On Jan. 2, 1919, at her home in Irvington, New York, along the banks of the Hudson River, African American entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker held a meeting that represented a significant development in human rights history. Walker gathered the Jamaican Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, labor organizer A. Philip Randolph, Harlem clergyman Adam Clayton Powell Sr., and others to inaugurate the International League for Darker Peoples (ILDP), one of the most impactful Black internationalist organizations of the 20th century.
Against the backdrop of World War I, the ILDP emerged as a crucial vehicle for Walker and her colleagues to advocate for universal rights. The group was committed to advancing Black liberation in the United States and abroad. They worked to ensure that marginalized groups the world over would not be left on the sidelines. While global leaders addressed peace and freedom as imperatives in the aftermath of the war, the ILDP tapped into the surging anti-colonial fervor of the period to demand expanded opportunities for all through “education, organization, and agitation.”
One significant goal of the group was to make demands at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference in hopes of pushing for racial reform. Convened in Paris on Jan. 18, the conference brought together more than 30 nations for the purpose of establishing peace terms following the end of WWI. While the conference was certainly a vital space for world leaders to gather and strategize ways to avoid conflict in the aftermath of war, Black activists viewed the gathering through a different prism. For them, it was a venue to challenge white supremacy and ensure that the interests of colonized subjects would not be overlooked.
Far beyond its moniker as the “war to make the world safe for democracy,” World War I also represented a catalyst for Black internationalist politics. The millions of Black people across the globe who served in the war effort as soldiers and workers demanded full citizenship rights, recognition, and inclusion in return.
In President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, issued a year before the conference, many Black leaders found a source of inspiration. They advocated for a “fifteenth point” that would extend rights and freedom to people of African descent and other people of color globally.
The ILDP’s own publication, World Forum, provided a window into its internationalist political platform and broad commitment to human rights. Membership required a fee and a commitment to contribute “mind and money to help ‘make the world safe for darker peoples.’” With these words, the ILDP forcefully rejected Wilson’s earlier rationale for why the United States must join World War I: “to make the world safe for democracy.” Instead, the ILDP articulated an anti-imperialist vision of liberation that prioritized the defeat of global white supremacy. Its interest was not protecting democracy but securing universal rights and liberation. Reflecting this conception of global racial taxonomies, ILDP leaders centered their work around the advocacy for rights of six specific groups: “Africans, Japanese, Chinese, Haitians, American and West Indian Negroes.”
The ILDP’s writings in World Forum underscored their fundamental commitment to strengthening relations between people of African and Asian descent in an effort to secure human rights and combat racial oppression. It was building on a long and rich history of political exchanges and connections between the two groups. Several historical developments of the 20th century strengthened these alliances, including the Russo-Japanese War (February 1904 to September 1905), a conflict over Russian and Japanese territorial claims in Manchuria and Korea. As one historian explained, Japan’s successful defeat of the Russian military served as a powerful “example of people who demonstrated the fallacy of white assertions that people of color were innately incompetent or inferior.” Japan’s defiance of European colonial powers left a favorable impression on many Black activists and therefore helped to deepen Afro-Asian connections. Those who accepted this perspective generally overlooked Japan’s own imperialistic ventures in East Asia. ILDP leaders reasoned that, together, “darker peoples” could effectively wage a war against white supremacy, which they described in World Forum as “the common evil.”
Walker played an instrumental role in these efforts. Only five days after the ILDP’s establishment, she set out to arrange a meeting with Shuroku Kuroiwa, publisher of the Tokyo newspaper Yorozu choho. Born in Kochi, Japan, in 1862, Kuroiwa emerged as a leading Japanese “journalist, translator, and novelist” during the early 20th century. In 1892, he launched Yorozu choho, which frequently featured works translated from English and introduced Japanese people to an array of writing from the Western world. The newspaper rose to prominence in Japan during the early 20th century because of its famous annual contest to select the best novel. Within four years of its founding, Yorozu choho boasted an annual circulation of over 24 million readers. As a result of Kuroiwa’s transnational outreach, many of its readers were based in the United States. In the early 20th century, Kuroiwa sent editors of the paper there to help bolster its readership and circulation. Komori Yoshihisa, a young graduate student from Japan, served as one of the paper’s overseas correspondents. Kuroiwa’s approach certainly amplified the paper’s presence both in Japan and in the United States, but it was his appointment as one of the Japanese representatives at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that caught the attention of the ILDP.
Walker arranged a meeting with Kuroiwa for Jan. 7, 1919, with one clear goal: to secure Japan’s assistance in advocating for racial equality at the Paris Peace Conference. To make this possible, Walker shrewdly sent along a floral arrangement to the Japanese delegation in New York and hosted a gathering at the illustrious Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for Kuroiwa to meet several ILDP members. Unbeknownst to Walker and her colleagues, Rev. R.D. Jonas, a white preacher, had eased his way into the group to collect intelligence for the British and the U.S. Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation). Walker would eventually walk away from the ILDP following this discovery, but in January 1919, she and the ILDP were focused on building transnational and transracial alliances in the lead-up to the conference.
The full details of the Jan. 7 meeting remain a mystery—archival records reveal little about what Walker and other ILDP members shared with the Japanese delegation that evening—but at its conclusion, Kuroiwa agreed to assist the group. According to one account, he pledged full “cooperation between the Japanese and the dark people of Asia and Africa.” With this pledge in hand, the ILDP went on to organize a follow-up mass meeting at Mount Olivet Baptist Church with the Japanese delegation on Jan. 16, 1919. At this meeting, ILDP members made plans to address racial discrimination as well as the “terms of peace and the darker peoples.” The ILDP’s work to secure Japan’s support at the conference reflected the group’s overall commitment to creating international coalitions to call for the rights and liberation of all people on the basis of their humanity. To that end, the ILDP resolved to demand “the abolition of colored discrimination” in Paris.
Despite their best efforts, however, the ILDP’s plans did not materialize. At the conference, the Japanese delegation presented a proposal to include a clause on racial equality in the Treaty of Versailles, the peace document signed by Germany and the Allies at the end of WWI, and even skillfully replaced the words “equality of races” to “equality of nations” to render it less offensive. Eleven out of 17 nations voted in favor of the proposal. However, it was quickly blocked when Wilson strongly objected. Wilson, one of the lead negotiators at the conference, insisted that the proposal’s approval required a unanimous vote. With this new provision in place, Japan’s racial equality proposal was ultimately rejected by the League of Nations Commission.
Despite its rejection, the proposal left a lasting impression on Black activists the world over, who praised the Japanese delegation for their stance. Many of them interpreted the move as evidence that Japan stood on their side in the struggle for freedom. In reality, Japan’s racial equality proposal was largely driven by nationalistic aspirations—a quest for power—rather than a genuine desire to advance racial equality for all.
For the ILDP, the dismissal of the proposal at the Paris Peace Conference was a major blow. Walker left and shortly afterwards, the organization folded for good. However, just a few months later, another Black woman, Mary Church Terrell, left her own mark on human rights history. The daughter of formerly enslaved people, Terrell was one of the first African American women to earn a college degree, and became one of the most prominent civil rights activists, clubwomen, and suffragists of the period. She was well positioned to address the domestic and international challenges facing Black people, and in May 1919, Terrell—a founding member of the NAACP who had recently joined an integrated women’s suffrage march in Washington, D.C.—was an official U.S. delegate to the International Congress of Women in Zurich. Her dynamic speech, delivered before more than 200 delegates, addressed racism, imperialism, and human rights. The focal point of her message was the need for the white women listening to recognize that their appeals for women’s rights, peace, and justice rang hollow if they remained reluctant to acknowledge the full rights and privileges of Black people and other marginalized groups across the globe.
Later, summarizing her speech in her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, Terrell noted the irony, as had the ILDP, that “thousands of colored soldiers … had crossed the sea ‘to make the world safe for democracy,’” yet they could not enjoy freedom at home. Terrell went on to advocate for “justice and fair play for all the dark races of the earth,” saying, “You may talk about permanent peace till doomsday … but the world will never have it till the darker races are given a square deal.” To that end, Terrell critiqued world leaders at the Paris Peace Conference, who had just weeks before rejected the racial equality proposal. She lamented that “the two most highly civilized and the most Christian nations in the world had denied racial equality to Japan which she had a right to demand.” To reinforce her position, Terrell also drafted and introduced a human rights resolution at the gathering in Zurich, one that would not sidestep racism and imperialism:
We believe no human being should be deprived of an education, prevented from earning a living, debarred from any legitimate pursuit in which he wishes to engage or be subjected to any [humiliation] on account of race or color. We recommend that estates members of the League of Nations should do everything in their power to abrogate laws and changes customs which lead to discrimination against human beings on account of race or color.
The resolution, which the delegates formally adopted in Zurich, represents one of the earliest articulations of a human rights resolution that would encompass the needs and concerns of all peoples, regardless of race and ethnicity. Terrell’s speech and her bold resolution predate the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights by close to 30 years.
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