Mittie Maude Lena Gordon

Mittie Maude Lena Gordon (August 2, 1889–1961)[1] was a black nationalist who established the Peace Movement of Ethiopia. The organization advocated black emigration to West Africa in response to racial discrimination and white supremacy.[2]

Mittie Maude Lena Gordon
BornAugust 2, 1889
Louisiana, U.S.
OccupationActivist

Gordon was born in Louisiana.[3] She had been a delegate to the 1929 UNIA convention in Jamaica. In Chicago, in December 1932, she founded a movement that would allow for the repatriation of African Americans to Liberia, because it would be cheaper to establish African Americans in West Africa than to provide them with welfare in America.[3] Her Peace Movement sent a petition with over 400,000 signatures to President Roosevelt in 1933. The petition was diverted to the State Department, from there it was diverted to the Division of Western European Affairs, where it stagnated.[3]

Due to her affiliation with Japanese politicians and Japanese members of the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World as well as the Black Dragon Society in the early 1940s, she was put under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.[4][5] In October 1942, she was arrested for "conspiring with the Japanese", an enemy nation of the United States during World War II,[4] and she spent the majority of the war years in jail.[6]

She died in 1961.[7]

References
  1. Blain, Keisha (2016). ""Confraternity Among All Dark Races": Mittie Maude Lena Gordon and the Practice of Black (Inter)nationalism in Chicago, 1932 – 1942". Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International. 2 (5): 151–18. doi:10.1353/pal.2016.0018. S2CID 164679231. Retrieved March 15, 2017.
  2. Parr, Jessica; Blain, Keisha (August 18, 2015). "Guest Post: Racial Violence and Black Nationalist Politics". earlyamericanists. Retrieved March 14, 2017.
  3. Jallone, Aullusine; Falola, Toyin (2008). The United States and West Africa: Interactions and Relations. University Rocherster Press. p. 85. ISBN 978-1-58046-277-8.
  4. Blain, Keisha, "Confraternity Among All Dark Races: Mittie Maude Lena Gordon and the Practice of Black (Inter)nationalism in Chicago". Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Vol. 3, no. 3, forthcoming.
  5. Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition?, SUNY Press, 1998, p. 77.
  6. Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960, Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, p. 108.
    - Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 240.
  7. Gartrell, John (December 1, 2017). "'Hidden Figures' in the Robert A. Hill Collection: Mittie Maude Lena Gordon". Duke University.
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