The Messenger, page 15
The setbacks Muhammad suffered after the McQueen affair left him scrambling for a way to hold on to his cult. He was receiving so many death threats that he spent most of his time shuttling back and forth between Chicago and Washington. In Chicago, he used several aliases, among them Ghulam Bogans (Bogans was the surname of his brother-in-law, Aaron).27 In Washington, he used another set of aliases, including Charles Evans, Mohammed Rassoull, and the Prophet, as well as Ghulam Bogans. Although he had established a small temple in Washington and held on to a small following in Chicago, neither provided him with enough money to feed his own family, let alone to help less fortunate members of the NOI. In 1938, he suffered the indignity of having to apply for welfare assistance, and gave his name as Ghulam Bogans. As the Social Security system was still in its infancy, welfare workers had little reason to doubt him, and even fewer means of verifying his identity.28
Although Takahashi was personally responsible for some of Muhammad’s woes, he provided support that caused Muhammad to quickly forget his grievances. Besides, Muhammad knew that he would have lost followers even without the controversy surrounding the sacrificial slaying episode. He had simply been unable to come up with anything to replace Fard. In an attempt to reinvigorate and usurp the leadership of the NOI, Takahashi began circulating flyers around Paradise Valley that echoed Fard’s prophecies regarding the War of Armageddon.
“Japan’s new policy,” he wrote in one flyer, “is to establish a new epoch in world history by leading the darker majority of mankind to a new life founded on international justice.”29 He promised Muhammad’s followers that in exchange for the NOI’s support of the Japanese war effort, Japan would build a single-family detached home in Hawaii and provide lifelong employment for every family as soon as America was defeated. Like the NOI, the SDOO had also fallen on hard times. A third black organization, based in New York and headed by Sufi Abdul Hamid, competed with Muhammad and Takahashi for members in Harlem. The New York Times and other mainstream media had labeled the politically astute Hamid “Harlem’s Hitler”30 because of his economic boycotts of white and Jewish merchants who refused to hire blacks. From a small band of followers who joined his organization in 1935 after a Harlem riot that he was accused of instigating, his group had grown so large that by 1937 it was second only to Father Divine’s Peace Movement in membership.31
Three months before he was killed when his J-5 Cessna crashed near a Long Island highway, Hamid relocated his cult, the Buddhist Universal Holy Temple of Tranquillity, Inc., into a spacious office building that he had bought for cash. But even before his death on July 31, 1938, his appeal to blacks had been ebbing. He had surrounded himself with a group of white advisers, notably Fred Burkhardt and Kay Price, the latter serving as his personal secretary, with whom he was rumored to be having an affair. In the days following his death, his organization started to fall apart amid media speculation that the source of his wealth was payoffs from Harlem merchants for calling off picketing against their establishments.32 Hamid had been the last obstacle that Takahashi had to overcome in his effort to garner the support of Harlem’s black nationalists.
The other roadblock in Harlem, Father Divine, was eliminated in April 1937, when Divine’s estranged wife, a Caucasian known as Faithful Mary, called a press conference in which she labeled Divine a confidence man.33 She told reporters that she planned to write a book in support of her claim that Divine’s movement had been a fraud from its inception. She said that Divine had never really been concerned about helping the poor, and that he was only using them to enrich himself. Recently, she said, he had tried to coax her into turning over the deeds to the sect’s hundreds of acres of land in Ulster County called the “Promised-land.” Divine wanted her to promise the land to him exclusively, she said, leading to a violent argument and her decision to break away from his movement.34
Even more serious allegations followed closely on the heels of the dissolution of Divine’s marriage. One of his senior assistants, John the Revelator, had been indicted in Los Angeles for Mann Act violations. According to the indictment, he had forced a juvenile member of the sect into becoming his concubine and into prostitution by telling her that she was the reincarnation of Mary, Mother of Jesus, and that she would give birth to a messiah. At the same time, Divine was facing prosecution on criminal charges that he knowingly used coal that had been stolen from a supplier in Pennsylvania to drive the furnaces in some of his buildings.35
Finally, an elderly woman by the name of Jessie Birdsall had filed a civil complaint in New York against Divine in which she alleged that he had bilked her out of her life savings of $2,000 by promising to provide her with “social security” payments for the rest of her life. When she confronted him after the first payment failed to arrive as promised, he told her that she had misunderstood him and that her $2,000 was gone, but that he would make good on his promise to care for her.36 But this time she didn’t buy his line.
On April 20, 1937, a process server attempted to serve a summons on Birdsall’s lawsuit while Divine was delivering a sermon to a crowd of 2,500 at his Harlem Heaven church. When several ushers were unable to prevent the server from approaching the pulpit, one of them pulled a knife and stabbed the man while Divine watched from the pulpit. Divine escaped through a rear exit, but police found him the next day after receiving a tip that he was hiding out in Milford, Connecticut. According to press accounts, Divine first tried to “invisibilize” himself by hiding behind a furnace in the basement of the Milford house.
At a court hearing after his arrest, Divine told the judge that he had never professed to be God or any supernatural being. His public confession proved too embarrassing even for his most devout followers. The movement survived, though membership—particularly among black males and whites—decreased significantly.37
The way was thus open for the rise of the PME, the Pan-African organization founded in 1935 in New York by a group of West Indians who were former high-ranking officials in Marcus Garvey’s UNIA. The two chief leaders of the PME were Leonard Robert Jordan, a former officer in the Japanese navy, and the Reverend William Gordon (Miltie Gordon’s former spouse), former assistant president general of the UNIA. In reality, the group was an unwitting front for the Black Dragon Society (BDS); most of its operating expenses came directly from the Japanese consul generals in San Francisco and in New York, with Ashima Takis acting as intermediary.38 While Jordan and Gordon were well aware of the BDS’s role in bankrolling the PME, they were initially given the impression that they could set their own agenda. However, by late 1938, with Takahashi out of jail, they realized that that was not the case. Takahashi was soon running the organization.
Like the pro-Japanese sermons that Elijah Muhammad was delivering in the Midwest, speeches by the leaders of the PME were bitterly anti-American and seemed to focus more on the plight of Japan than on the international oppression of nonwhites. The speeches that Muhammad and Jordan delivered all had the same central theme: As soon as Japan defeated America, it would help all people of color achieve full independence and prosperity. “I’m going to have President Roosevelt picking cotton after Japan crushes this government,” Jordan promised in one speech, “and Secretaries [Frank] Knox and [Henry] Stimson riding me around in rickshaws.”39 In another lecture, one which would help the FBI send him to jail, Jordan declared:
No one should be afraid to join this movement. We are protected by big people. This is an international setup. Our present main office is in Hawaii. We are connected with the Black Dragon organization in Japan.40
With the support of many of America’s most committed black nationalists, Takahashi was well on his way to creating a national underground network of revolutionaries to assist Japan’s war effort against America, but his personal relationships proved to be his undoing. When she moved in with him, Cheaber McIntyre was still legally married to Nathaniel McIntyre, a black Detroit auto worker and father of her four children.41 At first McIntyre ignored his wife’s politics and philandering, but after she moved in with Takahashi he began seething with resentment. In the course of filing for divorce in March 1939, he contacted the Detroit police to see if they knew about the Japanese radical who was conducting subversive activities in Paradise Valley.42 Detroit police responded in the negative, but notified the FBI’s Detroit field office.
In April, Pearl Sherrod, the black woman Takahashi jilted in favor of Cheaber McIntyre, also sought revenge. She contacted the Detroit field office and told FBI agents that her former paramour was hiding in Paradise.43 To solidify their case against Takahashi, the FBI collected data on every black organization he was rumored to be linked with. To the complete astonishment of the Detroit police, Takahashi had been operating out of a luxuriously decorated home on Canfield Avenue, within blocks of the Canfield police station. They also discovered that he had five branches of the cult in Detroit alone, with at least 3,000 card-carrying members. On June 27, 1939, immigration officials, assisted by Detroit police, raided a branch of the OMA on Washburn Avenue and arrested Takahashi for immigration violations.44
On the way to the courthouse for booking, Takahashi offered immigration inspectors Edward Carpenter and Roy Stevens $1,500 in cash if they would allow him to escape. They declined the offer. “I’ll give you $2,000,” Takahashi said, raising the ante. They declined again.45 When they took him before U.S. Immigration Commissioner J. Stanley Hurd that afternoon, the inspectors advised Hurd of the attempted bribe. The commissioner set Takahashi’s bond at $2,500 on the illegal entry charges, and instructed Detroit police to bring criminal charges against him for attempted bribery of a federal officer. At the conclusion of the trial on bribery charges on September 28, it took the jury three minutes to find Takahashi guilty. The next morning, he was fined $4,500 and sentenced to three years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.46
Cheaber McIntyre sat quietly through the trial, but on the morning the sentence was announced, she sobbed uncontrollably. She was sitting with another black woman in the front row near the jury. As Takahashi was led away in handcuffs, a juror overheard one of the women say that “they were going to get the judge.”47 After the court was adjourned, the juror informed the bailiff, who told Judge Frank A. Picard. Picard asked the prosecutor to notify the FBI of the threat immediately.
A few weeks after Takahashi’s conviction, Hoover berated Americans such as McIntyre, whom he accused of aiding America’s enemies.
It is known that many foreign agents roam at will in a nation which loves peace and hates war, a country which has proclaimed neutrality in a strife-torn world.… There are even native-born American citizens as well as aliens who have sold their birthright for less than the proverbial “mess of porridge.”48
While investigating the threat against Judge Picard, the FBI’s Detroit field office uncovered information suggesting that Takahashi was the mastermind behind a national network of anti-American activities. In early 1940, the Detroit special agent in charge (SAC) recommended that sedition charges be lodged against Takahashi.49 After conferring with U.S. Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge, who indicated that no grounds existed for further prosecution, Hoover sent a letter dated April 6 to the Detroit SAC ordering him to close the investigation.50
Even before Takahashi’s arrest, the FBI and military intelligence units had been investigating and attempting to inhibit anti-American activities by Japanese espionage agents in black communities. To this end, Hoover joined other top government officials who were pushing for passage of the Alien Registration Act, and on June 28, 1940, Congress adopted the legislation Hoover had been clamoring for. The Alien Registration Act (also known as the Smith Act) made it a federal offense to advocate “the overthrow by force and violence” of the U.S. government.51 The first peacetime national sedition law since the Sedition Act of 1798, the Smith Act in the first instance curtailed the right of free speech of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and other progressive political parties, and denied free-assembly rights to those who believed that the country was on the road to war, as well as to those who felt that a social revolution was needed in America. In late September, the first anniversary of Takahashi’s bribery conviction, the FBI recorded the first of nearly 100,000 pages of war-related documents on the NOI.52 Hoover also added two new names to more than 6,000 on the Bureau’s “custodial detention list,” a list of Americans who were considered dangerous enough to pose a threat to national security in case of war. One of the names was a “John Doe,” whom the Bureau’s Washington field office had under close surveillance. The other was Elijah Muhammad, who was under close scrutiny by the Chicago Field Office.53
On September 20, 1940, an intelligence report noted that “a Japanese in Washington, D.C., has been going around addressing a group of colored people in homes and at other places.… In these addresses his major promise is that if the colored people will help the Japanese out, the Japanese will take care of the colored people.”54 The possible presence of Japanese espionage agents at the FBI’s front door evoked a strongly worded order from the director. On October 16, Hoover sent a memo to the Washington SAC in which he emphasized the importance of the alien’s apprehension:
He is reported to have told listeners that the Japanese were building thousands of nice homes on islands near the United States for the colored people to pay them for their assistance.… You are instructed to conduct the necessary investigation to determine the identity of this individual to see if he is violating the [Alien] Registration Act.55
Around the same time that the October 16 memo was being written, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, which required all men between twenty-one and thirty-six years of age to register for the draft; an amendment expanded the upper draft age to forty-four. The next day, Congress passed the Registration of Certain Organizations Act, more commonly called the Voorhis Act, which required all foreign-controlled organizations and groups espousing a violent social revolution in America to register with the Justice Department. Although it had agreed—on paper—to close its investigation of Takahashi, the Detroit office kept an eye on the SDOO and the OMA. On December 23, 1940, the Detroit office asked Hoover for permission to reopen its investigation of the groups, noting that “Information received from the Chicago office indicates that [Takahashi] is a direct representative of a powerful Japanese organization whose aim is to overthrow the White Race.”56
On March 3, 1941, Hoover forwarded the reports of Japanese espionage activities to Berge. Once again, Berge found no grounds on which to base a federal prosecution. On March 7, Hoover told the Chicago and Detroit SACs of Berge’s decision. But one month later, he took a verbal swipe at Berge:
It is highly important that the Federal Bureau of Investigation be unhampered in its authority to conduct investigations into situations involving potential danger to the government of the United States, particularly as it relates to the obvious menace and danger to the internal security of this Nation by foreign agents such as Takahashi.57
In July the War Department issued a general memo advising all divisions of the intelligence community that Japan appeared to be involved in a nationwide campaign to “use” African Americans as part of its plan to take over the United States. The Japanese agent spotted in Washington was but one of many who made up the Fifth Column. On December 4, the ONI’s Counter Subversion Section issued a report of its own about Japanese sympathizers among Americans. The twenty-six-page report noted that African Americans were particularly susceptible to Japanese overtures and propaganda. Hoover’s arguments for more investigatory authority and the ONI’s report went unnoted by the legislative and executive branches—for seventy-two hours.58
On December 7, 1941, which happened to be the ninth anniversary of Fard’s last arrest in Detroit, the unthinkable happened. The War of Armageddon that Elijah Muhammad had believed in since Bible school, the race war that he had feared as a young man in Macon, and the cataclysmic destructive power of the Mother Plane that Fard had preached about in his final sermon moved nightmarishly close to reality: the Japanese—“Allah’s Asiatic army”—bombed Pearl Harbor, the U.S. naval base in Hawaii. The attack—which occurred, incidentally, in the Year of the Snake (the biblical representative of Satan) on the Asian calendar59—was the first aggressive act by a foreign power on American soil since the American Revolution, and took the lives of 2,345 men in a matter of hours.60 In an impassioned national address, President Roosevelt decried the surprise attack calling December 7, 1941, “a day that will live in infamy.”
Congress declared war on Japan the following morning. The media and the military brass faulted Hoover for failing to pick up warning signs days before the attack, and Hoover, in turn, castigated the armed forces for the same reason. Both the FBI and the military had erred, so both redoubled their efforts to prevent another catastrophe. At the time that Pearl Harbor was struck, the United States was nowhere near being prepared for a global conflict, let alone a war on two fronts, as Germany and Italy declared war on America on December 11. In the fall of 1941 the War Department had reported that “it did not have more than two (of thirty-six) divisions trained and equipped to take part, if needed, in an overseas landing against opposition.”61
