“[F]or the Rights of Dark People in Every Part of the World”: Pearl Sherrod, Black Internationalist Feminism, and Afro-Asian Politics during the 1930s

Abstract

This article explores the political ideas and activism of Pearl Sherrod, an African American woman who became a leader of The Development of Our Own, a Detroit-based antiracist political movement that sought to unite African Americans with people of color in Asia during the Great Depression. This article demonstrates how Sherrod articulated “black internationalist feminism” by maintaining a commitment to building transnational and transracial political alliances while advancing a feminist agenda. By excavating Sherrod’s life, this article highlights the key role a nonstate female actor played in shaping black internationalist movements during a global economic crisis and within a climate of government repression and censorship.

Keywords::

• black internationalism
• black radicalism
• Afro-Asian solidarity

About the Author

Keisha N. Blain is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Pennsylvania State University. She completed a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2014. Beginning in August 2015, she will be an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Iowa.

Notes

Fiona Paisley, “From Nation of Islam to Goodwill Tourist: African-American Women at Pan-Pacific and South East Asia Women’s Conferences, 1937 and 1955,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32 (2009): 21.

“A Pro-American Appeals for Better Understanding,” Vancouver News Herald, July 23, 1937. On the rhetoric of self-determination, see Erez Manela, A Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

My thinking on black internationalism is deeply informed by the scholarship of Michael O. West, William G. Martin, Fanon Che Wilkins, and others. See West, Martin, and Wilkins, eds., From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1045–1077; James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011).

Here I am drawing on Brenda Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Seminal works on 20th-century black women’s internationalism include Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Bu Dois (New York: New York Press, 2000); Gregg Andrews, Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2011); Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Erik S. McDuffie, “‘For the Full Freedom of … Colored Women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States … ’: Black Women Radicals and the Practice of a Black Women’s International,” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender and the Black International 1 (2012): 1–30.

Seminal works on Afro-Asian solidarity include Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity of Sedition? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Gerald Horne, “Tokyo Bound: African Americans and Japan Confront White Supremacy,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 3, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 16–28; Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen, eds., AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Yukiko Koshio, “Beyond an Alliance of Color: The African American Impact on Modern China,” Positions 11 (Spring 2003): 183–215; Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Robeson Taj Frazier, The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

See Ernest Allen, Jr., “When Japan was Champion of the ‘Darker Races’: Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism,” The Black Scholar 24 (1994): 23–46; Allen, “‘Waiting for Tojo’: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932–1943,” Gateway Heritage (1995): 38–55.

Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998), 292, n. 1. On the black radical tradition, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Seminal works on black women and radical politics include Ula Y. Taylor, “Read[ing] Men and Nations: Women in the Black Radical Tradition,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 1 (Fall 1999): 72–80; Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: the Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Erik S. McDuffie, “‘I Wanted a Communist Philosophy, but I Wanted Us to have a Chance to Organize Our People’: The Diasporic Radicalism of Queen Mother Audley Moore and the Origins of Black Power,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 3 (2010): 181–195; McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Gregg Andrews, Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2011); LaShawn Harris, “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party during the Great Depression,” Journal of African American History 94 (2009): 21–43; Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston : Beacon Press, 2013).

Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 121.

Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1999 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

Ibid., 2.

For the purposes of this article, I am relying on Linda Gordon’s definition of feminism: “a critique of male supremacy, formed and offered in the light of a will to change it, which in turn assumes a conviction that it is changeable.” See Gordon, “What’s New in Women’s History,” in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, ed. Theresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 29.

Nicholas Papastratigakis, Russian Imperialism and Naval Power: Military Strategy and the Build-Up to the Russo-Japanese War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Rotem Kowner, The A to Z of the Russo-Japanese War (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009); Naoko Shimazu, Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Rotem Kowner, Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05 (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2007).

Steven Ericson and Allen Hockley, eds., The Treaty of Portsmouth and its Legacies (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2008).

Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, xxv.

Ibid., 72.

Allen, “When Japan was Champion of the ‘Darker Races,‘” 28–29.

Gerald Horne, Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 43.

William Miller, “Finds Japan Trail in Negro Colony Here,” Cleveland Press, June 3, 1942.

Marc S. Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 97.

Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 31.

Takahashi was also affiliated with the Black Dragon Society, an ultranationalist organization established in 1901 for the primary purpose of obtaining military information to aid Japan’s imperialist ventures. See Allen, “When Japan Was ‘Champion of the Darker Races,‘” 31; Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, 76; David E. Kaplan and Alec DuBro, eds., Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld (Berkley: University of California Press, 2012), 24.

Allen, “When Japan was Champion of the ‘Darker Races,‘” 31.

Quoted in ibid., 32.

Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 284. The actual breakdown of membership along racial lines is unclear.

Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2003), 168.

Erika Lee, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian Exclusion in the Americas,‘’ Pacific Historical Review 76 (2007), 537–562; Eiichiro Azuma, “Japanese Immigrant Settler Colonialism in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands and the U.S. Racial-Imperialist Politics of the Hemispheric ‘Yellow Peril,‘” Pacific Historical Review 83 (2014): 255–276.

Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 34–35; Joe William Trotter, Jr., From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? African Americans, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Victoria Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2001), 167.

Ibid., 169.

Darlene Clark Hine, “The Housewives’ League of Detroit: Black Women and Economic Nationalism,” in Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 130.

Quoted in Allen, “When Japan was Champion of the ‘Darker Races,‘” 33.

Takahashi left his first wife, an Englishwoman by the name of Annie Craddock, during the early 1920s.

1940 U.S. Federal Census, Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, Ancestry.com subscription database, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed November 29, 2013); 1930 U.S. Federal Census, Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, Ancestry.com subscription database, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed November 29, 2013). The author has yet to locate definitive genealogy records on Sherrod’s parents.

1930 U.S. Federal Census, Toledo, Lucas County, Ohio, Ancestry.com subscription database, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed November 29, 2013); 1940 U.S. Federal Census, Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, Ancestry.com subscription database, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed November 29, 2013); 1930 U.S. Federal Census, Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, Ancestry.com subscription database, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed November 29, 2013).

James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Joe William Trotter, Jr., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions on Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

1930 U.S. Federal Census, Toledo, Lucas County, Ohio, Ancestry.com subscription database, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed November 29, 2013); West Virginia, Marriages Index, 1785–1971, Ancestry.com subscription database, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed November 29, 2013). It is unclear why Pearl Sherrod separated from her husband.

Turner, Islam in the African American Experience, 168.

Erdmann Doane Beynon, “The Vodoo Cult among Negro Migrants in Detroit,” American Journal of Sociology 43, no. 6 (May 1938): 894–907.

Claude Andrew Clegg, III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Edward Curtis, Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002); Turner, Islam in the African American Experience.

On black patriarchy in the UNIA see, Barbara Bair, “‘Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands Unto God’: Laura Kofey and the Gendered Vision of Redemption in the Garvey Movement,” in A Mighty Baptism: Race, Gender, and the Creation of American Protestantism, eds. Susan Juster and Lisa MacFarlane (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1996); Barbara Bair, “True Women, Real Men: Gender, Ideology and Social Roles in the Garvey Movement,” in Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History, eds. Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Karen Adler, “‘Always Leading Our Men in Service and Sacrifice’: Amy Jacques Garvey, Feminist Black Nationalist,” Gender and Society 6 (1992): 346–375.

Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer 1966): 151–174. On women in the NOI, see Bayyinah S. Jeffries, A Nation Can Rise No Higher Than Its Women: African American Muslim Women in the Movement for Black Self-Determination, 1950–1975 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014); Dawn Marie-Gibson and Jamillah Karim, eds., Women of the Nation: Between Black Protest and Sunni Islam (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

Ula Taylor, “As-salaam Alaikum, My Sister, Peace Be Unto You: The Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Women Who Followed Him,” Race and Society 1, no. 2 (1998): 179.

Ibid.

Gibson and Karim, Women of the Nation, 2.

Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, eds. Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African American Anthology (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 402.

Quoted in Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Black Man in America (Chicago: Muhammad Mosque of Islam No. 2 1965, 1973), 156.

See Ernest Allen, Jr., “Identity and Destiny: The Formative Views of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam,” in Muslims on the Americanization Path?, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito (Atlanta: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones, eds., Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 248.

Allen, “When Japan was Champion of the ‘Darker Races,‘” 32.

For references to TDOO women in secretarial positions, see “Nab Jap Who Preached Anti-Nordic Creed,” Chicago Defender, July 8, 1939; “Jap Organizer Gets Three Years in Federal Pen,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 7, 1939; “Jap Dreamer of Dark Empire Held,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 8, 1939.

Leon W. Taylor, “Japanese Propaganda Among American Negroes,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 18, 1943. The identity of this woman activist is unclear. While Taylor may have been referring to Sherrod, it is also possible that he was describing the activities of Dolores De Angelo, the wife of Ashima Takis who was featured in an earlier newspaper article. See William Miller, “Finds Japan Trail in Negro Colony Here,” Cleveland Press, June 3, 1942.

Ibid.

Quoted in Allen, “When Japan was Champion of the ‘Darker Races,‘” 33.

Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–4.

Ibid., 3–4.

Allen, “When Japan was Champion of the ‘Darker Races,‘” 34.

“Local Woman Weds Japanese Officer,” Detroit Tribune Independent, April 21, 1934.

On Amy Jacques Garvey, see Ula Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

Allen, “When Japan was Champion of the ‘Darker Races,‘”35.

“Local Woman Weds Japanese Officer,” Detroit Tribune Independent, April 21, 1934.

Mrs. P.T. Takahashi, “Development of Our Own,” Detroit Tribune Independent, June 16, 1934.

Mrs. P.T. Takahashi, “Development of Our Own,” Detroit Tribune Independent, May 5, 1934.

Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994).

Mrs. P.T. Takahashi, “Development of Our Own,” Detroit Tribune Independent, June 16, 1934.

Ibid (emphasis added).

Douglass Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

West, Martin, and Wilkins, From Toussaint to Tupac, xi.

Darryl C. Thomas, The Theory and Practice of Third World Solidarity (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001).

Mrs. P. T. Takahashi, “Development of Our Own,” Detroit Tribune Independent, June 16, 1934.

Ransby, Eslanda, 294, n. 12.

Ho and Mullen, Afro Asia, 5.

Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China.

Willie Jenkins, Detroit Tribune Independent, June 9, 1934.

Mrs. P.T. Takahashi, “Development of Our Own,” Detroit Tribune Independent, May 5, 1934 (emphasis added).

Mrs. P.T. Takahashi, “Development of Our Own,” Detroit Tribune Independent, June 16, 1934 (emphasis added).

McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 58–90.

Mrs. P.T. Takahashi, “Development of Our Own,” Detroit Tribune Independent, May 5, 1934.

Mrs. P.T. Takahashi to Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, June 11, 1934 (Exhibit 167), The Development of Our Own, FBI file no. 65-562-109. All FBI files cited in this article were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Ibid (emphasis added).

(On Mittie Maude Lena Gordon’s pro-emigration campaign, see Michael Fitzgerald, “‘We Have Found a Moses’: Theodore Bilbo, Black Nationalism, and the Greater Liberia Bill of 1939,” Journal of Southern History 63, no. 2 (May 1997): 293–320.

Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp, eds., Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 9.

Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism, 35.

McDuffie, “For the Full Freedom of … Colored Women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States,” 11.

“Heteropatriarchy” refers to the social hierarchy that recognizes male over female; and hetereosexual over homosexual. See Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing,” in Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology, eds. Andrea Smith, Beth E. Ritchie, and July Sudbury (Cambridge: South End Press, 2006), 66–73.

Allen, “When Japan was Champion of the ‘Darker Races,‘” 36.

“Dinner Party,” Chicago Defender, October 31, 1936.

The Development of Our Own, FBI file no. 65-562-109.

On radical women activists and the politics of respectability, see LaShawn Harris, “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party during the Great Depression,” Journal of African American History 94 (2009): 21–43.

“Local Woman Weds Japanese Officer,” Detroit Tribune-Independent, April 21, 1934.

1940 U.S. Census Records for Detroit, Michigan; Enumeration District: 84–30; Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Ancestry.com subscription database, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed November 29, 2013). To date, the author has yet to locate any concrete evidence to suggest that Sherrod was ever a student or employee of the Tuskegee Institute.

See Marie W. Dallam, Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer (New York: New York University, 2007).

Elin Diamond, ed., Performance and Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1996).

Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson, eds., Recovering the Black Female Body: Self Representations by African American Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

Ibid., 5.

Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 3.

Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

McDuffie, “For the Full Freedom of … Colored Women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States,” 7.

Paisley, “From Nation of Islam,” 21.

Women of the Pacific: A Record of the Proceedings of the Fourth Triennial Conference of the Pan Pacific Women’s Association, Vancouver, Canada, July 1937, Women and Social Movements, International database, http://wasi.alexanderstreet.com/ (accessed December 4, 2013), 4.

Ibid., 20.

Fiona Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 207.

Ibid.

1937 Diary, Elsie Andrews Papers, MS 312, Puke Ariki, Taranaki Museum, New Plymouth, New Zealand (digitized version), 56.

“A Pro-American Appeals for Better Understanding,” Vancouver News Herald, July 23, 1937.

Allen, “When Japan was Champion of the ‘Darker Races,‘” 44, n. 75.

Ibid.

1937 Diary, Elsie Andrews Papers, MS 312, Puke Ariki, Taranaki Museum, New Plymouth, New Zealand (digitized version), 56. On Ida B. Wells, see Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009).

“A Pro-American Appeals for Better Understanding,” Vancouver News Herald, July 23, 1937 (emphasis added).

Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific, 204.

Paisley, “From Nation of Islam,” 23.

Ibid.

Robert A. Hill, FBI’s Racon: Racial Conditions in the United States during World War II (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 515.

1940 U.S. Census Records for Detroit, Michigan; Enumeration District: 84-30; Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Ancestry.com subscription database, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed November 29, 2013).

The Development of Our Own, FBI file no. 65-562-109; On Idlewild, see Ronald J. Stephens, The Rise, Decline, and Rebirth of a Unique African American Resort Town (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013).