Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective

Lynching across the Pacific: Japanese Views and African American Responses in the Wartime Antilynching Campaign

LynchingacrossthePacific Japanese Views and African American Responses in the Wartime Antilynching Campaign Fumiko Sakashita O n January 25, 1942, a mob lynched Cleo Wright, an African American cotton mill worker in Sikeston, Missouri, for rape. Described by antilynching organizations as “the first lynching after Pearl Harbor,” the Sikeston lynching became a new symbol for African Americans’ two-front war—fighting fascism abroad while fighting Jim Crow at home. On February 26, a month after the incident, the Saint Louis and Saint Louis County branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) protested the Sikeston lynching with a silent parade. The Pittsburgh Courier reported that the protestors carried several antilynching signs with such messages as “Stop Lynching and Pass the Anti-Lynch Bill” and “V for Victory Abroad and V for Victory at Home.” A picture captured the protestors and their signs, one of which read: “‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ But Don’t Forget Sikeston.”1 The strategy of placing domestic injustices in an international context had long been utilized by African American antilynching activists, dating back to Ida B. Wells’s campaign in Britain in 1893–94 that aroused British public sentiment against lynching to influence American society. Such efforts mounted in the 1930s and 1940s as the country fought Nazism and fascism. The black press and leaders constantly reminded the public that international audiences, particularly those in enemy countries, saw lynching as an American disgrace. They warned the government that lynching armed Hitler and his allies—Italy and Japan—with a powerful propaganda weapon against the United States. But did these enemy countries in fact use lynching for Axis propaganda, 182 Fumiko Sakashita as antilynching activists claimed? The purpose of this essay is to explore Japanese views on the issues of lynching and race in the United States from the late 1910s to the 1940s and African American responses to them. How did the wartime enemy countries see American lynching? How were their views on lynching formed over time? And in what way did African Americans react to their reporting of American lynching? The Japanese people today, who use the word rinchi (“lynch” in Japanese pronunciation) to describe collective violence in general, have little awareness of the term’s original American context. In the early twentieth century when lynching was a contemporary social problem in the United States, however, Japanese books, newspaper accounts , and editorials kept the nation well informed about American lynching and racial friction. Ongoing international developments, such as the defeat of Japan’s racial equality proposal at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924, and the Manchurian incident in 1931, helped promote Japanese interest in American lynching. Diverse Japanese commentators from leftists to ultranationalists criticized lynching from their own perspectives. While the Japanese media paid only intermittent attention to American lynching, it nevertheless proved an effective tool in promoting Japan’s domestic and international political goals. After reviewing various Japanese narratives on American lynching, I further demonstrate how African Americans’ antilynching discourse changed as their country moved toward war with Japan. Black newspapers and periodicals strategically shifted their antilynching rhetoric as their view of Japan changed from “a leader of the darker races” to wartime enemy. Admittedly, unlike Wells’s campaign, which physically crossed over national boundaries, most antilynching efforts discussed in this essay were transnational only on the discursive level. However, the wartime antilynching discourse, just like other antiracist utterance, helps us understand how African Americans created the discursive counterpublic sphere in which they struggled to redefine the black body as both black and American. The unique wartime status of the Japanese and their antilynching views played a complex yet important role in forming African American antilynching narratives. Earlier Japanese Views on American Lynching A concept of lynching had existed in Japan long before the Japanese learned the American term lynching, according to the leftist journalist Gaikotsu Mi- Lynching across the Pacific 183 yatake, who in 1922 published a book entitled Shikei Ruisan (Compiled story on lynching), a collection of stories on reported lynching mainly in Japan but also around the world. Miyatake stated that “shikei” (私刑), which literally meant private persecution in Japanese, originated in China, reaching Japan by the 1680s. He further explained to his readers that in Europe and America “it [shikei] was generally called ‘lynch’ or ‘lynching,’” and quoted its definition from Encyclopedia Britanica.2 It was around the 1920s when the...