Mittie Maude Lena Gordon facts for kids

Mittie Maude Lena Gordon (August 2, 1889–1961) was an American 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.

Gordon was born in Webster Parish, Louisiana. 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. 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.

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. In October 1942, she was arrested for "conspiring with the Japanese", an enemy nation of the United States during World War II, and she spent the majority of the war years in jail.

She died in 1961.

Gordon's nephew (son of her older brother Clarence Allen Nelson) was the musician John Lewis Nelson. Her grandnephew, John Lewis Nelson's son, was the musician Prince.