Local Contexts

The Temple's opening represented the climax of an innovative religio-racial identity that Hamid cultivated, performed, and evolved throughout the 1930s. This process began, to our knowledge, with his career as a soapbox orator and community organizer, first in Chicago's South Side, and later in Harlem. It evolved over time as Hamid added new layers to this identity—first spiritualism, then Islam, then Buddhism—each one adding to his religious repertoire, rather than replacing what came before it. It was through his identity as a Black OrientalistFootnote ²⁶ that Hamid conceptualized novel links between religion, race, and national belonging, both for himself and for Black people as a whole.

Hamid spent his adult life in the urban north at a time of great religious change. In the Great Migration, Black Americans migrated to the urban north to flee the violence of the Jim Crow American south and seek new opportunities, bringing with them southern religious practices. There, they joined migrants from the Caribbean, who brought with them their own religious practices. They would have encountered a flourishing artistic and literary scene, religious innovation within Christian communities, and newly established religions. Along with a wide variety of Black Churches—including mainstream churches and storefront churches—one could find Black nationalist movements like Garveyism, spiritualists and practitioners of the “Oriental sciences,” and new religious movements “comprised of mostly poor and working-class black southern migrants.”Footnote ²⁷ Some of these groups incorporated religious repertoires from Pentecostal Christianity, Spiritualism, Kabbalah, and Freemasonry.Footnote ²⁸ Such innovation is an example of what Jacob Dorman terms “polycultural bricolage,” a term employed to capture the way that religions “are not bounded systems, but fluid, multivalent processes, constructed by many individual bricoleurs who work by recombining old and new” in creative ways.Footnote ²⁹ Justin McDaniel and Robert Campany have employed the term “religious repertoires” to refer to the cultural and religious elements—such as objects, texts, and rituals—drawn on by individuals, noting that religious repertoires “can be internally inconsistent and contradictory,” and are developed “within intimate familial, social, and professional networks.”Footnote ³⁰ Such creativity appears at the opening ceremony of Hamid's Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility, with the performance of Christian Spirituals, the reverence of “all the sages and prophets of the ages,” the prostration toward the Buddha, and Orientalist displays of supernatural powers.Footnote ³¹

Hamid belonged to a constellation of new religions that reimagined Blackness in relation to religion in response to “racial alterity, the systematic devaluing of black humanity, and the disciplined efforts ‘in pathologizing the religious experiences of blacks.’”Footnote ³² Tracey Hucks observes that Black religious nationalism “has continually sought to resist, dismantle, and recast” “anti-blackness imagery” that presents Black people as morally and physically inferior to white Euro-Americans.Footnote ³³ New religio-racial groups, in endowing Blackness with new meaning and rejecting the identifier “Negro Christian,” asserted the humanity of Black people and established them within sacred histories that circumvented ones of enslavement. They “provided new ways of understanding their origins as a people, the events that led them to their current social, religious, and political locations, and their corporate futures.”Footnote ³⁴ Multiple groups emphasized cartographic connections between African Americans, Africa, and Asia through religion, culture, and race. Some did so through dialogue between Asians and African Americans (like the Nation of Islam [NOI] and the Ahmaddiya movement).Footnote ³⁵ Some communities varyingly placed their origins in Ethiopia (Ethiopian Hebrews), Morocco (Moorish Science Temple of America [MSTA]), and Asia (NOI), while others, like the Peace Mission led by Father Divine, rejected racial identifiers altogether, favoring visions of a common humanity. Hamid, we will see, appears to have absorbed varying elements of these movements. Likely influenced by Black Israelite religions, at one point he professes that Black people originated in Ethiopia. His Muslim name would have connected him to other Black Muslim groups. And he established a Buddhist temple that offered a vision of a shared humanity among different races—perhaps in competition with Father Divine, with whom he had a rivalry.Footnote ³⁶

Religio-racial groups performed their new sense of self by adopting new names, manners of dress, and dietary and health practices. Followers of Father Divine adopted new names to separate themselves from their “false, mortal selves,” and indicate their turn toward their spiritual commitments.Footnote ³⁷ Members of the MSTA took on new names that reinstated their tribal name (Bey, El, or Ali) in favor of their prior “slave name.”Footnote ³⁸ Followers of the NOI similarly rejected their “slave name” in favor of restoring their Asiatic Muslim names.Footnote ³⁹ Ethiopian Hebrews covered their heads during services (black skullcaps for men, turbans or headscarves for women); male MSTA members donned a red fez (influenced by Masonic garb) while women wore turbans and long dresses.Footnote ⁴⁰ Each community employed such embodied performances to “engage the history and contemporary politics of the black body, speaking to the place of ideas about race and the body in understandings of national belonging.”Footnote ⁴¹ For this reason, Weisenfeld claims, adopting new embodied practices to reflect one's religio-racial identity was not simply political, but also performed religious functions.Footnote ⁴²

Hamid, likewise, performed his adopted identity through his new name, his speech (the use of Chinese), and sartorial practices. While it was not uncommon in this period for Black Americans to dress “Oriental” as a method of obscuring any potential identification as Black and to evade Jim Crow laws,Footnote ⁴³ Hamid's resignification of his own racial identity was not merely political. Rather, following Weisenfeld, Hamid performed his religio-racial identity as “a necessary part” of his “commitment to the narrative [he] believed conveyed [his] true history.”Footnote ⁴⁴ His appearance reflected his dual origin of Africa and China and, combined with his charisma, attracted a following to whom he taught Eastern religions in the service of a radical counterhegemonic discourse. This does not discount Hamid's religious identity and expression, but rather shows he used the embodied performance of his religious identity to reflect on African Americans as political, social, religious, and racialized subjects. Through all this activity, Hamid sought to provide material relief to the Black community, protest anti-Black racism and discrimination, and reject white supremacy.

Hamid's Black Orientalist identity served him well in Chicago, where he first rose to prominence as a soapbox orator at the forefront of a successful jobs campaign. In Chicago, he styled himself as Bishop Conshankin. Roi Ottley describes Bishop Conshankin as “a Buddhist missionary and a devotee of Oriental magic.”Footnote ⁴⁵ According to McKay, Bishop Conshankin “delved into the mysteries of occultism and, mixing together a hash of Hindoo, Persian and Chinese religions, he promoted himself as an Oriental philosopher.”Footnote ⁴⁶ He reportedly adopted the name Sufi Abdul Hamid at the behest of Black Muslims in Chicago, who “convinced him that the magic racket was a hindrance to the more serious work of job campaigning.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Apparently spiritualists lacked the reputation Muslims had among Black American elites. Both of Hamid's adopted names—Bishop Conshankin and Sufi Abdul Hamid—helped assert a new genealogy for himself, one that, like the names of other members of new religio-racial groups, signified “genealogies that transcended the bounds of Americanness, forging links to pre-American origins and transnational identities.”Footnote ⁴⁸ But the latter moniker firmly tied him to other Black Muslims who adopted new names to signify their religio-racial identity as Moorish Americans or as Asians. It is perhaps with the selection of his new name that Hamid incorporated Islam into his ever-expanding religious repertoire, continuing to maintain interests in spiritualism, metaphysicalism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.Footnote ⁴⁹ This would not have been unusual for the time—many migrants and immigrants in northern cities moved to, and through, different religious groups, with some individuals “combin[ing] political, social, and religious options as suited their individual needs.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Hamid moved to Harlem in 1932, where, speaking from atop a stepladder on 125th Street in Harlem's commercial district, he quickly distinguished himself among other sidewalk orators. He soon cemented himself as a vital component to the first phase of the Harlem jobs campaign (1932–1935). At this moment Harlem was economically dominated by white businesses, many of them Jewish owned. When Harlem was annexed to New York City in 1873, it contained numerous ethnic groups, the largest of which was the Jewish community. By 1910, Harlem contained the second largest concentration of Eastern European Jews in the United States. Black people began to migrate to Harlem in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The Black population in Harlem increased during the Great Migration, when Black Americans from the South, joined by immigrants from the Caribbean, relocated to urban cities in the north. This coincided with the movement of Harlem's Jewish population into newer housing units in the Bronx.Footnote ⁵¹ By the end of the 1920s, Harlem's population was 97 percent Black.Footnote ⁵² The depression, coupled with rising rent in Harlem, hit the Back Harlem community hard. While some advocated for a solution that lay in African Americans starting their own businesses within their own communities, which would be patronized by Black people, others saw the solution in gainful employment in white-owned businesses.Footnote ⁵³ However, the majority of white-owned businesses did not hire Black people, and if they did, offered only the lowest paying positions.Footnote ⁵⁴ Hamid criticized Harlem business owners who discriminated against Black Americans in their employment practice, calling for a boycott of all white-owned business who would not hire Black people.

Although popular among the working class, Hamid drew attention and criticism for his flamboyant dress and radical rhetoric. Multiple people suspected Hamid of being an opportunist, noting that his jobs campaign organization, the Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance charged membership fees in return for job promises.Footnote ⁵⁵ Black elites in Harlem repeatedly distanced themselves from Hamid, whose frequent condemnation of Christianity, association with Islam and other Asian religions (described by Claude McKay, a prominent writer and poet of the Harlem Renaissance, as “the mumbo-jumbo of African fetishism and Oriental philosophy”Footnote ⁵⁶), unusual dress, and fiery speeches defied Black respectability politics.Footnote ⁵⁷ Particularly controversial was his antisemitism, which formed part of his larger antiwhite rhetoric and earned him the moniker of the “Black Hitler of Harlem.” Black Church leaders were quick to condemn Hamid for his antisemitism.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is likely that they were also motivated by the threat of new religio-racial movements, which was “both theological, in that the groups offered options outside of Christianity, and institutional, in moving beyond the broad umbrella of ‘the black church’” during “a period of religious ferment and transformation.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Hamid originally denied charges of antisemitism, and McKay suggests these accusations were purposefully exaggerated by his opponents to discredit him.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, Hamid was known to use ethnic slurs and antisemitic language in his speeches. It seems that his stance toward the Jewish community changed over time, as part of his own constantly shifting and evolving negotiations of religion and race. In October 1934, Hamid was brought to court on charges of antisemitism. The plaintiff, Edgar H. Burman, Commander-in-Chief of the Jewish Anti-Nazi Minutemen organization, accused Hamid of referring to himself as “Black Hitler” and declaring open war upon the Jews.Footnote ⁶¹ Hamid avoided charges in this case, but wound up in court again in January 1935, when he was charged with distributing pamphlets titled “The Black Challenge to White Supremacy” and preaching atheism without a license. Hamid was sentenced to two ten-day terms at a workhouse. He denied the charges of atheism, arguing “I don't see how you can accuse me of that when I'm a Mohammedan, one of the most powerful religions in the world.”Footnote ⁶² Thus, for his first few years in Harlem, Hamid firmly asserted his religio-racial identity as a Black Muslim, positioning this identity in some ways that mirrored dominant religious and racial hierarchies (in his antisemitism) and in others that subverted the values of the white supremacist nation-state.

The pamphlet in question provides a reference point to Hamid's own complicated religio-racial identity. McKay provides a summary of this pamphlet in his book, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, which contains his account of major figures in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. He describes the pamphlet as follows:

Today of past Regret and future Fears:

Tomorrow:—Why tomorrow I may be

Myself with Yesterday's Seven Thousand Years.

McKay adds that in 1935, Hamid started to begin his speeches “with a proemial statement that Africa was the cradle of religion, that the original Semites are Ethiopians, who are the true Negroes, and that therefore there can be no fundamental conflict of race between Negroes and Jews.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This description provides us with some indication that Hamid's philosophy, at least at this time, included a vision for the larger history of Black people, and that within this history religion and race were intimately connected.

In tracing the religious and racial history of Black people to Ethiopian Hebrews—and claiming the original Jews were Ethiopian—Hamid echoed Ethiopian Hebrews, who maintained that “racially, Ethiopians were Semites.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Ethiopia held special import for Black religious nationalism since the late nineteenth century, when Ethiopia defeated Italy in the 1895 Battle of Adwa. The victory of an African nation over a European one “reinvigorated traditions of Black political internationalism . . . inspiring later twentieth-century pan-African political organizing” and Black Israelite religions.Footnote ⁶⁶ Black Israelite religions taught “that the ancient Israelites of the Hebrew Bible were Black and that contemporary Black people are their descendants.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Black Israelite religions, by looking to Africa for their religio-racial identities, fashioned a divine history that centered Black people as sacred and portrayed Black people as “religious agents . . . instead of objects of missions.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Black Israelite ideas could also be found among Black Muslim and Christian communities, such that Hamid's repetition of Black Israelite ideas would have been part of a broader religious rhetoric of the time.

Hamid borrowed from Black Israelite ideas to place the divine history of Black people, even while constructing his own identity as Arab and, eventually, Chinese. He claimed to have been born in Egyptian Sudan, and to have possessed an Arab passport.Footnote ⁶⁹ If Hamid's current birth connected him to a larger discourse that connected Black people globally and looked to Africa as a place of religious origin, his prior birth—asserted at the Temple opening to be Chinese—linked him personally to the Asian religions and philosophies that he would bring together in his temple. The various repertoires that Hamid draws on reveal the messy and contentious process through which individuals make sense of their own religious and racial identities.

Global Orientalist Discourses

Hamid's temple, like his religio-racial identity, represents a heterogenous amalgamation of what Lisa Lowe has termed “a multiplicity of Orients.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Just as Hamid had multiple reference points for his own religious and racial identity—Ethiopia, Egypt, China; Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist—the Temple of Tranquility incorporated a broad array of religious practices and credited multiple sources of knowledge. Hamid collected this Orientalist amalgamation under the banner of Buddhism, proclaiming the Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility to be Buddhist, although based on the teachings from all religions. In doing so, he participated in a form of Orientalism that at times shared in dominant Orientalist discourses, even while critiquing white hegemonic religious and racial categories.

Hamid began to advertise the Universal Order of Tranquility in late August and early September of 1937, proclaiming it to be open to “all people, regardless of race, creed, and color.”Footnote ⁷¹ Standing outside his home, dressed in plain clothes, Hamid laid out his plans for the Universal Order of Tranquility. As part of his pitch for a religious community open to all people, he repudiated his prior antisemitism, criticized Hitler, and invited Jews to join the community. In 1935, Hamid had been solicited by Nazi organizations who offered to help him fight against Jews in return for establishing a Black legion. To the press, Hamid recounted, “I spurned the Nazi offers because I realized that they had no better feeling for me or my people than for the Jews,” and “if the Nazis ever came into power in America, the Negroes here would suffer the same fate as the Jews in Germany.”Footnote ⁷² He concluded “I can now admit that it was fallacious for me to condemn Jews as a race”Footnote ⁷³ and promised equality to all Jews who joined his temple, which would not discriminate based on race or religion.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Cooke's article promoting the opening of the Temple, she remarked that his dedication to an intercreedal and interracial organization was “a far cry from the days . . . when he was trying to run all of the white folks out of Harlem.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Regardless of his attempts to present the Temple as open to all races, the moniker “Black Hitler” stuck. But with the opening of his temple, he successfully cemented a new layer to his identity: Buddhism.

While by its opening, the temple may have been named as Buddhist, Hamid's early pitches for the movement drew from a wide array of religious influences. In his initial announcement of the formation of the Universal Order of Tranquility—of which he claimed his then-wife, Stephanie St. Clair, was a devotee—Hamid explained that the movement was based on “the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, ancient Egyptian philosopher and sage,” and that the main features of the movement included “belief in the conquest of mind over matter, reincarnation and common ownership of property of all of its followers with the establishment of communal industries.” The Universal Order of Tranquility was to be further based on his knowledge from fifteen years of learning: “I studied the Upanershads of India, the Zhender-Vesta of Persia, the Tao and Louize movements of China and the political and religious philosophies of Confucius. I went beyond the Christian history of the last nineteen centuries and studied the originators of Christianity, the Gnostics. I studied the original alchemists, whose idea was not the turning of base metal into gold but the distilling of baser thoughts into a finer realization.”Footnote ⁷⁶ He concluded:

Hamid had planned to circulate a new pamphlet advertising his movement, called “Universal Truth vs. Universal Lie,” and was working on a “ten-volume set of books which will be the ‘true text’ of his movement.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Hamid's ambitious program indicates he intended to consolidate a variety of religious philosophies into one movement that emphasized mind over matter and reincarnation.

Hamid might have been the leader of the temple, but his third wife, Madame Fu Futtam (born Dorothy Matthews), played an important role in the development of Hamid's philosophy, the gathering of followers for the Temple, and possibly the Temple's financing. Madame Futtam—who claimed to be part-Japanese and changed her name to reflect this background—was a spiritualist in her own right. She authored numerous dream journals that she promoted in newspaper ads. Hamid's second wife, Stephanie St. Clair, from whom he separated in November 1937, accused Hamid of having an affair with Madame Futtam. For their part, Madame Futtam and Hamid maintained that they had been meeting each other to discuss religious philosophy. In one interview, Fu Futtam claimed, “Sufi and I are interested in esoteric work, and he has been helping me on philosophical passages in a book I've just finished.”Footnote ⁷⁸ When a reporter from the New York Amsterdam News asked Hamid to corroborate this, “after a lengthy discussion of the principles of Buddhism and its connection with his newly evolved philosophy,” Hamid explained “he is working on a philosophical concept of religion,” and St. Clair “interferes with his work. Mme. Futtam had been helping him organize his followers, and both were interested in the same ideas.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Hamid married Madame Futtam in April 1938, which appeared to confirm rumors of the affair and that Madame Futtam had financed the Temple.Footnote ⁸⁰

When it was finally time for the Temple to open, Hamid described it as “a Buddhist temple based on the teachings of all the sages and prophets of the ages,” the purpose of which was “to surmount untested faith and belief with sound knowledge similar to that practiced by the yogis of India, Tibet, and Japan.”Footnote ⁸¹ The Universal Holy Temple may have acknowledged other religious prophets, but without a doubt the Temple emphasized Buddhism and Asian religions, as they were understood by Hamid and by his community. In practicing Buddhism, Hamid was motivated by his confirmation that he was “a master of the same philosophy as practice by those of the European world.”Footnote ⁸² Hamid explained that in order to truly understand the philosophy of which he himself was master, one needed to take classes at the Temple. For “you can't learn this in Columbia or Harvard or Princeton. You will have to come to our school here to learn the deepest esoteric subjects that are taught. I may be speaking in parables like your Savior, but I will get more explicit as I go along.”Footnote ⁸³ The Temple's program included an eclectic mixture of classes on Buddhism and Asian religions, such as “The Nirvanic Path,” “The Glorious and Supreme Path of Disciplehood,” “The Esoteric Path of Knowledge,” and “The Yoga of Subduing the Baser Self.”Footnote ⁸⁴ By portraying university education as inadequate to understand the esoteric truths of Asian religion, Hamid employed common romantic Orientalist depictions of Asia as holding timeless, intuitive wisdom. But unlike white counterculturalists who employed the same rhetoric, Hamid also bypassed white supremacist restrictions on African American university education.

In his framing of Buddhism and other Asian religions, Hamid, like other new religious movement leaders of the Great Migration, criticized Christianity, capitalism, and imperialism. Although Hamid positioned the Temple as drawing on “the teachings of all the prophets,” he appears to have been rather critical of contemporary Christianity.Footnote ⁸⁵ Reportedly, in his first sermon, he said of the Bible: “You are used to a preacher telling you what Isaiah told Paul to tell Moses. But the Bible is messed up so bad that we don't know what Moses said.”Footnote ⁸⁶ As we have seen, Hamid contrasted his manner of worship to “emotional” churches, in which members would “rather get out in the aisles and mess around and pat your feet,” adding that “there will be no collection plates here.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In making this comparison, it is possible that Hamid, like other Harlemites, criticized storefront churches “for their public piety and noisy worship practices, deeming them vestiges of a backward South.”Footnote ⁸⁸ At this moment other new religious movements, like the MSTA, were “demeaning the Christian worship of African American migrants from the South whose cultural proclivity to religious ecstasy or spirit possession was drastically transforming the religious landscape of the urban North.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Denigrating the religion of Southern migrants was a way of criticizing Christianity as a whole.

By referencing collection plates, Hamid appears to be echoing critiques of churches that capitalize off Black worshippers without contributing to their needs.Footnote ⁹⁰ And by promoting Communism as a Christian value, Hamid joined “a small but vocal minority” who “asserted that Communism was more ‘Christ-like’ than Christianity and made calls for a ‘new religion.’”Footnote ⁹¹ His main issue was not Christianity, but rather the way it was practiced in Harlem in his day: “I approve of the philosophy of Christ, and even of the teachings of Christianity,” “but as advocated by the average Negro minister it is detrimental to the Negro race.”Footnote ⁹² Hamid rejected religious institutions “primarily based on dogmatic theology,”Footnote ⁹³ an opinion he held for years. Since at least 1934, Hamid claimed to be “a disbeliever in the strict dogmas of Christianism, Jewishism and Confucianism equally with Moslemism and evangelism.”Footnote ⁹⁴ He believed that “when a man becomes a slave to any dogma or creed he becomes a useless entity to the social order in which he lives.”Footnote ⁹⁵ He further criticized “Occidental religion,” reasoning that if it had truly carried out the teachings of “Christnar,” the Buddha, and Jesus, then “there would not be room in the society of mankind for such things as lust, greed, hate, and passion, coupled with insanity,” which were at the root of racial injustice.Footnote ⁹⁶ In his view, Western religion had failed, evidenced by the racist oppression of Black people in the United States. With the Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility, Hamid saw an opportunity to “bring about a complete revolution in the realm of spiritual culture in the West.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Like other new religio-racial movements in Harlem, Hamid sought both the material and spiritual liberation of Black people. He believed the Universal Order of Tranquility to be both a social and divine community, proclaiming that “by common ownership we may be able to break down the five detrimental causes of human wreckage—lust, greed, hate, passion and insanity. Mankind has suffered religiously as a result of dogmatic and theological misinformation.”Footnote ⁹⁸ He placed the material relief of the Black community at the center of the Temple's activities. Part of this community plan was the building of the Universal City, which Hamid planned to use to employ “thousands of Negroes who will produce everything my people need in the way of food.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The Temple reportedly contained a free employment agency, a room for the manufacturing of sacred garments, offices, an auditorium, and a social center for youth.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ After the conclusion of each service, Hamid would invite the audience to move to the banquet hall to eat as much as they should wish.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In addition to this material relief, Hamid planned to use the Temple as a platform to speak on behalf of Black struggles.

Already in his first sermon, notably broadcast over the radio, Hamid used his celebrity to address religion, politics, and racial inequality. He originally planned to transmit sermons nightly from 8:15 to 8:45, every day except Fridays.Footnote ¹⁰² But after about a month he ran out of funds and cancelled the radio broadcasts.Footnote ¹⁰³ These broadcasts were intended to be used to “appeal nightly to private and public industry to give employment which will help obliterate the desperate plight of the people of Harlem.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ By broadcasting his sermons over the radio, Hamid took advantage of the growing trend of Black preachers utilizing the popular entertainment industry for proselytization.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Beginning in the 1920s, Black clergy began to use the medium of the phonograph as a basis of ministry. Phonograph sermons continued to be a popular commodity well into the 1930s. In 1930, only 7 percent of African American households owned a radio, and it was not until World War II that radio ownership in Black homes reached over 50 percent.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Like phonograph preachers who created race records, Hamid similarly used modern broadcasting to promote the well-being of the Black community and bring his religious messages to a wider audience. The “first message of Buddha to be broadcast over the air” was, then, one in support of the Black community.

We can see in Hamid's presentation of Buddhism, and the religion of the Universal Order of Tranquility, many features characteristic of Orientalism. Early scholarship on Buddhism was intimately bound up in colonialism, Orientalism, and the emerging field of race sciences. While early postcolonial Buddhist Studies scholarship emphasized the role of Euro-Americans in constructing knowledge about Asia and Buddhism, recent scholars have resisted totalizing narratives. These scholars highlight the process of cultural exchange in the construction of the “Orient,” the heterogeneity of interests and actors in this process, and the ways that Orientalist and colonial hegemonic discourse also made possible modes of resistance.

Colonial-era scholars, through a process of dialogue and exchange with Asian Buddhists,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ forged new ways of understanding and representing Buddhism. Early Buddhist Studies scholars prioritized Pali texts and doctrine as the source for “authentic Buddhism,” which sometimes mapped onto racial theories of Aryan civilization. Nineteenth-century scholars, as part of a longer quest for the racial origins of the Buddha, determined that Buddhism emerged in India, and from there concluded, based on a conflation of linguistic families with racial sciences, that the Buddha was racially Aryan.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Such an identification, along with a text-based reading of Buddhism, made possible the articulation of a universalizing discourse that privileged whiteness, portraying “true” Buddhism as a “religion of science developed for an Aryan future,”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ while simultaneously dismissing contemporary Asian Buddhists as local, ethnic corruptions of a world religion. Alongside such racial articulations of Buddhism ran a romantic Orientalist current, in which Euro-Americans saw in Buddhism and Asian religions the potential cure to an ailing Western society in the throes of a spiritual crisis brought on by the materialism of scientific rationalism.

For their own part, Asian reform Buddhists engaged in modernist discourses as both accommodation to and resistance against colonialism and modernizing discourse, and in response to their own nationalist contexts. Individuals like Anagārika Dharmapāla frequently subverted modernist discourses to critique the imperialist assumptions of Euro-American scholars and to elevate Buddhism above Christianity, particularly that practiced by missionaries in Asia. His rhetoric was not entirely counterhegemonic, however. He also deployed antisemitic rhetoric to condemn Christianity and Islam for the supposed degeneration of humanity, proclaiming, “[W]e condemn Christianity as a system utterly unsuited to the gentle spirit of the Aryan race.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Instead, he claimed that Asians descended from the Buddha were the true Aryans. In doing so, Dharmapala undermined Western Christian superiority while upholding dominant racial categories.

Both anticolonial Buddhist discourse, as well as romantic discourses, might form part of what J. J. Clarke terms “affirmative Orientalism,” in which romanticized visions of the East are contrasted with the West “as an agency for self-criticism and self-renewal, whether in the political, moral, or religious spheres.”Footnote ¹¹¹ For Euro-Americans, the universalizing project of Orientalism could be “subversive and counter-cultural within the Western context, designed to confront indigenous Western religious and philosophical assumptions and practices with a radical alternative.”Footnote ¹¹² For Asian Buddhists, modernist and Orientalist discourses could be inverted to criticize Western imperialism and colonial epistemologies. And yet, neither of these Orientalist discourses capture the specific racial, political, and material dimensions of the Orientalism participated in by individuals like Hamid.

As Lowe observes, Orientalism is “heterogeneous and contradictory,” consisting “of an uneven matrix of orientalist situations across different cultural and historical sites,” each of which “is internally complex and unstable.”Footnote ¹¹³ As such, we should be skeptical of narratives that portray Orientalism as a process that occurs solely between a white West and an Asian East. Many Black Americans, including intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois and religious groups like the MSTA, constructed romantic images of Asia to protest the oppression of Black people in the United States, critique the colonization of Africa and Asia, and repudiate Orientalism's “discursive trap of mutual subordination and . . . separation” of Black Americans and Asian Americans.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Such a discourse is defined by Bill Mullen as Afro-Orientalism, “a counterdiscourse that at times shares with its dominant namesake certain features but primarily constitutes an independent critical trajectory of thought on the practice and ideological weight of Orientalism in the Western World,” a “subtradition in indigenous U.S. writing on imperialism, colonialism, and the making of capitalist empire.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Afro-Orientalism “constitutes a self-conscious alternate modernity that . . . can only define its subversive potential in terms of the West itself.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Jacob Dorman, who is interested in Black Orientalism in relation to religion, defines it as “a recalcitrant counter-discourse that critiqued American racism and the discourse of civilization by exoticizing the self.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Many Black religious movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—including Black Jews, Black Muslims, Rastafarians, Black Shriners and Freemasons, and spiritualists—“both generated and were generated by black Orientalisms.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Such individuals studied languages, donned “Oriental” dress, and connected themselves personally to the “Orient.” They would have engaged in a larger Orientalist popular culture that included theater performance, film, images, and spiritualist shops.Footnote ¹¹⁹ For these individuals, religion was an important means for “resignifying blackness in the context of a hierarchical racial frame,”Footnote ¹²⁰ shifting the meanings of Blackness away from white American racial categories and toward the Orient.

Hamid's Black Orientalism, therefore, ran contiguous to other Orientalist discourses. It shares in other Orientalist frameworks while simultaneously being counterhegemonic—or perhaps in Dorman's terms, recalcitrant—to the dominant religio-racial frameworks of Orientalism in the United States. Hamid understood Asian religions as philosophies by nonwhite people that not only rivaled that of European philosophers but could also revolutionize the spiritual culture of the West, whose spiritual decay was signified by the disease of white supremacy and racism. His juxtaposition of Asian religions to the racial oppression of American capitalism and empire was inseparable from a growing Black religious and political movement “that criticized White racism while promoting reforms to achieve racial equality and Black political empowerment.”Footnote ¹²¹ Through his Afro-Orientalist vision of Buddhism, Hamid could envision himself as a racialized subject within Harlem and the United States, even while participating in broader discourses of Black internationalism. He was not the only actor constructing his religio-racial identity, however. After his death, other individuals also read his Black Orientalist identity as subversive. But they did so in ways that echoed dominant racial categories that marked nonwhite, non-Christian individuals as inherently un-American.

The “BB Plan”

The circulating rumors about Hamid's relationship with Japan resurfaced after Pearl Harbor, when The People's Voice published a series of articles on the “Black Buddhism Plan.” The People's Voice, a New York City–based weekly paper founded by Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in 1942, according to the FBI, enjoyed a circulation of more than twenty-five thousand.Footnote ¹³⁷ The first of four articles on the “Black Buddhism Plan” was published just one week after President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which required all Japanese persons to be removed from the West coast, and in the context of recent FBI arrests of Black Americans in Harlem. The “Black Buddhism Plan,” or the “BB Plan,” appeared in four articles in The People's Voice between February 28 and March 21, 1942.Footnote ¹³⁸ Two, if not all four, of the articles were written by Cheves Richardson, an early supporter and friend of Hamid.Footnote ¹³⁹ The BB Plan, conceived of by The People's Voice, is essential to understanding how Hamid's religio-racial identity placed him within the geopolitical context of the early twentieth century.

According to The People's Voice, the BB Plan was one aspect of a larger World War II plot, called the “B Plan” (Buddhism Plan) concocted by the Japanese to take over the entire world using Buddhism. The People's Voice warned readers that Japan would use Buddhism to unite the peoples of Asia. “The scope of the world B Plan of the Japanese is almost unbelievable,” Cheves Richardson wrote; “the strategy which they have used is definitely the cunning of an Oriental group.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ One article illustrated the threat of Japan, and of Buddhism, with a map (Figure 2). On this map, a large Buddha hovers off the coast of Japan. Incense smoke wafts from his torso, signifying the threat of Buddhism, and the Buddhism Plan, as it spreads throughout Asia. The People's Voice cautioned that Japan would first use Buddhist strongholds to attack India while simultaneously entering Sri Lanka through the Buddhist countries in Southeast Asia. “The World B. Plan has over 11,000,000 followers in Burma; 90,000 lamas act as agents, operating from Buddhist monasteries with headquarters in Rangoon,” they warned, and “in Thailand, Ceylon, Burma and Tibet, it is customary for every boy between 12 and 20 years of age to enter Buddhist monasteries,” where “particular stress is placed on the teachings of Bushido, imparting to them the fanatical battlefield heroism of which much has been said.” According to The People's Voice, Japan planned to consolidate their rule over all of Asia through Buddhism. And to make it worse, The People's Voice claimed, the Japanese “Buddhism” plan extended across the Pacific, to the United States.

Fig. 2.

Map of the progress of the “Buddhism Plan” in Asia. The text reads: “On the map above is depicted the threat of Buddhism shown in the incense rising from the figure of Buddha over Burma, Thailand, India, all of the Dutch East Indies and Ceylon. This is the serious threat to the democracies. We must cope with this threat in order to attain victory. Important defense measures must be placed in these Buddhist territories, for they are under the supervision of the Japanese empire.”Footnote ¹⁴¹

Sufi Abdul Hamid had allegedly been chosen before his death to lead the “BB Plan,” which would see Black Buddhists team up with the Japanese empire to infiltrate the United States from within.Footnote ¹⁴² Black Buddhists, the articles warned, “preached Buddhism as the religion of color the world over, the key to racial success.”Footnote ¹⁴³ According to The People's Voice, Japanese agents, inspired by the success of Father Divine, believed religion provided the best means “to gain control over the Negro.” African Americans who converted to Buddhism would be offered Japanese citizenship and a chance to visit, study, and receive military training in Japan. The People's Voice reported that Hamid agreed “to send hundreds of Negro students yearly, financed by the Japs,” to Vidyodaya College in Colombo, which attracted “scholars from all units of the B Plan.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In exchange for his agreement to lead the BB unit in the United States, Japanese agents allegedly supplied the funds for the down payment for Hamid's Temple.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ One article reported the Japanese offered Hamid the backing of 300,000,000 followers, who, after the success of the “Buddhism Plan,” would establish a Black empire in Africa. The People's Voice alleged that Hamid's writings “immediately adopted the BB Plan line.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The first article on the BB Plan claimed that the plan died with Hamid, but later articles argued that the BB Plan failed because African Americans distrusted Japan's imperialist ambitions.

The People's Voice was not the only news organization to connect pro-Tokyo African American sympathizers with Buddhism. In 1942, the Associated Negro Press (ANP), a news agency that provided its member papers with a twice-weekly packet of information, released a report on the influence of Japan on African Americans. The ANP reported the influence of Japanese agents in the Southern United States, as well as “colored agents,” consisting of “‘Japan's black allies in large seacoast cities of the black belt’ who ‘established themselves as fortune-tellers, seers, clairvoyants, spiritualists, voodoists, palmists, phrenologists, tea-leaf and coffee ground readers.’”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ This group, according to the ANP, also included well-educated African Americans appearing as “turbaned East Indian mystics,” with “knowledge of Arabic or a smattering of some Oriental dialect” who had images of the Buddha in their parlor or reception rooms.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The ANP concluded “in the event of a full and successful invasion of our borders from the southwest [by Japan], her illiterate followers in the black belt were expected to rise with such vigor that a temporary diversion would facilitate more rapid movement of the invader.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ For the ANP, Buddhism and other non-Christian religions served as the smoking gun for pro-Tokyo Black sympathies.

That the BB Plan was published by a Black newspaper and authored by someone who had once claimed to be a follower of Hamid is not insignificant. The religio-racialization of Black Buddhists as dangerous to the body politic of the United States speaks to the presence of competing religio-racial subjectivities among the Black community. Both The People's Voice and the ANP speak to, and for, the Black community in constructing Hamid's religio-racial identity as not just subversive but dangerous. The People's Voice claims to speak for the entire African American community when it asserts, “[T]he BB Plan has failed among American Negroes because they distrust Japan and her Axis tie-up.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Thus, as Martin has observed, Black religio-racial subjectivity could at times be aligned with the religio-racial force of the white Christian state.

The BB Plan, with its reliance on Orientalist exaggerations of Buddhism in Asia, seems far-fetched today. But at the time the FBI took the BB Plan seriously and chose to retain the March 21, 1942, article in their file on the MSTA because this article alleged that there was a connection between the Black Buddhism Plan and Duse Mohammed Ali of the MSTA.Footnote ¹⁵¹ When the “BB Plan” theory is placed within its historical context, we can understood why Hamid, as a racial activist who was both Black and Buddhist, was the perfect person to be placed within such a theory, and why the BB Plan's subsequent association with the MSTA alarmed the FBI. The Black Buddhism Plan was based on religio-racial imaginations of a Black Pacific community rooted in Buddhism. As a famous Black Buddhist, Hamid, though long dead, became the face of this community, centering him in visions of an alternate geopolitical community that threatened American imperial ambitions in the Pacific.

Buddhism Surveilled

As the Harlem Renaissance developed, the American empire increasingly shifted its focus toward the Pacific. The war of 1898 resulted in the U.S. acquisition of Spanish holdings in the Pacific and the Caribbean, including the Philippines, Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, as well as Hawai'i. By the 1920s, the Pacific had become imperialized, leading to what Etsuko Taketani calls a “shift in social cognitive mapping—or a new spatial ordering of the world.”Footnote ¹⁵² The formation of an imperialized Pacific community, one in which the United States had a vested geopolitical interest, influenced Black internationalism in the United States. Black artists and intellectuals looked not just across the Atlantic to foster a Black international identity, but also across the Pacific, to other “colored nations.” The possibility of an Afro-Asian alliance alarmed government agencies. These fears came to a head after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, when intelligence agencies investigated both Japanese Americans and African Americans. Central to the surveillance of these communities was not only race but also religion.

For decades prior to December 1941, Japanese Americans were viewed with suspicion, and seen as “un-American” or “anti-American,” for both racial and religious reasons. Whereas in the late nineteenth century anti-Asian sentiment focused on Chinese people, culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, in the early twentieth century anti-Asian attitudes increasingly focused on Japan. A major impetus for rising anti-Japanese views was the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, in which Japan demonstrated its military power. In the years leading up to and following World War I, anti-Japanese sentiment resulted in the creation of the “Alien Land Laws,” preventing Japanese people from owning property or becoming naturalized citizens, and the Immigration Act of 1924, which prohibited immigration from Asia altogether.

As Duncan Williams notes, the wide categorization of Japanese Buddhists as “un-American” involved discrimination on the basis of both race and religion.Footnote ¹⁵³ For years before Pearl Harbor, government intelligence agencies in the United States and in Canada investigated Japanese American Buddhists in Hawai'i, California, and Canada. Buddhist temples were surveilled, and Buddhist priests were documented on the “ABC” list, which recorded names of persons to be arrested in case war broke out with Japan.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Group A suspects, the highest priority for arrest, included Buddhist and Shinto priests. At least three years before Pearl Harbor, intelligence agencies “commissioned studies on the ‘Americanization’ and ‘potential loyalty’ of Buddhists versus Christians in the Nikkei [second generation] community.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ These reports concluded that “Buddhists were more likely than their Christian counterparts to identify with Japan and less able to properly ‘Americanize.’”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ As a result of years of government surveillance of Japanese American communities, Japanese American community leaders were arrested within mere hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Two months later, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of those deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast. Over 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were forced to vacate their homes and detained in camps. Thus Buddhists, as a category, were seen as essentially un-American, persons to be subject to surveillance.

While on the West Coast government agencies interned Japanese Americans, on the East Coast the FBI began surveilling and detaining African Americans, particularly those religious groups who rejected the category of “Negro Christian.” Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounded up any Black Americans who appeared to support Japan. Around 125 Black Americans were arrested on grounds of draft evasion, sedition, and pro-Japanese espionage, including the leaders of the NOI, the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, the Brotherhood of Liberty for the Black People of America, the Ethiopian Pacific Movement (EPM), and the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World (PMEW). When the leaders of the EPM were arrested, they were accused of plotting “a coalition of Africa and Japan in planning a ‘world empire for the dark races’” and of deterring recruitment and enlistment in the U.S. military.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ These arrests represented the culmination of decades of suspicions of an Afro-Japanese alliance.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

During the early twentieth century, some African Americans participated in the geographic imaginings of an alternate Pacific community, one dictated not by American imperial power, but by “colored solidarities against worldwide racism and Western imperialism.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Taketani employs the term “Black Pacific community” to designate the imagined community formed through Black narratives that conjure a shared history between African Americans and the colored peoples of the Pacific Rim, and in doing so, questions and challenges American hegemonic visions of a Pacific community.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ In the lead-up to World War II, many in the African American community articulated a sense of solidarity with Asian peoples through their shared experience of colonialism and oppression under white supremacy.

The Black Pacific Community

While Japan's military victory in the Russo-Japanese war prompted government officials to worry about what this would mean for American imperial ambitions in the Pacific, African Americans looked to Japan as formidable proof that a so-called “colored” nation could overthrow white colonizers. Throughout the early twentieth century, Japan was the object of some admiration among Black intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington. These figures upheld Japan as evidence that modernity was not the sole province of Europeans and that white supremacy was not natural nor universal. They further looked to the country as a potential leader in the fight against white colonialism. Some foresaw with this victory a widespread anticolonial movement for self-determination in Asia and in Africa.Footnote ¹⁶¹ For example, Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), envisioned that a Japan-led movement of “Asia for the Asiatics” would be the precursor for a restoration of “Africa for the Africans.”Footnote ¹⁶² Political solidarity against racism also extended to within the borders of the United States, where both Asian Americans and African Americans suffered from white supremacy. Throughout the early twentieth century, as anti-Asian sentiment rose in the United States, some African Americans, in recognition of their shared experiences of racism, objected to anti-Asian racism, including the passing of the Alien Land Laws and the segregation of Japanese school children.Footnote ¹⁶³ Perceptions of an alliance between Black Americans and Japanese in the struggle against white supremacy increased following World War I. The 1919 Paris Peace Conference was instrumental to this development. When Japan proposed the addition of a racial-equality clause to the charter of the League of Nations, some Black Americans read this as a signal that Japan would lead in a global fight against white supremacy.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Such views heightened during the Second Italo-Ethiopian war (1935–1936) amid widespread anticipation that Japan would ally with Ethiopia against white colonialism.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Thus, leading up to World War II, some people in the Black community believed the Japanese Empire would be an integral player in the fulfillment of what the Chicago Defender termed a “manifest destiny”—one not dedicated to the expansion of the American empire, but to the abolition of white supremacy.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

While positive sentiments toward Japan waned following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, some Black Americans remained skeptical that Black people would be better off from an American victory than a Japanese one. Some of the groups that emerged in the 1930s in support of Ethiopia, like PMEW and the EPM, remained pro-Japanese, proclaiming Japan as the “champion of the colored people.” Some individuals, like Robert Jordan, believed that, were Japan to win the war, they would liberate Black people in the United States and lead the fight to drive out white colonialism in Asia. The EPM proclaimed that after Japan defeated the United States, the nation “will be turned over to the Negro,”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ while members of the PMEW hung a black cloth in their windows so that when the Japanese arrived their homes would be spared.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Visions of an alliance between Black people and the Japanese empire influenced interpretations of World War II as a global race war, with Black Americans understanding that liberation from Jim Crow in the United States was intimately linked to anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa.

To be sure, Afro-Asian solidarity movements were not monolithic. Alongside those who celebrated Japan as the leader in the fight against white supremacy were those who looked at Japanese imperialism and colonialism with scrutiny. Such individuals, rather than seeing Japan as the hero of racialized people, sought solidarity elsewhere, particularly after World War II. Nevertheless, even for those critical of Japan's imperialism and colonialism, Japan still served as “an ‘index’ in the worldwide struggle for Black liberation.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Pro-Japan provocation—the political solidarity with Japan against white imperialism and racism—brings “radical Black internationalism into sharper focus.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Because of this, the possibility of a Black Pacific community entered the imagination of U.S. government and intelligence agencies as a dangerous form of Black internationalism.

Japan loomed large in the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to investigate Black racial rights groups. In 1920, an FBI agent was tasked with assessing whether any Japanese people were behind Marcus Garvey's Black Star Line, a shipping company established by Garvey to facilitate the back-to-Africa movement.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Intelligence agencies viewed the UNIA as “the progenitor as well as incubator of the welter of new nationalist formations that sprang up in the U.S. in the 1930s, all of which absorbed and adapted UNIA principles of racial independence, African redemption and colonization, and Afro-Asiatic racial solidarity.”Footnote ¹⁷² Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the FBI surveilled Naka Nakane (also known as Sakotaka Takahishi) and Yasuichi Hikida for spreading pro-Japanese propaganda, taking an interest in the treatment of Black people, and promoting solidarity movements against white supremacy.Footnote ¹⁷³ The FBI's Survey of Racial Conditions in the United States, or RACON, commissioned by Hoover in 1942 to investigate “foreign-inspired agitation among the American Negroes,” dedicates significant space to Japanese influence and activity among African Americans.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ The FBI's RACON reveals a distinct concern within the FBI that “the Japanese government has endeavored to implant pro-Japanese ideas and attitudes in the minds of the colored people” and to frame World War II as a “race war.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ It is through such reports that, in Taketani's words, “the black Pacific entered the domain of the thinkable, the imaginable, in the national security discourse.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The FBI's creation of the Black Pacific as “an object of surveillance” constituted a counterimagining of a Black Pacific community as it was envisioned by Black authors.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

Some African Americans, knowing the FBI's anxieties about pro-Japanese sympathies in the Black community, purposely played up their pro-Japanese sentiments. Malcolm X, leader of the NOI, wrote in his autobiography that when the army attempted to draft him, he circulated a rumor that he wanted to join the Japanese Army in an attempt to be disqualified from service.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Members of the American government took such threats seriously. In February 1942, Mississippi congressman John E. Rankin made a bid for the internment of Japanese Americans that conflated anti-Black racism with anti-Japanese sentiment. He claimed to the U.S. House of Representatives that “Japanese fifth columnists were stirring unrest ‘among the Negroes in Harlem’ so successfully that New York ‘city authorities’ had ‘entirely lost control.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Rankin warned that if the Japanese were not incarcerated, they would incite twenty million African Americans to revolt.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Such claims helped reinforce the idea of a Black Pacific community.

Religion has, overall, been neglected in research on Black Pacific narratives, both as they were imagined by Black Americans and by government agencies. But religion is, in fact, integral to these imagined communities. Like Japanese American Buddhists, Black new religious movements were also surveilled for years prior to World War II. Sylvester Johnson has documented how the emergence of Garveyism and Black religio-racial movements coincided with the “unprecedented” “deployment of U.S. intelligence” “as an essential element of statecraft.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ New religio-racial groups were deemed enemies of the state, “as especially potent manifestations of grand racial opposition to White power that advanced a politics of Black liberation.”Footnote ¹⁸² The surveillance of the MSTA, for example, begun in the early 1930s, was rooted in both anti-Black racism and suspicions that the group used religion as a cover for their covert activities.Footnote ¹⁸³ The MSTA's vision of “global unity among peoples of color in opposition to Western colonialism and racism” led to the greatly increased surveillance of members who held pro-Japanese sympathies in 1941 and 1942.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ As we can see with the example of Hamid, Buddhism is also part of this story.

It is the creation of the Black Pacific, both in Black literature and as an object of surveillance, that allowed for the conceptual possibility of a “Black Buddhism Plan.” Just as Japanese Americans’ religious and racial identities led to their surveillance as suspected antinationalists, Buddhism also served as a point of concern for government agencies wary of pro-Japan Black Americans. Some government officials and agencies anxiously observed the relationship between African Americans and Japanese American Buddhists. These authorities particularly looked to San Francisco with anxiety. Congressman Martin Dies, for example, prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, worried about the potential of Japanese espionage in San Francisco, because of the concentration of African Americans and Japanese Americans in the area.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ The U.S. military, in a list of “Japanese-Negro Front organizations” that featured the UNIA, the PMEW, and the EPM, also included the Emmanuel Gospel Mission of San Francisco because of its potential ties to Japanese Buddhist institutions.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Allegedly, the Mission preached “to Negroes, Hawaiians, Mexicans, and Hindus the doctrine of the necessity of a union of all colored races against whites.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Therefore, both Japanese Americans and Black Americans, on the basis of their construction as religious and racial subjects, became suspect of harboring anti-American sentiment and of colluding together.