Title: Inspiration from the East: Black Arkansans Look to Japan
Abstract: ON A TUESDAY EVENING, AUGUST 21, 1934, a plantation manager, accompanied by a deputy sheriff, broke up a meeting at Clear Lake Church in rural Mississippi County, Arkansas. They carted off four people-an Asian man, his Mexican wife, and two black men-to jail in Blytheville, where they were tried a few days later on the charge of anarchy and convicted. Their crime had been to attempt to organize black residents of Mississippi County into a chapter of the Original Independent Benevolent African Pacific Movement of the World, a group that looked to Japan as the protector of the colored races. The Justice Department even sent an agent to Blytheville to review the case. Eight years later, in the months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, another federal agent came to Mississippi County to investigate whether the local black population might harbor a pro-Japan fifth column. The 1934 events, occurring over a couple of weeks in the northeastern corner of Arkansas, might seem curious and insignificant from the perspective of today. But this small local story sheds light on some significant themes in southern history during the Great Depression. It may surprise us that some black sharecroppers in depression-plagued Arkansas looked to Japan for inspiration or solace and also that whites would fear a conspiracy between Asians and the local black population. While information that would allow us to penetrate very far into the psychology of those who joined the Pacific Movement is lacking, one can infer from the movement's existence a remarkable degree of race consciousness and international awareness among black farmers in northeastern Arkansas. Even more clearly, we can see a high degree of white paranoia about any attempt to organize black people at the nadir of the Great Depression, and, after Pearl Harbor, a fear of disloyalty among African Americans when the United States was at war. Race consciousness among rural black Arkansans did not appear out of thin air in 1934. For decades, black men and women in the cotton fields-not just in towns-had displayed a surprising degree of activism and interest in a world beyond America. In another work, I have described how in the late 1800s Arkansas became the nerve center within the United States for a black migration movement to Africa. Around 700 black Arkansans actually emigrated to Liberia in the last quarter of the century, and they inspired fascination with the dark among those left behind. One manifestation of this interest in Africa was mission work. As foreign mission work was getting into full gear in the 1890s, a quarter of black American missionaries to the African continent hailed from Arkansas.1 Arkansas's African emigration movement was a form of resistance to white oppression and an expression of black nationalism. The movement directed people of color to separate from white America to an all-black world of Liberia, and, if that were not possible, to remove to all-black towns opening up in the 1890s in what would later become Oklahoma. By the 1920s, this black nationalism resurfaced in Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In addition to the notions of separation and race consciousness, Garvey enshrined Liberia as a destination for black settlers and symbol of a successful black state.2 Until recently, people have considered Garvey's UNIA, with its headquarters in Harlem, primarily as a northern urban movement, somehow neglecting the fact that most black residents of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York in the 1920s had recently arrived from the rural South. But Mary Rolinson, in Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920-1927, has demonstrated that the movement flourished in the cotton belt, particularly in the same area of eastern Arkansas that had been on fire for African emigration thirty years before. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which emphasized integration and equality of the races, had branches in only five Arkansas towns in the 1920s. …
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 3
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