A Word about Hawaii and the Reds

L-R, Dwight Freeman, Dr. John Reinecke, Koji Ariyoshi, Jack Kimoto, an attorney [dark suit], 

Charles Fujimoto, Eileen Fujimoto, and Jack Wayne Hall

Absent from the website of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People is the true beginning and ending of its Honolulu chapter. While the composition of the Black population of the territory of Hawaii was negligible, friends and allies of the Black struggle - Black, white, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese were engaged in this struggle on many fronts, including through the NAACP in Honolulu in the 1940's.

But the organization's website lists May 1960 as the founding of the chapter, just one year after the territory of Hawaii was admitted as the 50th state, and this is not true.

By 1949, the Cold War was in deep-freeze mode, and the paranoia to ferret out suspected Communists and their friends reached high gear.

NAACP co-founder WEB DuBois had not so much called himself a communist, and he would not officially join the Communist Party USA until 1960, but he had much earlier gone to the Soviet Union and declared himself publicly a "Bolshevik."

To continue the dangerous mixed metaphors, temperatures ran high as the deep freeze of anticommunist paranoia raged. The rage was not limited to the Congressional House hearings chaired by J. Parnell Thomas - the ones we rarely talk about which precede the more famous ones later led by the US senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. Nor were the hearings limited to the capitol of the United States, Washington DC. Hearings to ferret out communists were staged in different parts of the country, including such fly-over states as St. Louis, MO, and in Territory of Hawaii.

Postwar, Cold War events unfolded at a rapid pace leading up to the late 1940's and a collision with the Honolulu chapter of the NAACP.

ILWU Strike

One of the CIO's most militant labor unions, the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), staged two successful labor strikes. In 1946, it was by 26,000 sugar workers, then in 1949 of the Hawaii territory's longshoremen. The longshore strike went on for 177 days and although ultimately a success for the union led by CPUSA's Australian-born Harry Bridges, the territorial legislature called its own witch-hunt hearings and requested the investigative powers of the US Senate committee.

Effectively two Star Chambers were looking under every bed and on every lanai for a Communist to blame and indict. It was the Communists, but it was also the condition increasingly put on the island's white elite to be admitted to statehood: get rid of the Communist Party.

Naturally the Communist Party of Hawaii and the ILWU had a lot of overlapping officers, especially at the top. Among the rank and file, the depth of Marxist-Leninism varied from worker to worker, comrade to comrade. Just as naturally, the gains they were making as workers were linked like two peas in a pod of the CP of Hawaii and the union.

The witch hunts opened up these disparities and made room for snitches to turn on the people who had fought for them.

But just so, the famous Jack Wayne Hall, for whom a building is named in Hilo, HI, was the ILWU representative. Eileen Toshiko Fujimoto was executive secretary of the ILWU on the islands. Both were Central Committee members of the Communist Party of Hawaii.

Fujimoto's husband, Kauai-born Charles Fujimoto, a University of Hawaii graduate student in chemistry, became what was the Hawaii Party's last general secretary.

All four of these Hawaii Communists, as well as school teachers and central committee John Reinecke and his wife, were simultaneously members of the Honolulu chapter of the NAACP.

This might make outsiders do a double take if you don't know the history of the Communist Party USA or its stance around the world, including in apartheid South Africa. The Party's stance was not only non-racial but also anti-racist.

So workers in the Pacific Northwest and Deep South, as well as in the territory of Hawaii, were organized together, integrated, across racial lines. This was the commitment of the Party, and it drew Black and white, and a broader range of peoples in Hawaii.

This was too much for the largely white, landed elites of the Hawaii Territory, so just as they had earlier called in the US Marines to overthrow the sovereign Hawaii government, they called in a Congressional witch hunt to put a stop to the self-determination of the labor movement.

The First Casualties

With the territorial and Congressional investigations into subversion, Communists were in the cross-hairs. The FBI stepped up its goal to expose Harry Bridges and deport him. Only the firmest and the hardest backbones stood with the comrades who had been fighting since the 30's to organize agricultural and dock workers in Hawaii. Others could not risk association.

Some comrades, like Jack Kimono, left the Party and became a snitch, for which he was nicely rewarded with poverty and obscurity in the long run. Kimono had been with the Hawaii Party almost since its founding in 1936.

Other names were exposed under testimony, like Robert and Ah Quon McElrath, both organizers with the ILWU, and two unknown comrades who were active in labor struggles and within the NAACP, were named. Ewart and Eugenia Guinier.

The Guiniers, an interracial couple, met and married in Hawaii and besides labor organizing, they did work supplying the local military bases.

Once their links to the Communist Party were revealed in testimony, their days were numbered.

The McElraths were able to keep under the radar, even though Robert was also a member of the Hawaii Party's central committee.

The NAACP was not so lucky.

By 1949, the contentiousness within the Honolulu chapter had grown so intense, members were writing cables to the main office warning of Communist sects taking over. Whether it was a sect or not, the ensuing election saw the Communists win the local presidency of the chapter.

This was too much and too far. So as the US is wont to do in elections it does not like, the NAACP refused to recognize the election and for good measure de-certified the chapter altogether. It disappeared and would not reappear on the NAACP official history until 1960.

But wait. There's more. This was the incident which infamously pivoted the civil rights organization to direct all its chapters to expel Communists and cease working with them in any capacity.

This forever shifted the NAACP to the center-right, as contingents of Black Communists chose the Party that was the backbone of the labor movement and civil rights over the organization that thought it could walk or crawl without that backbone. These comrades quietly left.

More than Seven Mules

In hindsight, they might have been safer all abandoning ship. Conventional history has all but erased this history when under the cover of the anticommunist Smith Act the full force of the US government, its federal police, and an array of local thug cops in places in the Deep South and California went after, infiltrated, kidnapped, murdered, and arrested members of a domestic political party.

Bill Bailey in later life

The Hawaii Party's first general secretary, the very able labor organizer Bill Bailey, was chased out of the island by the late 30's when he was alerted a corporate hit squad was targeting him. To Bailey's first group of recruits into the Party, he reportedly turned to the red flag on the wall: "That's my Bible. We've got to go out and visit people and talk and talk and begin to organize the workers."

The gospel Bailey was organizing was too much for the island's bourgeoisie planter and shipping class.

In the wake of the territorial and federal witch hunts after World War II and the strikes, the FBI coordinated the arrests of 125 Communist Party leaders in a nationwide sweep that extended to the island territory.

Arrested in Hawaii were most of the central committee, including Charles Kazuyuki Fujimoto, his wife Eileen Toshiko Fujimoto, Dr. John Reinecke, Jack Wayne Hall, Koji Ariyoshi, Dwight Freeman, and Jack Denichi Kimoto.

The local newspaper dubbed them "the seven mules of Moscow" and actually manufactured letters to the editor against the arrestees from a supposed concerned citizen.

For being Communists, John Reinecke and his wife Aiko were both fired from their teaching jobs and denied their pensions for 20 years until a graduate student's dissertation revived their cause, and the state reversed itself.

Koji Ariyoshi with Mao Zedong

Koji Ariyoshi, a journalist born in Kona on the Big Island, continued to run his labor-centered newspaper, the Honolulu Record, until the late 50's.

Hall continued his labor organizing into the 1960's when he moved to California as ILWU's regional vice president. He is arguably one of the most recognized name of the bunch, which is unfortunate.

Ah Quon McElrath

The McElraths - Bob and Ah Quon - were spared in the FBI sweep, but the Guiniers, newly jobless, left Hawaii back to the US mainland where the witch hunt followed them.

Ah Quon McElrath became a pillar in the civil rights community on the island, founded and chaired the Committee on Social Welfare, organized with civil rights workers in Alabama, and was an early backer of the University of Hawaii's Hawaiian Studies program.

L-R, Herbert Aptheker, Ewart Guinier, and Alice Childress

Upon leaving Hawaii to New York City, Ewart Guinier became secretary-treasurer of one of the last Communist-run CIO unions, United Public Workers of America, which in its waning years of the 1950's took in Communist school teachers expelled from the American Federation of Teachers. He was subpoenaed to reveal names by the US Senate witch hunt but refused. He was named in said hearings as "one of the most effective Stalinist operatives that there is, who takes advantage of the fact that he is a Negro, because any attack upon him in this critical time is immediately turned into an attack on the Negro people, which of course is fantastic, but because of that Guinier has become a very powerful figure in Stalinist circles in New York."

The Guinier's first daughter, Lani - as in Lani Guinier, the esteemed law scholar and one-time Clinton nominee for the Office of Civil Rights - was born in 1950 ("Lani" is Hawaiian for heaven or sky).

Ewart Guinier went on to be the first chair of the Black Studies Department at Harvard, a curious elevation for a labor organizer, but consider the university had exhausted a list of literary giants, like Ralph Ellison, John Hope Franklin, and others refused the position before turning to Guinier, who accepted it.

Guinier, perhaps too true to his labor roots and not wanting to be a fixture for white liberalism, immediately butted heads with the white Harvard establishment and publicly called out one of its Black professors as "a patronized and colonized slave."

Denouement

That said, the Hawaii Party's members did get dispersed; Eugene Dennis, chair of the Communist Party USA at the time, announced in 1956 that the Hawaii Party was no more. Since this was only technically true, as the Communists were still there, this might have been a submission to Cold War tactics and a concession to one consensus to end the territory's second-class status and meet the terms for it to become the 50th state (the Party members would have well remembered how, unlike on the US mainland, military rule had been imposed during the war and territorial legislators locked up). The other consensus, richly debated, was about the overthrow of a sovereign nation by US Marines.

But whether dispersed to California or New York, or remaining in Hawaii, the core of the Hawaii Party carried on a struggle, and we should remember them for that.

Hawaii ILWU solidarity picket [date unknown]