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Chapter 9: The Los Angeles Defender: Hugh E. Macbeth and Japanese Americans
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171 9. The Los Angeles Defender Hugh E. Macbeth and Japanese Americans The long history of relations between Asian Americans and African Americans has been marked by a complex succession of interactions, in which individuals have at different times expressed curiosity, disdain, admiration, hostility, envy, affection, rivalry, xenophobia, and sympathy for the other. Probably the most common sentiment has been indifference—members of these two population groups have simply not been in a position either to make trouble for the other group or to do them much good. Historians have only begun to document some of the striking, if less common, incidences of mutual support and friendship between blacks and Asians. One of the most notable cases of such collaboration was occasioned by the wartime removal and incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans . The arbitrariness and race-based nature of the government’s actions toward a group of nonwhite American citizens and residents struck a responsive chord among many African Americans. Conversely, the disproportionate presence of blacks among critics and opponents of the government ’s policy helped to inspire a lasting bond with many Nisei, and to draw representatives of the two groups together in postwar legal struggles for civil rights. Perhaps the most outstanding black supporter of the rights of Japanese Americans during World War II was Hugh E. Macbeth,1 an attorney in Los Angeles who was executive secretary of the California Race Relations Commission. An early and fervent advocate for equal justice, Macbeth dedicated himself to fighting Executive Order 9066 through fact-finding, lobbying, and public speeches. The legal challenges he helped bring, though unsuccessful in reversing the policy, ultimately resulted in an important postwar victory for Japanese Americans. 172 / African American Supporters Hugh Ellwood Macbeth had a colorful and slightly checkered prewar career. He was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1884, the oldest of eight children. His father, Arthur Macbeth, the son of a Scottish immigrant father and a free black mother, was a pioneering black portrait photographer . (A Macbeth family legend claims that Arthur Macbeth’s mother had been sired by the Bullochs, the family of Theodore Roosevelt’s mother, and certainly Arthur Macbeth strongly suggests TR in his photos, which show him with mustache and pince-nez.) In 1905, after attending Avery Normal School and Fisk University, the young Hugh decided to become a lawyer. As he later told the tale, he decided to attend Harvard University. Ignorant of the admissions process, he traveled to Cambridge and managed to see the law dean, James Baer Ames. Ames initially refused to admit him, explaining that Macbeth would do better at Tuskegee— Harvard, he explained, trained lawyers for “leadership in railroads, banks, and big business.” Macbeth then explained that he wished to study at Harvard in order to find out why colored people had lived in the United States for 300 years without sharing in the leadership of big business. Dean Ames then relented and admitted him, stating, “Young man, you have won your first law case.” After graduating from Harvard in 1908, Hugh Macbeth married, had a child, and settled in Baltimore, where his father had moved the family and established his photography business. Unable to support himself through the law, he first worked for a shoe company, and subsequently assumed editorship of a new African American newspaper, the Baltimore Advocate (later known as the Baltimore Times). During his tenure on the newspaper , Macbeth stirred up controversy through his attacks on local ministers and political figures. He also sparked opposition among the black community ’s solidly Republican leadership by supporting Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party candidacy and attending the party’s convention (at least until Roosevelt excluded black delegates from the convention). These were the first demonstrations of the maverick style and shifting political stance that were to characterize his entire career. In 1913, Macbeth gave up management of the paper and headed west to Los Angeles, then still a growing city of some 400,000, including perhaps 10,000 blacks. He praised the city enthusiastically to his wife as “God’s Country.”2 The couple’s happiness was shadowed in 1914 when their young daughter was killed in an automobile accident; a second child, Hugh Macbeth Jr., was born in 1919. In the decades following his move to Los Angeles , Macbeth became an important player in local law and politics, although [18.191.21.86] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:18 GMT) The Los Angeles Defender / 173 lack of available sources...