From Du Bois to Obama: African American Intellectuals in the Public Forum

2. Black Intellectuals and the Quest for Legitimacy: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Expenditure of Moral Capital

32 [ 2 ] Black Intellectuals and the Quest for Legitimacy: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Expenditure of Moral Capital America was in the midst of war. Nazi Germany’s expansionist takeover of Europe, the attack on Pearl Harbor by an equally expansionist Japan in the East, and the fascist government of Italy that in the 1930s had attacked Ethiopia made for a triumvirate that seriously threatened civilization and world peace. While the United States reacted strongly to the December 1941 attack by Japan, the declaration of war on Germany and the rest of the Axis powers might almost have seemed an afterthought. From the perspective of many African American intellectuals, World War II was a war about race, colonialism, segregation, and the possibilities for liberation from these forms of oppression. Adolf Hitler’s Aryan ideology displayed in every way possible a contempt of Africandescended people and Jewish people. The systematic plan for Germany to expand in order to have lebensraum (living space) for its people led to the willful policy of mass extermination of Jews and represented the horrific logical conclusion of eugenics and statist racism. It was no wonder that most African American intellectuals and political leaders ultimately endorsed the “double V”: victory over Germany and victory over segregation at home.1 And yet for many African American intellectuals, the response to Japan was more complex. Japan, before Pearl Harbor and as far back as the early years of the twentieth century, had represented something %DQQHU+DOH\&KLQGG $0 The Quest for Legitimacy 33 more positive: a people of color who, as a nation, had marshaled strength and assertiveness to match almost anything that the West had produced. Overlooked by many was the fact that Japan harbored some vile racist attitudes of their own toward Koreans and Chinese peoples. Their belief in their own supremacy saw them at the top of the Asian peoples and was not unlike the way that the British saw themselves vis-à-vis other European nations.2 Because Japan, unlike Germany, made some overtures to black Americans and because in certain sectors of black America there was a strong belief in an Afro-Asiatic connection, black intellectuals appeared willing to, long before America’s entry into war, to give Japan some benefit of the doubt. However, the responses after the United States began gearing up for the war were for the most part mixed.3 Japanese propaganda to African America was intense during the 1930s and for the most part well received. Tinged with a racialism that appealed to a black nationalism that hungered for a model of fortitude and self-respect, Japan represented a nation that stood apart from and yet saw itself equal to any of the Western powers but the British Empire in particular. In the United States, Japanese envoys such as Hikida Yasuichi, Naka Nakene, a Japanese activist, and Masao Dodo, a Japanese journalist, among others, spoke at black rallies and lived in black communities to point out racial affinity and solidarity.4 On the West Coast, African American newspapers such as the California Eagle were, for the most part, pro-Japan. There was an attempt on the part of the black press in this region to portray Japanese people as a group that black people should emulate. Even on the East Coast, the sentiment of group solidarity rang out in Harlem’s Amsterdam News. Just about the only black sector of reservation regarding Japan came from the Left.5 African American intellectuals and political activists, whether in the Communist Party, sympathetic to the Party, or who otherwise held progressive beliefs, saw the Japanese as one of the Axis powers, whose ideology rested on a virulent racism. As difficult as it may have been to go against what many black Americans have felt about Japan and a supposed “Afro-Asiatic connection,” Japan’s imperialist designs and racial supremacist views were unacceptable. On the West Coast, the black Left watched the Japanese propaganda movement in the black community as closely as the FBI did. What they saw made them very concerned. But matters would become even murkier as events in Europe unfolded in the late 1930s and early ’40s.6 %DQQHU+DOH\&KLQGG $0 The Quest for Legitimacy 34 Hitler’s nonaggression pact with Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union caused the American Left to align with the Popular Front, which denounced the West’s imperialist approach...