When Jordan Kahahawai-Welch was around 12 years old, she accompanied her tutu (grandmother), auntie and uncles to a Honolulu theater performance about the Massie affair, a sensational criminal case that began in 1931 with a false rape claim asserted by a 20-year-old white U.S. Navy spouse living in the posh suburb of Mānoa.
Nearly 90 years on, the troubled characters, flimsy evidence and frenzy of racist propaganda that swirled around the accusation and rape trial remain shocking. Newspapers nationwide reported the scandal in bombastic fashion.
Startling to Kahahawai-Welch was her family’s tie to the case: Her great uncle Joseph Kahahawai and four of his close friends were the men wrongly accused, arrested and put on trial.
The jury in the rape case deadlocked and a mistrial was declared. Private investigations later proved even more clearly than flimsy initial police work that the five men accused were involved in an argument elsewhere and couldn’t have been at the scene of the alleged gang rape.
In January 1932 came the most devastating development: Jordan’s great uncle, Joseph Kahahawai, was abducted, shot and killed by four white vigilantes, including the husband and mother of the accuser, Thalia Massie. The killers were caught driving to dump Kahahawai’s body at the Halona Blowhole.
The story – and portrayals of it – have been difficult for Kahahawai-Welch and her family to grapple with. For many years, it simply wasn’t discussed.
“I kind of remember just feeling sad, a little bit of hurt and having a lot of questions,” the 28-year-old Kailua resident said. “I wanted to make the connections. How are we related? I started asking my parents and my grandma a little bit more just beyond the facts, who he was and in general what the story was.”
A soft-spoken amateur boxer born on Maui, Joseph Kahahawai attended a private high school on a football scholarship and was later a part of the territory’s National Guard.
More than 2,000 people attended the 22-year-old’s funeral in 1932. Kahahawai-Welch and her relatives regularly tend to his gravestone in the Puea Cemetery in Kalihi, bringing flowers and leis after family celebrations.
There is no other memorial to Joseph Kahahawai. At 6 feet tall and about 180 pounds with dark skin, his story is not unlike those involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, which amplifies the names and personal stories of Black people killed by violent authorities or vigilantes.
“Insistence on centering the humanity of people who are victimized by organized violence, whether at the hands of the state or vigilantes, is trying to undo the work of how white supremacy has interacted with people of color, especially Black people,” said Akiemi Glenn, who holds a doctorate in linguistics. She leads a Hawaii nonprofit called the Pōpolo Project. It seeks to shed light on the experience of Black people in the Pacific.
“These are folks embedded in networks of relationships, in kinship. They brought joy to people’s lives.”
The vigilantes who killed Joseph Kahahawai — including the U.S. Navy officer married to Thalia Massie, two enlisted Navy sailors and her mother — were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years of jail time. Under a furor of pressure to overlook what the case’s defense attorney Clarence Darrow repeatedly described as an honor killing, the territorial governor of Hawaii commuted their sentence to one hour of time to be served in his office at Iolani Palace. The group left Oahu four days later, never to return.
In an attempt to distance themselves from the shame and hurt of the case, some of Joseph Kahahawai’s relatives changed their last names after the rape and murder trials. Of the five men accused in 1931, only one later gave an on-the-record interview about the Massie case.
Jordan Kahahawai-Welch and her cousins Nakoa Farrant and Vance Farrant are the first of their generation to speak publicly about the case. Their grandfather, a beloved Kailua High School athletic director and football coach, Joe Kahahawai, is the half-brother of the murdered Joseph Kahahawai. While he died in 1998, his wife, Bernie Kahahawai, is 83 and remains in Kailua.
“I don’t see anyone else who is here to tell this story who has more responsibility than the families involved,” said Vance Farrant, a 22-year-old senior at Stanford University.
“Who else is going to tell the story? Whose responsibility and privilege is it to tell this story?”
Kahahawai-Welch and the Farrant brothers said that many in their generation actively seek greater connections to their culture, as well as recognition of the legacy of colonialism still felt in Hawai’i.
Kahahawai-Welch’s experiences visiting Mauna Kea in 2019 during protests against the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope there prompted an even deeper connection to her Native Hawaiian heritage.
“It was a super powerful moment,” she said. “It was inspiring to see how many people are proud to be Hawaiian, proud to care for Hawaii the way they care for it in such a passionate way.”
Learning how much fear the Massie case stoked in earlier generations, she said, has helped her understand the reluctance of her parents' generation to say much about it.
“The Massies had so much power,” she said. “In our grandpa’s family there had been discussions about wanting to take action, wanting to do something about it. But the Massies had so much power that people were afraid of. They were fearful of retribution.”
The specter of the rape charge loomed large. Such violence was exceedingly rare in Hawaii at the time, particularly in Native Hawaiian communities.
The private detective agency hired by the Territory of Hawaii after the Massies left reinvestigated Thalia Massie’s rape claim. The Pinkerton agency created a report approximately 300 pages long, clearing the accused. But prominent white businessmen and government officials suppressed the release of the taxpayer-funded report.
“A rape charge, that’s the kind of thing that doesn’t go away, even when a trial doesn’t convict you,” said Vance Farrant.
The accused were all local, working-class men whose lingua franca was Pidgin, a language with roots in Hawaii’s sugarcane plantations. Known as the Kauluwela Boys — a reference to the elementary school they attended from 1920 to 1924 and later played football near — they lived in Iwilei, enjoyed sports, dances and the time-honored teenage pastime of driving around in search of a bit of fun.
Like Kahahawai, Ben Ahakuelo was also Native Hawaiian and a boxer. He represented the Territory of Hawaii in the Amateur Athletic Union – or AAU – boxing championships at Madison Square Garden in April 1931. Both Ahakuelo and Kahahawai were portrayed as towering brutes in editorial cartoons.
Two of the other accused men, Horace Ida and David Takai, descended from Japanese families. Another, Henry Chang, was of Chinese Hawaiian ancestry. Soon after the mistrial, Ida was kidnapped at gunpoint and badly beaten by U.S. Navy sailors.
In the ’30s – as throughout the 20th century – local criminal justice systems, the press and federal government officials linked the accused to racist tropes about blackness and its threat to white womanhood. These racist concepts were imported from the Deep South courtesy of plantation owners and white military servicemen.
“Ideas about Black people have been mapped onto ideas about Indigenous people here and used to justify things like the murder of Joseph Kahahawai,” said Glenn, with the Pōpolo Project. “They were able to drum that up and apply it to a Native Hawaiian man.”
A senior at Stanford studying environmental science, Vance Farrant and his brother Nakoa Farrant – a PhD student at UC Santa Barbara studying ecosystem regeneration and revegetation – both expressed the disempowering effect of the Massie case.
The effects lasted even into the ’70s and ’80s, the youth of their parents.
“At that moment in history, what do you do with that, the facts of what happened. There wasn’t political mobilization on any big scale. It was just emerging in Hawaii at that time,” Vance Farrant said. “The point is now there’s this political moment, and there is stuff to be done.”
“We do care about this, it does affect us,” he continued. “Because it is within our reach and our consciousness to do something about it.”
Museums, historians and local theaters in Hawaii have on occasion examined the Massie case.
The trial would’ve been well known to many Americans in the 1930s; closing arguments in the murder case were broadcast live via radio. The trials profoundly changed Hawai’i, revealing the influence of the federal government, U.S. Navy and wealthy white — or haole — establishment, particularly an oligarchic group of businesses known as the Big Five.
Until the mid 1980s, though, the Massie-Kahahawai case didn’t appear in textbooks taught in the one-semester history of Hawaii course required of high schoolers in the state.
John Rosa is an associate professor of history at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa whose book "Local Story: The Massie-Kahahawai Case and the Culture of History" examines the Massie case while playing close attention to the social, racial and economic conditions most directly felt by Native Hawaiians and immigrants in the territory. He also serves as an adviser to the state’s Department of Education social studies curricula, which covers issues including colonialism, plantation life and events like the Massie case and World War II.
“They use a really well-designed book that doesn’t hold back,” he said. “It’s as critical as a high school textbook could be.”
Unlike his peers who matriculated in the 1990s, Rosa observed that around 80% of the undergraduate students in his classes at UH-Mānoa today have heard of the Massie case.
“When I went to school, I didn't know about the case and it certainly wasn't discussed publicly like it is today," Rosa said. “It was kind of like Japanese American internment. There was no doubt that it happened, but it was never really discussed.”
