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...Authority west the Mississippi River. As the vehicle headed south from Iowa, Hosokawa witnessed the peculiar customs of Jim Crow for the first time. From his seat in the front half of the bus, the journalist jotted notes on what he saw. Hosokawa encountered segregated bathrooms, restaurants, and waiting areas as he traveled through the border states. By the time the bus reached Arkansas, it was so full that passengers were standing in the aisle. Boarding and exiting the bus became an elaborate ritual of segregation, as whites emptied the front half of the bus at every stop to allow blacks to file in and out of the back section. The whole process, Hosokawa later recalled, seemed "profoundly ridiculous." (1)
Before 1940 few Japanese Americans had ever set foot in the Deep South. Three years later, more than sixteen thousand relocated Californians and Hawaiians lived behind barbed wire in the Arkansas Delta. Meanwhile, hundreds of Japanese American recruits trained at military bases across the region. (2) Although Bill Hosokawa could see "no middle ground in the South's polarized society of black and white," Japanese Americans confounded the color line in the Jim Crow South. (3) That the unprecedented influx alarmed many citizens is not surprising considering the anti-Japanese sentiment sweeping the country in the wake of Pearl Harbor. But southern fears ran deeper, as leading whites worked to offset the impact of a third "race" on the segregated status quo. To accommodate Japanese American servicemen, local officials decided to keep them on the white side of the color line. But simply allowing Japanese Americans to use white water fountains and restrooms proved an uneasy compromise. Japanese Americans were a conspicuous other in a volatile racial caste system. Moreover, they refused to "act white." Many Japanese American troops rejected the rules of segregated society, while others actively rebelled against discrimination. As southern whites quickly realized, Japanese American internees and soldiers in Dixie posed a variety of challenges to Jim Crow. Officials and everyday people feared that the problematic "third race" would undermine white supremacy. In response, Arkansas officials and southern congressmen backed the anti-Japanese crusade of their West Coast colleagues while adding their own segregationist slant. The controversy over Japanese American internees and troops reflected broader racial anxieties in the wartime South. While white leaders pointed to a Tokyo-led insurgency, the growing impatience of southern blacks and Japanese Americans with second-class citizenship spurred homegrown resistance.
The Japanese American experience in the South during World War II revealed the increasingly permeable borders of Dixie. Officials like Arkansas governor Homer M. Adkins felt confident that they could curry federal favor while forestalling a social upheaval that could compromise white supremacy. The wartime influx of Japanese Americans forced whites in the South to confront the precariousness of Jim Crow. This episode revealed the increasing inability of southern white leaders to defend the segregated status quo, even as it exposed their segregated society to comparisons with fascism. At the same time, in trying to make the Japanese Americans behave according to the Jim Crow script, white leaders foreshadowed the ways they would later react to the protests of the civil rights movement. First in Arkansas and then in Mississippi, whites granted Japanese Americans some privileges of whiteness to isolate them from African Americans. At the same time, whites discriminated against the Japanese Americans in explicitly racial terms. The debates among whites about what to do with the Japanese Americans reveal the underpinnings of the defense of segregation. At the same time, the limited dialogue between Japanese American leaders and more militant elements of the black press reveals an attempt to harness wartime rhetoric of freedom and equality for racial advancement. (4) Jim Crow figured prominently in this conversation as the embodiment of racial intolerance, discrimination, and violence. As the editor of an internment camp newspaper declared in 1944, "No American of Japanese ancestry wants to give his life for the preservation of Jap Crowism." (5)
Weeks before the announcement in early 1942 that Arkansas would host two internment camps, Little Rock already buzzed with news of a different sort of Japanese influx. As the federal government hastily hammered out a plan for relocating Japanese American civilians, the War Department debated what to do with Nisei--American-born children of Japanese immigrants--in uniform. Although the government suspended enlistment of Japanese Americans for almost two years after the Pearl Harbor attack, there were hundreds of Nisei already serving in the army before the nation entered World War II. By early 1942 the military had sent several hundred mainland Nisei soldiers to Camp Joseph T. Robinson in North Little Rock. (6) During February the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette repeatedly ran an announcement entitled "American-Born Japanese as Soldiers and Citizens." Camp Robinson officials appealed to the people of Little Rock to "show special consideration to several hundred American-Born sons of Japanese parents." Though the state's leading paper urged against "blind prejudice or unreasonable suspicion," some local whites soon raised a fuss. (7) On March 17, 1942, a group of white businessmen led by Hodson Lewis of the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce visited Camp Robinson. In a private meeting with Brigadier General F. B. Mallon, the civic leaders decried the growing number of Japanese American soldiers at the camp. (8) Lewis punctuated the protest by firing off a letter to Arkansas congressman David D. Terry, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. "Our Little Rock people are very much disturbed over the rapid increase of Japanese soldiers at Camp Robinson," declared Lewis. He complained that there were "901 Japs" at the camp already, with more arriving every week. While assuring the congressman that his constituents were "good and patriotic citizens," Lewis warned that the federal government was taking advantage of Arkansan hospitality. "[T]here are very grave social problems arising which are not only embarrassing but can become quite dangerous," declared Lewis. He mentioned the "co-mingling of Japanese soldiers and Negro women" and also suggested that white girls should not "dance with these boys without restrictions." With unintended prescience, Lewis worried that Japanese American families would follow the soldiers to Arkansas. The prospect of Japanese American settlement, Lewis concluded, was "not desirous" and potentially "hazardous." (9) While this voluntary emigration never materialized, Lewis's fear of a massive Japanese influx would soon become a reality.
In response to local complaints, General Mallon sent a confidential memo to the War Department describing the prickly situation in Arkansas and warning the top brass of the potential for greater unrest. "Every effort is being made by me to induce the leaders in Little Rock to approach the question from a patriotic viewpoint," Mallon asserted. The general praised the conduct of Japanese American soldiers but feared that "one unfavorable incident on the part of an individual would be sufficient to ignite the flames that are now smouldering among the alarmed civilians." Mallon asserted that the concerns of local Arkansans had more to do with "delicate social problems" than with possible sabotage. "It appears," he concluded, "that the fear on the part of the residents of Little Rock lies in their belief that any equality shown to the Japanese by white people may result in the negroes in this vicinity increasing their demands." (10)
Indeed, the Camp Robinson controversy reflected wider concerns about maintaining white supremacy. As General Mallon concluded, "the Japanese question here presents much less of a problem than that of the Negro." (11) Just days after the tense meeting at Camp Robinson, a white policeman gunned down a black army officer on the streets of Little Rock. When the African American community demanded an investigation, the Little Rock Arkansas Democrat dismissed the protests as a "campaign by the black press and the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) to use the war to undermine white supremacy on the home front." (12) Although the murder had no direct connection to the Japanese American presence, white city leaders worried that growing black militancy might attract the sympathies of Nisei troops. Bill Hosokawa remembered that local African Americans frequently remarked to Japanese Americans that "colored folks has got to stick together." Perhaps this was why Lewis and his cohorts warned General Mallon that Nisei servicemen were "infiltrating colored areas in Little Rock, and making social contacts therein." (13) While military officers at camp headquarters downplayed the simmering controversy, pressure from local leaders may have persuaded the military men to find an alternate base for a unit of Hawaiian Nisei scheduled to arrive that summer. Historian Masayo Umezawa Duus suggests that racial tension in Little Rock was "one of the reasons, even if not the main reason, why the 100th Battalion [Hawaiian Nisei] was sent to Camp McCoy [Wisconsin] even before barracks had been built for them." (14) This transfer, however, would prove to be a small victory for Arkansans anxious about a growing Japanese American presence in the state.
Less than a month before the Little Rock businessmen took their grievances to Camp Robinson, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, which established the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Soon uprooted Japanese Americans would be moved from the crowded assembly centers of the West Coast to isolated relocation centers farther inland. Although the WRA established most of its ten camps in the intermountain West, the Army Corps of Engineers also selected two swampy tracts of land along the snaking banks of the Mississippi River. Given that most of the WRA sites lay on arid plateaus or barren deserts, the temperate and fertile Arkansas Delta sounded like a promising, if stubborn, prospect. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) boasted that the Arkansas internees would "grow food for America's victory effort" after clearing the "near-primeval forests" of the Delta. (15) However, the dense vegetation and boggy soil had resisted encroachment for centuries. Overwhelmed at the prospect of draining and clearing the densely wooded swampland, landowners had sold the underdeveloped and tax-delinquent land to the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. When plans to relocate impoverished farm families fell through, few developers jumped at the chance to rehabilitate the marshy wilderness. After decades of difficulty and frustration, the abandoned lands fell into the open hands of the newly formed WRA. (16) Just twenty-six miles apart, the proposed sites at Rohwer and Jerome sprawled over twenty thousand acres. (17)
When WRA officials notified Arkansas governor Homer M. Adkins of their plans in early 1942, the former Ku Klux Klan candidate adamantly opposed the proposals. Realizing the futility of stubborn resistance, Adkins opted for a strategy of compromise and cooperation. Through negotiations with WRA director Milton Eisenhower, Adkins hammered out the "specific conditions" of internment in Arkansas. The governor arranged for a formal request from Washington that Arkansans accept Japanese American evacuees "as a patriotic duty." Furthermore, Eisenhower promised that the Japanese Americans at Jerome and Rohwer would be confined to the camps and that the pay for interned workers would not exceed the normal wages for similar labor in the area. Finally, Eisenhower assured Adkins...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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More articles from Journal of Southern History
The not so silent minority: Louisville's antiwar movement, 1966-1975., February 01, 2007
Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family's Letters.(Book review), February 01, 2007
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