Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism

Abstract

ABSTRACTDuring World War II, some 125 African Americans were arrested for resisting the draft or for exercising seditious behavior. The twenty or so persons held on the more serious charges included Elijah Muhammad of the Allah Temple of Islam, a religious association; Mittie Maud Lena Gordon of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, an African repatriation movement in the Garvey tradition; the Rev. Ethelbert A. Broaster of the International Reassemble of the Church of Freedom League, Inc., a black Hebrew organization; and Bishop David D. Erwin and General Lee Butler, leaders of the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, an emigrationist group. The arrests brought to light the existence of strong, pro-Japanese sentiments among African Americans that the authorities, not to mention black middle-class spokespersons, quickly dismissed as the uttering of a small number of fanatics.The reality, however, was that pro-Japan feelings among black workers as well as the black middle class had been building since the turn of the century, following Japan's celebrated victory over the Russian fleet. This mood was given greater impetus during the worst years of the Great Depression by the appearance in Detroit of a Japanese national known as Major Satokata Takahashi, who took command of an association known as The Development of Our Own.Mr. Takahashi's initial organizing activities in Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis, and the “ripple effects” therefrom, led to the messianic expectation on the part of tens of thousands of African Americans throughout the midwest, the upper and lower Mississippi Delta, east-central Oklahoma and the New York-New Jersey region that Japan's imperial army would free them from the ravages of American racism. Through the employ of newspaper articles, FBI documents, military intelligence reports, and court records the author has reconstructed a history which, up until the present, had been almost completely forgotten.