AFRICAN-AMERICANS IN THE PRE-WAR YEARS

The first several decades of the twentieth century were a prosperous moment in the development of Black radicalism among working-class and middle-class African Americans. However, as Cedric Robinson (Reference Robinson2000) reminds us, there was nothing particularly new about the radicalism at this historical juncture nor was it some social anomaly that randomly appeared on the American political horizon. Instead, the first half of the twentieth century of Black radical thought was deeply nourished by a longer, historically rooted tradition found in Africa and the African diaspora that constantly negotiated its relationship between capitalist slavery, imperialist expansion, and its own resistance to this “dialectical matrix” (p. 167). In the early years of the twentieth century, figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett consistently wrestled with and debated the outcomes of a failed period of Reconstruction and the effects this would have on shaping the role African Americans would play in twentieth-century America (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1989, Reference Du Bois1935; Wells-Barnett Reference Wells-Barnett2002). Hundreds of thousands of displaced southern Black sharecroppers moved to northern industrialized cities in search of work as the United States prepared to enter the First World War. As Phillip Foner (Reference Foner1976) records, during the second decade of the twentieth century, Black industrial labor almost doubled in number from 550,000 in 1910 to more than 900,000 workers by 1920. Almost another half million African Americans entered the U.S. Armed Forces in segregated units which included Puerto Ricans who had recently been conspicuously granted U.S. citizenship under the Jones Act of 1917.

Following the war, White soldiers—feeling they had been displaced by Black labor—clashed with both African American industrial workers and African American soldiers returning from overseas who brought with them a newfound sense of social consciousness. As discrimination, violence, and unemployment mounted against them throughout the United States, African Americans looked within their larger historical tradition of resistance, as well as within the general American left, as a way to respond to the growing threat to Black personhood. From this social vortex came groups such as Marcus Garvey's Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) as well as increased participation within U.S.-based socialist organizations, including the International Workers of the World (IWW), Cyril V. Briggs's African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) and—later in the mid 1920s—the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA). Of particular importance here are the efforts of the CPUSA to attract the Black industrial class to its ranks. One of the ways in which this was accomplished was through the centering of Black oppression within the Communist plank through a reformulation of communist positions on nationalism (chauvinism) and the right to self-determination. Both positions were frowned upon within various sectors of the CP since they helped to further the interests of the bourgeois class while compromising the overall labor and class struggle. This party line was problematic for African Americans because it asked them to overlook the racialized nature of Western capitalism even as they continued to face racial violence and discrimination in everyday life and even within the CPUSA (Kelley Reference Kelley1990, Reference Kelley1996). Recognizing this deterrent, Lenin broke with the party line, arguing that self determination was a key component of the larger struggle against imperialism and thus could be used to unite the international laboring class. As Robin Kelley (Reference Kelley1996) notes, Lenin's position “created an opening for African-Americans to articulate nationalist ideologies in spite of the Party's formal opposition to ‘Negro Nationalism’” (p. 105). Lenin's reformulation also provided an opportunity, perhaps unintentionally, for a reassessment of the radical work of Black Nationalist organizations such as the UNIA and the ABB that also drew from notions of Pan-Africanism and internationalism more generally.Footnote ⁷ “The Communist movement's internationalism,” continues Kelley (Reference Kelley1996), “not only appropriated the familiar idioms of Pan-Africanism, but in many respects it cleared the way for a vision of black anti-imperialism that could transcend without negating a completely racialized worldview” (p. 108).

Pan-Africanist internationalism rooted in the right to self-determination within the CPUSA culminated in 1928 during the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern with the declaration of the “Black Belt theory.” The Black Belt theory argued that Blacks were an oppressed majority in the south who had the right to self-determination. The Sixth World Congress of the Comintern further substantiated the fact that African Americans not only had a unique intellectual tradition but that they were entitled to govern their own nation within the continental United States (Kelley Reference Kelley1996). No matter how much the CPUSA and Lenin asserted African American political sovereignty it remained an abstract political and theoretical claim that never took root at the local level of the party. Because of this, Black internationalism became an alternative model from which African Americans could “cross cultural boundaries, to escape and challenge essentialist presumptions common among some segments of the CP …” (Kelley Reference Kelley1996, p. 108). The extension of African American political thought to internationalist discourse provided a deeply rooted and highly nuanced analysis of the relationship between race and the cultural and political subjugation of certain segments of the globe that extended from the Great Depression through the end of World War II. As Penny von Eschen (Reference Von Eschen1997) notes, such an approach considered how “discourse was critical in shaping black American politics and the meaning of racial identities and solidarities” (p. 3).Footnote ⁸ Nonetheless, during the 1930s and early 1940s, African Americans struggled to transform many of these broader political linkages into tangible outcomes for Blacks residing in the United States. Ultimately, models of alternative ways of social life remained underdeveloped during this period.

The divide between Black radical theory and social life was the central subject of Richard Wright's important 1937 essay, “Blueprint for Negro Literature.” Directing the majority of his attention towards African American writers but also towards Black cultural production in general, Wright urged Black writers to use Marxism as a framework for a style of writing that could avoid the pitfalls of blind nationalist rhetoric while still detailing the “complexity” and “magic wonder” of Black personhood under “even the most sordid existence” (Reference Wright and Mitchell1994, p. 103). Wright had, by this time, become quite skeptical of a great majority of writing by African Americans, which he thought had become overly preoccupied with attempting to illustrate the basic humanity of U.S. Blacks. This bland orientation towards Black culture, in Wright's opinion, created a larger stagnation in Black political thought that prevented Black intellectuals from envisioning the textured richness of Black culture and, more importantly, a new and politically powerful social consciousness among the Black proletariat. “Shall Negro writing,” asked Wright, “be for the lives and consciousness of the Negro masses, moulding [sic] those lives and consciousness toward new goals, or shall it continue begging the question of the Negroes' humanity?” (Reference Wright and Mitchell1994, p. 99).

Wright put the full force and weight of his writing behind the former choice but was careful to point out that he was not asking Black writers and intellectuals to act as mere agents of “propaganda,” “preachers” or—even worse—as “salesmen” of a Black tradition (Reference Wright and Mitchell1994, p. 103). Such an approach would fail to capture a new vision of Black politics and could fall prey to problematic forms of Black nationalism (chauvinism). However, Wright, maintaining some commitment to the Stalinist reconfiguration of the Negro Question, was not against the use of Black Nationalism for he saw it not as inherently part of Black life but rather as a product of Western racial capitalism. This reformulated nationalism enabled African American writers to understand its strengths and limitations while still aiming for “the highest pitch of social consciousness” (Wright Reference Wright and Mitchell1994, p. 101).Footnote ⁹

Nonetheless, Marxist theory was not the end-all but rather “a starting point.” Recognizing the practical limitations and the general void often created between Black intellectuals and Black labor that was informed by Marxist theory, Wright asserted that “no theory can take the place of life” (Reference Wright and Mitchell1994, p. 102). Thus, claimed Wright, “after Marxism has laid bare the skeleton of society, there remains the task of the writer to plant flesh upon those bones out of the plenitude of his will to live” (Reference Wright and Mitchell1994, p. 102). Accordingly, the task of Black writers at this particular moment in history was to confront the tainted history of Western racial capitalism as well as to document new alternative schemas for living and being for the Black working class.

Showing his own theoretical inclinations, Wright (Reference Wright and Mitchell1994) suggested that alternative visions of living could be created by writers through their own “awareness of consciousness” or what he plainly termed “perspective” (p. 103). He loosely defined perspective as:

Wright called attention to the theoretical yet practical goals that writings by progressive African Americans should attempt to incorporate into their work and that are understood by the very people living the structural outcomes of social inequality, violence, and isolation. At another level it is also a call for an understanding of the commonalities between oppressed groups and the relationship between Western racial capitalism and its structural relationship to the everyday life of Black men and women.Footnote ¹⁰ In short, “(p)erspective for Negro writers will come when they have looked and brooded so hard and long upon the harsh lot of their race and compared it with the hopes and struggles of minority peoples everywhere that the cold facts have begun to tell them something” (Wright Reference Wright and Mitchell1994, p. 104). Even as Wright's challenge to search for the “cold facts” (p. 104) was first and foremost a call to Black literary writers, it was certainly not limited to them. His call was easily extendable to the writings of journalists, intellectuals in the social sciences, and certainly to other Black artists. Illustrating the political stakes behind Black journalism, incorporating a perspective beyond the linear trajectory of dominant Western historiography, Courier reporter George Little (Reference Little1942c) commented: “Democracy should be an emotional instead of an intellectual experience, it is something that is felt deeply and passionately. Because white Americans and Britons have made democracy an intellectual and not emotional concept, democracy has been a failure” (p. 14).

Wright's nuanced theoretical comparative frame of “perspective” was an important potential bridge between the Black middle class and Black workers across the globe as they attempted to imagine new models for living as an economically and socially marginalized group of the U.S. polity. Perhaps even more importantly, not only could the writings by African Americans bridge class differences within the Black community, but they could do so by providing a more tangible component to complement the already heavily theorized components of Black social life. While Black internationalism and the politics of the African diaspora thrived during these years as a socially progressive model, African Americans also found an interesting social project worth their attention a little closer to home.Footnote ¹¹

LOOKING FURTHER SOUTH FOR SOME “COMMON COURTESY”

In early 1942 and 1943 two of the most popular Black presses in the United States, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, each sent a writer to Puerto Rico to provide its readers with detailed accounts of the political and social conditions on the island. As part of its coverage the Courier sent local Pittsburgh physician Dr. George Little sometime in the early months of 1942. Upon his return from the island, Dr. Little completed a three-part series of articles for the Courier that was published between February 21 and March 7 of the same year (Reference Little1942a, b, c). Staff correspondent Deton Brooks (Reference Brooks1943d) of the Chicago Defender visited Puerto Rico almost a year later in what was described by the paper as an “extended tour of the American outpost in the Caribbean” (p. 7). Although it appears that the two presses independently originated the idea to visit the island as part of a larger series of stories focusing on the third world (such coverage was common at the time), they were also likely to have been extended formal invitations by prominent members of the Puerto Rican government, a popular practice during the era (Von Eschen Reference Von Eschen1997). An editorial in the August 28, 1943 Defender pointed to the quest of finding a solution to state sanctioned racism as part of the paper's larger rationale for sending Deton Brooks to Puerto Rico:

The editorial demonstrates a proactive concern with the effects of Jim Crow segregation and how those effects fit into global patterns of inequality taking place in far-off continents such as Asia and Africa, although the instances of and potential solutions to inequality found in places nearby were perhaps more worthy of the Defender's attention, in terms of presenting different models of social life for Blacks in the United States. “It was this thought,” reasons the editorial writer (1943b), “which prompted us to send an editor 2500 miles to the American possession of Puerto Rico, where with first hand information he has shown how certain anticipated repressive measures in that island are in part aimed at keeping us down” (p. 14, emphasis added).Footnote ¹² Thus, the series of articles found in the Black popular press during the time imaginatively entertained Puerto Rico as an archetype for understanding the ways Blacks themselves were being marginalized across multiple axes. More specifically, both Brooks and Little deemed Puerto Rico's racial composition, monocultural economy, and colonial status useful points of comparison for African Americans seeking redress from the U.S. government.

During his short time in Puerto Rico, Dr. George Little was hosted and taken around the island by UPR chancellor Dr. Jaíme Benítez, as well as by a number of San Juan's most prominent families.Footnote ¹³ Brooks never made any specific note as to his living arrangements during his seven-week tour of the island, but it is difficult to imagine an American journalist spending such an extended period of time without some assistance or guidance from the insular government. Indeed, Brooks had access to and was able to interview prominent figures in the Puerto Rican government including Popular leader and president of the senate Luis Muñoz Marín, whose manner “resembled that of President Roosevelt,” according to Brooks (Reference Brooks1943a), in his “knack of talking in language that the ‘man on the street’ understands” (p. 7). While the series of articles by Brooks was more journalistically vigorous, both accounts centered on the ways in which the struggle for freedom and democracy in Puerto Rico affected the plight of African Americans on the U.S. mainland. “How could occurrences in a little subtropical island outpost 1,150 miles from Florida,” asked Deton Brooks (Reference Brooks1943d) in his first dispatch, “affect the condition of minorities here at home?” (p. 7). Brooks concluded that “the link between freedom for Puerto Rico and freedom for the Negro is understandable” (p. 7). While Brooks was immediately preoccupied with comprehending the social and structural links between Puerto Rico and African Americans, the majority of Dr. Little's (Reference Little1942a) preliminary observations focused on the beauty of the island and on the beauty of Puerto Rican women, as evidenced by the subtitle of the very first published article: “Beautiful Señoritas A La Puerto Rican Style” (p. 14). In spite of his early descriptive and gendered preoccupations, by his third and final essay Little moved to a more nuanced analysis of Puerto Rican politics and social customs.

One of the overarching themes among the major Black presses in their coverage of Puerto Rico during the time was the apparent affinity that African Americans had with the struggles taking place in Puerto Rico. According to Penny Von Eschen (Reference Von Eschen1997), the similarities between African Americans and other people throughout the third world most often pointed out among Black press were not necessarily about biological characteristics; rather, those similarities discussed among aggrieved communities during this time were deeply embedded in the longer historical legacy of colonialism and the accumulation of land that were crucial links in the advancement of Western capitalism. As Victor Rodriguez (Reference Rodriguez2005) shows, one of the first ways Puerto Ricans came to be racialized was through the limited collective control of and access to land due to the island's colonization by the United States in collaboration with local elites. The expropriation of land in favor of economic interests resonates with the failures of land redistribution experienced by African Americans during the period of Reconstruction (pp. 13–16). Put differently, the perverse history of U.S. racial capital was expressed equally through (wage) slavery and colonialism—a key point that links the struggles of African Americans and Puerto Ricans.

Additionally, the broader efforts of the U.S. government to curtail socialist and communist political movements within the United States during the war years explains why Black scholars and writers during this period turned to Puerto Rico as a social and political resource.Footnote ¹⁴ As Deton Brooks (Reference Brooks1943d) proclaimed in his piece on July 31, “The fate of the Negro, the Jew, the laboring classes, in fact most of America's minorities will be decided by what happens to Puerto Rico” (p. 7). The active reorganization of the Puerto Rican insular government during the 1940s discussed below was an important structural index for measuring the ways in which African Americans and other aggrieved communities could make their own requests from both local and federal authorities. Specifically, the institutionalized nature of Puerto Ricans' second-class citizenship within the U.S. polity, combined with their longer history of slavery and colonization, made them an ideal point of comparison. What set Puerto Rico apart from other countries in its importance to Black journalists (as well as to those making claims from among the U.S. racial regime) was the very nature of Puerto Rico's subjugated political status within the United States. As John Robert Badger (Reference Badger1943) noted in his “World View” section for the Defender:

Unlike a host of countries in Africa and even Asia, the particular nature of Puerto Rico's colonial status afforded African Americans more than an imaginary link to claims about Black nationhood and citizenship. Although countries such as Ethiopia, Algeria, and India were often used as resources to frame internationalist ideas about Pan-Africanism or Black personhood more generally, they remained, nonetheless, outside the formal political and thus legal jurisdiction of the United States. This legal externality was a crucial point where most Pan-African schemas lost their transposability within the U.S. racial regime.

Puerto Rico was not the only place within the hemisphere where African Americans had tested theories relating to U.S. imperialism and their relationship to it. Along with the Philippines in the eastern hemisphere, the various revolutions and social upheavals taking place in Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba were crucial points of reference where African Americans could reflect upon the relationship between U.S. imperialism, race, and their own social positioning. Discussing the Spanish-American War of 1898, Amy Kaplan (Reference Kaplan2002) notes that the “negative identification of Cubans … and Filipinos as ‘colored’ found contradictory political interpretations among African Americans” (p. 137). Kaplan shows that while some thought about the potential role that African Americans played in the imperialist project as “mediators” between the United States and its new racialized subjects, others thought about how the the new colonies—which had been romanticized as free of racism—served as a useful resource for African Americans. Nonetheless, the fact remains that Cuba—under the Teller Amendment of 1898—was never formally established as a U.S. colony while Filipinos remained “wards … without citizenship rights,” a colonial prerogative outlined in the Jones Act of 1916 (Espiritu Reference Espiritu2003, p. 60). Despite popular calls to the contrary, there is no record of African Americans ever migrating en masse to live in any of the new colonial territories forcefully acquired during the Spanish-American War of 1898; all of which were eventually granted formal independence (Kaplan and Pease, Reference Kaplan and Pease1993). As a result, Puerto Rico was important because it provided a locus which allowed Black intellectuals to frame their political struggle against the U.S. government as part of a broader anti-imperialist hemispheric vision of the Americas while remaining intimately local.

Debates about citizenship on the part of African American journalists were an indicator of the continued investment that Black intellectuals had in ideas about democracy and freedom at both an international and a local level. Speaking about Pan-Americanism at the onset of World War II, journalist Frank E. Bolden (Reference Bolden1942) noted that:

Bolden uncovered how the principles of U.S. democracy and freedom outlined in the Constitution remained an empty and contradictory promise for African Americans and other people of color within the Western Hemisphere in the face of continued colonial expansion as well as racist violence and exclusion on the home front. But Puerto Rico remained an integral “bridge” between ideas of democracy and racialized capitalist expansion for these intellectuals. “Remember,” asserted Deton Brooks (Reference Brooks1943a), “Puerto Rico is a battlefront. It's just another area in which the big American fight—the underdog vs. entrenched power—continues. We can't afford to lose there anymore than we can on the home front” (p. 7). The colonial status of the island was not the only or perhaps even the central aspect of Puerto Rico that attracted Black journalists to Puerto Rico as an important link in a hemispheric vision of the Americas. Rather, the ways in which Puerto Ricans were also a racialized colonial population both within and apart from the United States warranted its serious discussion. Speaking about Puerto Ricans whom he saw as having direct “blood ties” with African Americans, Dr. George Little (Reference Little1942c) remarked that they “are imbued with a consciousness of their race and destiny, they look forward to a progress and an advancement of their people” (p. 14). “Race,” commented Bolden (Reference Bolden1942), would be a constituent “part in our endeavor to ensure cordial hemispheric relations” (p. 12). Bolden continued by warning that race could not be “dealt with, as some short-sighted individuals in this country are desirous of doing. The majority of our allied South American friends are colored. Let's not make the mistakes of the British Empire…” (Reference Bolden1942, p. 12). Puerto Rico was thus a pivotal location where other aggrieved communities, in this case African Americans, could continue to challenge the link between race and empire. In sum, while Puerto Rico was certainly not the first location that African Americans used to negotiate ideas about race and empire, the permanency of Puerto Rico's colonial status and the constitutionally legislated second-class nature of its subject's citizenship remained an important standpoint from which African American intellectuals could contest their own treatment and substatus citizenship within the U.S. polity.

According to Deton Brooks (Reference Brooks1943e), the “sub-status” classification of Puerto Ricans was an important marker for African Americans because it permitted a much broader questioning of the nature and benefits of what U.S. citizenship entailed (p. 13). By the time Brooks had written his first article in the series about Puerto Rico for the Defender in the summer of 1943, more than twenty-five years had passed since Puerto Ricans had been formally granted U.S. citizenship with the passage of the Jones Act in 1917. While constitutional inclusion granted Puerto Ricans certain forms of flexibility associated with U.S. citizenship, Puerto Rico remained plagued by extensive poverty and disease that had not been properly accounted for by U.S. administrators. As Kelvin Santiago-Valles (Reference Santiago-Valles1994) notes, both poverty and disease remained central and unresolved concerns for social scientists and government officials on the island throughout much of the early twentieth century. Concurrently, both of these issues along with concerns of criminality became the key discursive variables used to cast Puerto Ricans as a “subject” people (Santiago-Valles Reference Santiago-Valles1994, p. 57). In the eyes of Black journalists, then, the granting of American citizenship was an empty and symbolic gesture that had in no way improved the material lives of the majority of Puerto Ricans on the island. African American journalists continually pointed out that not only had U.S. citizenship failed to present Puerto Rico with any structural improvement in the day-to-day lives of most Puerto Ricans but that, in fact, the presence of U.S.-based sugar monopolies had drastically increased the disparity within the local class structure. In “Independence for Puerto Rico,” (1943a) a Courier editorial focused on the strategic nature of Puerto Rico and made reference to this structural failure noting: “Our government does not want to turn Puerto Rico loose because of its strategic value and big investment of the sugar trust whose exactions have reduced the Puerto Ricans to abject poverty and disease” (p. 6). Deton Brooks (Reference Brooks1943d) further substantiated these claims in one of his first ethnographic reflections of the island:

Indeed, Deton Brooks was especially critical of the United States' sugar monopoly interests on the island and made Puerto Rico's economy a key point of analysis throughout his seven-part series. While including numerous critiques of U.S. sugar barons throughout his various monologues, Brooks dedicated almost his entire fourth dispatch to focusing on Puerto Rico's dependence on sugar. In his article of August 21, “Puerto Rico One Crop System Needs Reform,” Brooks (Reference Brooks1943g) aimed his wrath squarely at three of the largest corporate sugar mills on the island: Centrals Aguirre, The South Puerto Rico Company, and the Fajardo Company. “Cruel, arrogant despot, King Sugar rules supreme,” began Brooks, “All the people are his subject and none escape the tyranny of his reign … Sugar is King of Puerto Rico” (Reference Brooks1943g, p. 13). Brooks's analysis of United States sugar interests on the island strategically drew on the much larger question of U.S. colonialism and the ways in which Puerto Rico's economy was at the mercy of the wants and interests of U.S. racial capital. Meant to highlight this vulnerability, Brooks placed his journalistic attention on the starvation faced by thousands of Puerto Ricans during the early war years when the island was dangerously surrounded by German submarines. The majority of Puerto Rico's fertile lowlands were appropriated through various colonial taxation policies that increased land concentration in favor of the large sugar mills. Aside from small plots of land that could be used for other types of subsistence crops, the majority of Puerto Rico's food had to be imported from the United States. Accordingly, during the early war years while Puerto Rico's centrals were stocked with tons of sugar cane, thousands of Puerto Ricans were starving waiting for food supplies to get through the German lines. “There was plenty of sugar,” remarked Brooks, “but no food” (Reference Brooks1943g, p. 13).

Brooks was deeply affected by the widespread poverty and the harsh conditions under which Puerto Rico's large agricultural proletariat lived, even during a supposed economic upswing—a situation which devolved from the market vulnerabilities to which American economic interests had exposed Puerto Rico. Not only was sugar monopolization limiting agricultural production for local markets but it was also depriving a booming agricultural proletarian sector of U.S. citizens of land and basic life necessities.

The explosion of Puerto Rico's proletariat, argues sociologist César Ayala (Reference Ayala1999), was attributable to the much larger process of land concentration that left hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans landless and forced to work in many of the same corporations that had been responsible for the removal of their property. Illustrating this marked increase, Ayala observes that in 1919 alone “there were 79,261 agricultural workers in the sugar industry” and that during a 1934 general strike “the stoppage affected 100,000 workers, affecting those employed in the sugar mills” (Reference Ayala1999, p. 199). Brooks (Reference Brooks1943g) honed in near this number in his article stating that out of “an estimated 100,800 employed directly in the sugar industry, 92,000 are farm laborers falling within the group drawing the lowest salary” (p. 13). Brooks calculated that the average sugar worker was making about $252 dollars a year or about seventy-eight cents a day. It is not difficult to see how the average worker who “supported an average family of five” found it impossible to live “in an area where experts say it takes $800 per year for a family of five to live at a decent minimum standard” (Reference Brooks1943g, p. 13). With poverty so visible throughout the island, a 1943 editorial in the Courier citing the Tugwell Report from the same year scornfully proclaimed: “Puerto Rico is no better off than it was when won from Spain in 1898, and [Tugwell] might have said with greater truth that Puerto Rico is actually worse off …” (Courier 1943b, p. 6). In spite of Brooks's and Little's critiques of American sugar interests in Puerto Rico, both writers understood that sugar was also at a crucial historical juncture; the overall demand for sugar from the island was in drastic decline, and the industry was becoming heavily dependent on extensive government subsidies in order to stay afloat.Footnote ¹⁵

Within the context of monocultural sugar production dominated by U.S. corporations, it was easy for African American journalists to fuse Puerto Rico's economic and social schema with that of the southern United States. In the eyes of these journalists, the challenges faced by the Puerto Rican agredado were not so different from those of Black southern sharecroppers. “If Puerto Ricans have citizenship,” asked Brooks (Reference Brooks1943e), “why do they agitate, why aren't they satisfied? It's because they don't have full rights, their citizenship resembles in many respects that of the disenfranchised white and colored southern sharecroppers” (p. 13). Once again Brooks's knowledge of the particularities of race and American citizenship are important points from which to pivot his larger critique of the myth of American democracy and its failures for Puerto Ricans, U.S. Blacks, and poor southern Whites. But Brooks was also interested in the politics of race as a key resource for measuring how Puerto Ricans were positioned within the U.S. polity. Thus, understanding the political and economic program of Luis Muñoz Marín during this period became the central schema from which Black journalists could talk about the convergence of many topics including land reform, race, and poverty.

The emergence of Luis Muñoz Marín and the PPD during the 1940s was organized around a U.S.-centered populist platform of modernization oriented towards a massive land reform program that clashed with the large sugar corporations which owned much of the land that was targeted for redistribution. As early as 1934, with the passage of the Sugar Act, the vulnerability of Puerto Rico's sugar industry to U.S. capitalist interests was becoming more apparent. Under the Sugar Act, Puerto Rico lost its U.S. market status, finding itself now far behind Cuba, the beet states out west, and Hawaii, which had already been formally incorporated as a U.S. territory. Recognizing the unviable dependency on monocultural sugar production, the PPD based its economic reform on the recommendations of the recently formed Puerto Rico Policy Commission (PRPC). The PRPC produced one of the most important documents of the time, one that would become a foundation for the emerging PPD political apparatus. Popularly referred to as the Plan Chardón, named after former university chancellor Carlos Chardón, the report used the Sugar Act as a framework for promoting a more balanced economic development plan for the island. The Sugar Act standardized sugar quotas for each of the major sugar-supplying regions within the various colonial and internal outposts of the U.S. empire. The quota system established under the Sugar Act left Puerto Rico near the bottom in terms of priority, further exposing its crippling dependency on U.S. markets. As a means to counteract this dependency, the Plan Chardón attempted to diversify economic development through state-mandated appropriation of some of the island's largest sugar mills. The land seized by the insular government was then to be redistributed creating more than 24,000 homesteads for the displaced Puerto Rican agredados (Ayala Reference Ayala1999).

This massive program of land redistribution within the United States, argued Black journalists, was a revolutionary project that would not only improve the conditions for all Puerto Ricans, but would give African Americans recourse for making their own claims to such drastically radical forms of land redistribution. Muñoz Marín himself understood the real and symbolic importance of Puerto Rico for African Americans and other countries in the global south. In an interview with Brooks (Reference Brooks1943c), Muñoz Marín reminded him and other correspondents about the stakes behind their journalistic coverage of the island:

Accordingly, the success of Muñoz Marín in Puerto Rico at this particular historical juncture was of the utmost importance. Not surprisingly, as Muñoz Marín, Rexford Tugwell, and the PPD began to face mounting opposition to their reform program from various members of Congress, the Black popular press quickly came to their defense. “Why should American interests be so intent in strangling reforms within the island,” asked Deton Brooks (Reference Brooks1943a). “Because they are afraid that some of them might eventually infiltrate into the United States jeopardizing their vested interests” (p. 7). The “vested interests” that Brooks referenced directly implicated former Michigan Congressman Fred Crawford (1935–1953), Louisiana Congressmen James “Jimmy” Domengeaux (1941–1944, 1944–1949), and Mississippi Representative Dan McGehee (1935–1947). All three congressmen opposed the reforms taking place on the island but for different reasons.

Congressman Fred Crawford was a longtime Michigan banker and businessman who spent much of his early years in industry, owning and operating various sugar beet mills in several states. His strong ties to the sugar beet industry were deemed a conflict of interest in the eyes of Brooks and once again exposed Puerto Rico's colonial dependence on sugar, as senators with economic interests openly advocated for the curtailment of the island's quota while they sought to avoid having land owned by the large sugar corporations seized by the insular government. “The sugar interests naturally don't want to see [the land reform] succeed. And they are using every possible technique to kill it,” concluded Brooks (Reference Brooks1943i, p. 13).

While Brooks implied that Crawford's advocacy for Puerto Rico's sugar industry was linked to Crawford's own financial interests as both a banker and a representative for the sugar industry, Brooks also argued that sugar interests brought southern politicians in line with their position by arguing that if land and economic reform could be enacted in Puerto Rico, it should also be used enforced in the American south.

Thus, Brooks's attack on Congressmen McGehee and Domengeaux were aimed squarely at their positions as southern congressional representatives in whose interests it was to keep Black labor in its place while openly advocating for maintaining the traditional southern cotton, one-crop economy—both issues playing themselves out within the question of land reform on the island. Rhetorically questioning the congressional representatives' opposition to the major land reform programs in Puerto Rico, Brooks (Reference Brooks1943d) queried: “Why are Doummengeaux and McGhee [sic] so concerned [about the new reforms]?” (p. 7). Clearly indicating a rationale that marks Puerto Rico as virtual schema for the southern United States, Brooks (Reference Brooks1943d) reasoned that:

Implicit within Brooks's comparison of Puerto Rico and the American South was a critique of both congressmen as representatives of the southern Jim Crow economic and racial order. This critique was made more apparent as Brooks (Reference Brooks1943d) thought about what would happen in “Dixie” if similar land reforms were allowed to pass and “if Negroes and poor whites became respectable land owners” (p. 7). Recalling the continued legacy of a failed period of Reconstruction, such reforms would enable Blacks and poor Whites in the south to vote and remove both congressmen from their positions where, according to Brooks (Reference Brooks1943d), they had consistently voted against “bill[s] like the anti-poll tax” as well as “anti-lynch or anti-strike legislation” (p. 7). Domengeaux himself was a known bigot who openly espoused racist rhetoric as part of a congressional delegation that visited Puerto Rico in 1943. During the trip Domengeaux “managed to fondle women, get drunk, curse out Governor Tugwell, and racially abuse the speaker of the insular House, Ramos Antonini” (Fernandez Reference Fernandez1996, p. 144). It was reported that Domengeaux, upon seeing Ernesto Ramos Antonini who was Black, said “It's pretty dark in there. Come out so that I can see you” (p. 144).Footnote ¹⁶

Pushing further the critique of southern racial politics and the U.S. Congressmen in whose interest it was to keep Black sharecroppers and poor White labor under control, a June 19, 1943 Courier column demanded that the United States government decide what it wanted to do with Puerto Rico. On the one hand, the column maintained that the United States was not interested in seeing the island “turned loose” (p. 6) because of its strategic military value as well as its deference to King sugar. Concurrently, it argued that neither would the United States want to incorporate the island formally into the American Union as a state because it was a political and racial liability to the dominant racial order. “The government does not want Puerto Rico admitted as a State,” asserted the author “because that would give colored people too much of a voice in Congress, and four-fifths of the Puerto Ricans are colored, according to American anthropology” (Pittsburgh Courier 1943a, p. 6). Journalists for the Courier and Defender often thought of Puerto Rico as a Black nation or at least worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as other Black republics. Evidence here ranges from the coverage of Puerto Rico's participation in the Paris conference of the World Federation of Trade Unions to end Jim Crow segregation in the work place (Burns Reference Burns1945a, b) to the inclusion of Puerto Rico as a possible answer to the question “What is the only Negro kingdom in the World?” in the Chicago Defender's informative weekly quiz section “Do You Know?” (1943a, p. 15). Other possible answer options for the quiz included Liberia, Ethiopia, and Haiti.

Not only was the socioeconomic restructuring of the island by Muñoz Marín a potential threat to southern business and political elites wishing to avoid similar economic reforms in the American south, but so too was the threat of a “colored” interracial alliance between African Americans and Puerto Ricans if the island were granted statehood. Granted both land and the rights of first-class citizenship, Brooks (Reference Brooks1943d) excitedly proclaimed that when Puerto Ricans and African Americans would vote “these cohorts of infamy would lose their power and their jobs as congressmen” (p. 7). Interestingly, the mention of this potentially powerful alliance between U.S. Blacks and Puerto Ricans complicates romantic readings of the coalition between the two groups since it entails the incorporation of Puerto Rico into the American Union rather than the calls for independence typically made by the Black left at the time. Likewise, John Badger (Reference Badger1943) cemented this political conundrum as he discussed the similarities between the enemies of African Americans and those of the Puerto Rican people:

Ultimately, the ability to see the connection between Puerto Rican freedom and the unfulfilled claims of Black citizenship was not a random romantic modeling of the demands of both camps. Instead, it was a larger call and realization that no project of freedom was complete or even possible until all of the structures that nurtured racism and exclusion were adequately dismantled.

In spite of the powerful deployment of Puerto Rico for addressing Black racial, social, and economic subordination, it would be naïve to argue that the transposability of Puerto Rico was entirely accurate or not plagued with problems of analysis. Just as they had done with Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines, African American journalists also romanticized race relations on the island. Racism was often misinterpreted as a phenomenon solely caused by and attributable to U.S. imperial endeavors. More precisely, racism was seen as something that was imported to the island by the same southern senators and other Americans visiting or passing through. On more than one occasion both Brooks and Little made it a point to indicate that Puerto Rico was not plagued by any major problems about race and that the color line on the island was not socially relevant. Brooks (Reference Brooks1943f) devoted his entire third article in the series to a discussion of “color” (p. 13) which he earlier argued “plays some part in their [Puerto Ricans'] attitude although it is not openly discussed” (Reference Brooks1943e, p. 13). In “Puerto Rico Has No Big Race Problem,” Brooks (Reference Brooks1943f) distinguished between the institutional practices of racism and those that occur in everyday social life. While he found that the former is, for the most part, absent he conceded that in the latter, “the question of color is bound to arise from time to time regardless how much it is shoved in the background” (p. 13). Brooks demarcated racism geographically, noting it was a problem principally found in coastal areas where most Black Puerto Ricans tended to reside. Such a geographical delineation of race is indicative of what anthropologist Isar Godreau (Reference Godreau2002) terms a “discursive distance” whereby the cultural and phenotypic signs of Blackness in Puerto Rico are spatially and temporally located either somewhere else and/or in pre-modern times (p. 283).

“Race consciousness,” in Brooks's opinion, is “more pronounced” as you move up the economic ladder (Reference Brooks1943f, p. 13).Footnote ¹⁷ Despite acknowledging the intersectionality of race and class and the almost total absence of Black Puerto Ricans within the upper echelons of Puerto Rican society, Brooks hesitated to treat this exclusion as having systemic or institutional roots.Footnote ¹⁸ As Brooks tried to talk to Black Puerto Ricans about their absence from high positions in government and business, he was somewhat confounded when they claimed they were even more unwilling to talk about racism than Whites. Instead of seeing this as an indicator of how talk of race and racism is framed within discourses created by elite White Puerto Ricans and the potentially dangerous ways in which Black Puerto Ricans are silenced, Brooks (Reference Brooks1943f) saw this as a sign of a “feeling that within the framework of the democratic concept that this subtle prejudice will work itself out” (p. 13). In some ways, Brooks's observation further highlighted the faith and commitment he himself had in U.S. democracy and in the belief that in achieving a functioning democracy the problem of race would disappear.

While reiterating many of the same points about class, race, and democracy as Brooks, Little was more direct in making links between U.S. imperialism and racial outcomes on the island. Discussing the growing prevalence of military bases on the island and the soldiers that they attracted Little (Reference Little1942c) remarked:

In emphasizing the “southern drawl” and the “general bewilderment” of U.S. military personnel (“peckerwoods”) stationed throughout the island, Little (Reference Little1942c) called attention to the overall lack of violence between Whites and Blacks that the southern soldiers are accustomed to seeing back home. Little was most concerned because he feared that these soldiers would infuse racist ideology and violence common in the American south into Puerto Rican society with perhaps dangerous outcomes for Muñoz Marín's political ambitions. Interestingly, like Brooks, Little (Reference Little1942b, c) briefly mentioned the existence of a “caste system” that “gives preference … to the ‘white’ natives” in job placement but did not go into further detail refusing to discuss the ways in which racist structures were already deeply embedded throughout the Puerto Rican political spectrum and social life” (p. 14).

The ambiguous relationship between class, race, and politics that writers like Brooks and Little struggled with are observable in a June 16, 1945 Courier editorial celebrating the introduction of U.S. Senate Bill 1002. Proposed by Maryland Senator Millard Tydings, SB 1002, favored by a wide segment of progressive groups, called for an island-wide referendum whereby Puerto Ricans would choose the political fate of the island from one of the following preselected options: independence, statehood, or dominion status (an “autonomous” territory permanently under the control of the U.S. government). While the editorial emphasized that “at least half of the population are classed as Negroes” it also noted that when it comes to Puerto Rico, there is “no color line there” (Pittsburgh Courier 1945, p. 6). The editorial, in keeping with the newspaper's previous positions, emphasized the rights that Puerto Ricans were entitled to as U.S. citizens and the U.S. congressional barriers to the progressive reforms that were being implemented. In the face of Jim Crow segregation, the introduction of SB 1002 was viewed as a potentially useful piece of legislation being opposed by U.S. reactionaries. “Never before has a great country like the United States even CONSIDERED allowing a subject land to decide what its future will be in a free election—especially not a COLORED land,” observed the Courier editorial (Reference Brooks1945, p. 6).

Just above the editorial was a political cartoon by longtime Courier staff artist Wilbert L. Holloway. The cartoon depicted an aging Senator Tydings holding a serving tray with SB 1002's three political choices. In front of Senator Tydings stands what appears to be an upper-class White Puerto Rican woman wearing a traditional dress and a necklace with a cross pendant—a direct reference to the island's dominant Roman Catholic tradition. The woman smiles as she ponders the tray of status options before her. In addition to the gendered colonial gaze that Tydings directs towards the woman's body, what is especially pertinent here is what the viewer perhaps misses at first glance: in the far back of the image standing behind and to the left of the White Puerto Rican woman is a Black Puerto Rican woman. The class position of the Black Puerto Rican female laborer is hinted at as she carries a basket of fruit or vegetables on her head and appears to be barefooted. Unlike the White Puerto Rican woman in the foreground, the Black Puerto Rican woman remains faceless and undefined.Footnote ¹⁹ In other words, her minute presence in the cartoon is also highlighted by her striking absence (Gordon Reference Gordon1997). Though Tydings and the White Puerto Rican woman do not notice her standing in the background, that she does take note of each of them is evident by her motionless posture. She stands at attention slightly leaning forward with her hands crossed and resting at her waist intrigued by the political dealings taking place before her. The Black Puerto Rican woman is representative of the larger segment of the Black Puerto Rican population standing aloof in the background of Puerto Rican society, uninvited to the political table. Within the broader political context, the cartoon and the editorial provide the reader with contradictory messages about the potential uses of Puerto Rico as a model for challenging Jim Crow laws in America. While at least half of the Puerto Rican citizenry were “classed as Negroes,” they were not, in fact, the ones who would be choosing and participating in the political process (Pittsburgh Courier 1945, p. 6). Instead, Black Puerto Ricans lingered in the sociopolitical background as elite White Puerto Ricans, in collaboration with the U.S. empire, remained front and center as they decided the fate of the island.

Fig. 1.

“Puerto Rico Will Choose,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 16, 1945.

A SHIFT IN PERSPECTIVE

In the spring of 1946 President Harry S. Truman vetoed the Tydings bill, effectively ending any popular referendum where Puerto Ricans would be allowed to choose their political future.Footnote ²⁰ Concurrently, by the latter half of the 1940s Muñoz Marín had drastically moved away from his more radical vision of Puerto Rican society. Despite being a harsh critic of U.S. colonialism and a proponent of independence, by 1946 he had come to believe that there was no way that Puerto Rico could compete economically as an independent country. Incorrectly assuming that the only way the island could economically sustain itself was through exclusive trading rights treaties with the United States, Muñoz Marín concluded that independence was no longer a feasible option. While Muñoz Marín had long been an opponent of North American corporate trusts such as the sugar industry, he later came to depend heavily on these very forms of U.S. capital for his populist-driven modernization plans.

This shift in political perspective meant that Muñoz Marín abandoned many of his more progressive views including those of land redistribution. Kelvin Santiago-Valles (Reference Santiago-Valles1994) properly notes that ultimately the populist oriented land reform program did not dramatically alter land ownership on the island between 1940 and 1950 and might have actually exacerbated inequalities associated with land tenure. The reform program, states Santiago-Valles (Reference Santiago-Valles1994), “was aimed at those 500-acre-plus ‘latifundos’ that were explicitly owned by corporations. Deliberately or not, this left untouched those corporate-owned ‘latifundos’ that were formally owned and/or registered by individuals” (p. 199). Furthermore, within his own party, Muñoz Marín effectively neutralized the leftist independentista wing of the PPD through political intimidation that either forced marginal members in line with the increasingly conservative movement within the party or by expelling members who refused to conform, including labor organizers and communists. By the time the Tydings bill was defeated in 1946, Muñoz Marín had laid much of the groundwork for his formal declaration that he no longer favored independence but rather another status that allowed Puerto Rico some form of sovereignty while keeping its fundamentally colonial relationship with the U.S. regime intact.

Luís Muñoz Marín's “betrayal,” as it has come to be popularly known in leftist circles, was not looked upon kindly by many among the political left, including progressive African American intellectuals, communists, and labor organizers. We can reasonably suggest that Marin's rejection of independence and his deeper political shifts helped account for why Puerto Rico virtually disappeared as a subject of keen interest for Black journalists by 1950. One striking example of this shift can be seen in the work of Pettis Perry. Perry, the son of Alabama tenant farmers, joined the CPUSA in 1932 and later served as secretary of the Party's Negro Commission. One of his duties within the party was to forge alliances between southern sharecroppers, farmers, and industrial workers across the United States. Because of these political obligations within the party, one would expect that—like the journalists before him—Perry (Reference Perry1951) would find powerful connections between African American and Puerto Rican labor and the industrialization taking place on the island. Instead, the opposite is true. Describing Muñoz Marín as a “servant of Wall Street … following the path of his master” (p. 5), Perry dedicated an entire unpublished paper in Reference Perry1951 to critiquing the massive reforms that Muñoz Marín was supposed to bring to the island. Perry marshaled a plethora of statistical data to show the PPD was failing at eradicating the overall poverty plaguing the island while promoting a colonial industrialization plan which included trade agreements that provided huge disparities between the total amount of goods being exported and imported to and from the U.S. market. For Perry, this was a clear indication of the failure of Muñoz Marín to follow through with the programs that had initially excited the Black press in the United States during the early half of the 1940s. “[I]mmediately after attaining the governorship,” commented Perry (Reference Perry1951), Muñoz Marín “revealed in no unmistakable terms that he is the patron saint of United States imperialism, and all hitherto promises and declarations are shown to be made like a pie-crust—to break” (pp. 4–5).

While Perry continued his critique of the PPD economic platform and U.S. colonialism, it was substantially different from the visions of a decade earlier. Instead of drawing on the relationship between race, empire, democracy, citizenship, and their intimate links with Puerto Rican and African Americans as Brooks and Little had done, a somewhat jaded Perry (Reference Perry1951) looked at the case of “Negro Liberation” and “colonial liberation” as similar products but not as inextricably linked (p. 15). The razor sharp and multipronged critique of American empire vis-à-vis Puerto Rico as it manifested itself both within and without the nation produced by an earlier generation of African American intellectuals, journalists, and activists had been slightly dulled by the mid 1950s, though it would powerfully resurface by the end of the decade and be taken up again among groups including the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party in the 1960s.