongside black classmates at the African American colleges Hampton Institute and Howard University. Oyabe was in the vanguard of a number of Japanese students and professors who would affiliate with historically black colleges and universities during the twentieth century.4 During the early 1900s there was significant interaction in Pacific coast cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles between the pockets of Japanese American and African American populations.5 In these cities, where restrictive covenants effectively kept Japanese Americans confined in nonwhite districts, a number of Issei settled in homes alongside African Americans and Latinos. In neighborhoods such as Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights, Japanese-operated groceries and restaurants served a partly black clientele. Nisei children attended school and joined in street life with their African American neighbors. Nisei jazz enthusiasts frequented black nightclubs , while Japanese American musicians and bands on the West Coast played together with black colleagues.6 The Japanese press also reprinted statistics on lynchings provided by Tuskegee Institute. The English sections of the Japanese American newspapers Kashu Mainichi and Rafu Shimpo printed reports by Nisei columnists Joe Oyama, Eddie Shimano, Yasuo Sasaki, and Tokumi Hamako, who toured the South and wrote sensitively about Jim Crow conditions (although the coverage was often condescending in its depictions of black southerners). Black lawyers such as Walter Gordon, Loren Miller, and Hugh Macbeth connected with Nisei lawyers in fighting segregation and restrictive covenants. Outside the West Coast, Japanese expatriate intellectuals formed bonds with African Americans. In New York, artist Eitaro Ishigaki painted a black history mural for a Harlem courthouse, while he, Isamu Noguchi, and Hideo Noda each produced artworks of lynchings. Chicagoan Jun Fu- [3.140.185.147] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 21:22 GMT...

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