Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: When a lynching occurred in Sikeston, Missouri, on January 25, 1942, the black-oriented newspaper Louisville Defender published a cartoon that depicted Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese emperor Hirohito peeking into a white mob burning a black man and Hitler telling Mussolini and Hirohito: “Boys! That’s Democracy a la USA.” Although the article appeared slightly before the Pittsburgh Courier launched its famous “Double V Campaign”—victory over fascism abroad and victory over Jim Crow at home, such a notion had been already shared among black people. The Sikeston lynching became a new symbol for their two-front war. The St. Louis branch of the NAACP made anti-lynching signs, one of which read: “‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ But Don’t Forget Sikeston.”

This presentation examines how African American anti-lynching struggles of the 1930s and 1940s utilized international references to lynching to advance their cause at home. By looking at various black newspapers and periodicals, this paper elucidates the way anti-lynching discourse changed under the influence of the wartime international situation. It particularly focuses on how African Americans treated the anti-lynching responses of the Japanese, whose status shifted from “a leader of the darker races” to a wartime enemy over the decade. In so doing, the paper illuminates how such anti-lynching discourse reflected African Americans’ efforts to redefine the black body as a national being that was both black and American.

Anti-lynching activists believed that international protests against American racism helped raise the consciousness of the American public who were reluctant to support anti-lynching campaigns. Before World War II when the black press reported nations abroad criticizing lynching in the U.S., they favorably reported the Japanese anti-lynching protests. As World War II approached, however, the image of the major Axis Powers—Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan—as an enemy to American democracy played a significantly different role in the anti-lynching campaign. African American newspapers and periodicals not only made a direct parallel between American racism and Nazism and condemned the hypocrisy of American democracy they were fighting for. They also repeatedly warned the U.S. public and government that lynchings were providing perfect propaganda for the Axis Powers, as seen in the cartoon of Sikeston lynching. Since Japan was lumped together with Italy and Germany as a proponent of fascism, African Americans tried to distance themselves from the Japanese, who had been their colored comrades for decades, thus redefined themselves as American citizens. On the other hand, it was Americans, not the Nazi, that reminded African Americans of the continuous racism at home under the wartime condition, because neither German Americans nor Italian Americans, only Japanese Americans, were put into the American concentration camps. In their two-front war, African Americans struggled to find an answer to what it meant to be black, and contested what it meant to be American.