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"The Great Unknown & the Unknown Great: African American Attorney was Defender of Japanese Americans During WWII" was published in the Nichi Bei Times Weekly's June 7-13, 2007, issue. In this Nichi Bei Times exclusive series, Dr. Greg Robinson, author of “By the Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans,” examines little-known but prominent figures in Japanese American history.

By GREG ROBINSON
Nichi Bei Times Contributor

Hugh MacBeth, Sr. an African American attorney from Los Angeles, is largely forgotten today, but he deserves commemoration as an outstanding defender of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1884, Hugh Ellwood MacBeth attended Fisk University and Harvard Law School, graduating in 1908. After living several years in Baltimore, where he was founder and editor of the Baltimore Times newspaper, he headed to California in 1913.
In the decades that followed, MacBeth became an important player on the Los Angeles legal and political scene. He concentrated on aiding African American litigants and criminal defendants, and represented such notable clients as jazz great Jelly Roll Morton.

MacBeth pressed numerous cases challenging segregation laws and restrictive housing covenants. In 1940, he persuaded the American Legion to cease excluding Black boxers from fight cards at Hollywood Legion Stadium.

Yet MacBeth represented numerous white clients, and he remained active in the larger society. In 1934 MacBeth was named general counsel for the Utopian Society, a largely white economic reform group that claimed 600,000 members. Although MacBeth’s reaching beyond the Black community drew criticism, his broad connections led to his being named resident consul for the Republic of Liberia in 1936.

Two years later, when Governor Frank Merriam created the California Race Relations Commission, MacBeth, who had drafted the law establishing the commission, was named executive secretary and the sole African American commissioner.

Connections With Japanese Americans

MacBeth maintained close contacts with Japanese Americans. He settled in Los Angeles’ Jefferson Park, which was then largely Japanese.

MacBeth’s son Hugh Jr., who later became his law partner, recalled that as a child he attended Japanese school with his Nisei pals after school, since otherwise he had nobody in the neighborhood to play with. There, Hugh Jr. studied Japanese language and judo (and also absorbed community prejudices against Chinese and Filipinos). Meanwhile, the MacBeth family informally took in a Nisei neighbor, Kenji Horita.

In early January 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor, MacBeth traveled to Guadalupe and Santa Barbara, Calif. to investigate the cases of Issei rounded up by the government during December and interned in Missoula, Montana. Following interviews with the internees’ families, he discovered that those taken were prosperous farmers, and that there was no previous evidence of sabotage.

He swiftly concluded that removal was being engineered by white agricultural interests anxious to grab the Issei farmers’ land. Outraged, MacBeth turned to organizing support for Japanese Americans among liberal and church groups. Thanks to his leadership, the California Race Relations Commission and the Santa Barbara Minister’s Alliance became the only two Southern California organizations to officially oppose evacuation.

MacBeth simultaneously organized efforts nationwide. He corresponded with Socialist leader Norman Thomas, who used the information MacBeth provided in newspaper articles and radio speeches denouncing Executive Order 9066.

MacBeth later co-signed Thomas’s pamphlet, “Democracy and the Japanese Americans.” The pamphlet -- widely distributed by the Japanese American Citizens League -- denounced the government’s policy as “totalitarian justice” and called for an end to evacuation and for reparations.

The announcement of Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942 was a blow to MacBeth. On Feb. 22 he sent President Roosevelt a telegram, asking him to permit “liberty-loving Japanese” to pursue their agricultural activities “under military surveillance and with government assistance.”

In March 1942, he wrote General John DeWitt in support of proposals that loyal farmers be permitted to form cooperatives and establish colonies in Utah. (The plan was designed by Hi Korematsu, whose brother Fred would soon challenge evacuation).

MacBeth proceeded to lecture the general that removal reflected “general and deep seated American racial prejudice against Orientals and particularly against Japanese.” Meanwhile, he spoke privately of his grief at families being “torn up by the roots” and sent off from their homes “they know not where.”

In May 1942, MacBeth visited the Santa Anita Assembly Center with his wife and brother, to see friends and collect information on conditions. Shortly afterwards, he traveled to Washington to brief Justice Department officials on Japanese Americans. (Using a White House cook as a back channel, MacBeth struggled vainly to secure a meeting with President Roosevelt, in order to lobby for an executive order making racial discrimination a military offense!).

Read the rest of this article on the Nichi Bei Times website