The History of Afro-Caribbean Migration

Winston James

THE HISTORY OF AFRO‐CARIBBEAN MIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES

Introduction: Visible but Unseen

Going by some of the most influential texts on American immigration, one could easily come away with the notion that the Caribbeanpresence in the United States is a recent, at most a postwar, phenomenon. After all, Caribbeans and non-Europeans in general do notfigure in Oscar Handlin's classic study, The Uprooted . [ 1 ] And they do not get so much as a mention in the best general study ofAmerican immigration, John Bodnar's The Transplanted, despite the author's claim to comprehensiveness of coverage. From his reviewof the literature on American immigration, Bodnar suggested that what is needed is for scholars to go beyond the restricted field of visionoffered by studying one or more ethnic groups. Following his own prescription, Bodnar announced that his book is not about the Irish inBoston, the Germans of Cincinnati, or the Chicanos of Los Angeles. Instead, it is about the entire immigrant saga, comprised of all thesegroups and cities and other groups and cities. [ 2 ] It was almost inevitable that the fulfillment would fall short of such a rash andextravagant, if generous, promise. For, alas, despite its undoubted and justifiably celebrated achievements, it is not a comprehensive storyof American immigration. Despite its flamboyance and pretensions to the contrary, The Transplanted is a study of aspects, albeitimportant aspects, of European immigration to the United States, not of the entire immigrant saga. [ 3 ]

It is from reading these ostensibly general histories of American immigration that one will close each book with the impression that blackpeople did not migrate to the United States before the Second World War, except as enslaved Africans and coming directly from thecontinent. In 1972 Roy Bryce-Laporte complained that, aside from Ira Reid's pioneering 1939 study, The Negro Immigrant, the blackimmigrant as a subject has escaped the concerns of the majority of mainstream social scientists and historians, even those who consider thetopics of immigration and ethnic inequality their special fields of interest. [ 4 ] The observation still holds true three decades later. Indeed,Reid's findings have never been integrated into the mainstream of American immigration history. It is as if his work did not exist. [ 5 ] True, black immigrants figure in the bulging body of literature on those who entered the country after the 1965 immigration act—the so-called New Immigrants. [ 6 ] But black immigration to the United States is by no means new. For contrary to the claims and implicationsof these histories, the migration of black people, especially from the Caribbean to the United States, has been continuous, if uneven, sincethe early seventeenth century. And the impact of this migration upon American society, and especially upon Afro-America, has beenprofound.

Phases of Afro-Caribbean Migration to the United States

The migration of Afro-Caribbeans to the United States may be subdivided into four distinct phases. The first stretches from the colonialperiod to 1900; the second from 1900 to the Great Depression of the 1930s; the third from the late 1930s to 1965; and the final onestretches from 1965 to the present. Though crucial to the development of the Caribbean population in the United States, the first twophases have been the most neglected in immigration history and deserve and call for special attention here.

The Colonial Period to 1900

The distinct but intertwined history of Afro-Caribbeans and Afro-Americans is revealed most clearly during this period. Sharing a commonWest African heritage and the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade that dispersed them on the North American mainland and the islands,Caribbeans and Afro-Americans were brought together in Britain's North American colonies, Southern as well as Northern. Barbadianslaves were taken by their colonizing British owners to South Carolina during the seventeenth century, and earlier in the same century slavesfrom Barbados constituted an important portion of the black population of Virginia and the Chesapeake generally. Indeed, seasoned slavesfrom the Caribbean predominated among the earliest African arrivals, those whom Ira Berlin dubbed the charter generations, in what wouldbecome the United States. [ 7 ] South Carolina was in fact developed by and in subservience to Barbadian interests, supplying beef,pork, and lumber products to the island in exchange for sugar. Furthermore, it has been persuasively argued that South Carolina was, evenin the eighteenth century, the dependent of little Barbados, an island master. South Carolina, said Peter Wood, was the colony of a colony;an extension of Barbados to the North American mainland, Betty Wood called it. [ 8 ] Little wonder, then, that the settlement wasreferred to in London as Carolina in ye West Indies, for South Carolina was an integral member of the Caribbean universe of exchange andcommerce. In the eighteenth century, South Carolina extended and deepened its trading relations with other Caribbean colonies, Jamaicasurpassing Barbados as a market for its products in the late eighteenth century. Up to 1700 virtually all the slaves in South Carolina camefrom the Caribbean, and Barbados in particular; the first known African slaver arrived in South Carolina in 1696. The traffic from theCaribbean continued during the eighteenth century, despite the growing importance of direct trading with Africa. Thus, during the course ofthe eighteenth century, a conservative estimate suggests that between 15 and 20 percent of slaves to South Carolina came from theCaribbean. [ 9 ] But the degree of intercourse between the two areas, as Jack P. Greene has forcefully argued, was enormous. [ 10 ] And the significant influence of the Caribbean on South Carolina endures to this day.

But the pre-twentieth-century Caribbean presence in the United States extends far beyond colonial Virginia and South Carolina. Well intothe eighteenth century, the majority of slaves in the North had either lived or were born in the Caribbean. In New York, with the largestslave population in the North, slaves imported from the Caribbean continued to outnumber Africans brought directly from the continent.

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Despite gaining a reputation for rebelliousness after a slave revolt in the city in 1712 and despite legislation placing higher duties on slavesimported from the islands, the disproportionality continued. One estimate put the ratio of Caribbean to African slaves at three to onebetween 1715 and 1730; and fully 70 percent of slaves arriving in New York between 1700 and 1730 came from elsewhere in theAmericas. Of the estimated 3,411 slaves imported by New Yorkers between 1715 and 1741, the largest number came from Jamaica,followed by Africa, Barbados, and Antigua. [ 11 ]

But Caribbeans also figured prominently among the free people of color in the North. Prince Hall established black freemasonry in theUnited States and was a distinguished leader of black Boston during the eighteenth century. Up to the 1970s Hall was generally said tohave been Barbadian, but modern scholarship expresses uncertainty as to preciselywhere he was born. [ 12 ] But given thepreponderance of Barbadian slaves in Boston in the early eighteenth century (Hall is believed to have been born around 1735), it is likelythat he was in fact born on the island. Despite substantial black migration from the South, from Canada, and from Europe, as late as 1860one in five black Bostonians had been born in Barbados and other Caribbean islands. [ 13 ] The Caribbean population in the UnitedStates was relatively small during the nineteenth century, but it grew significantly after the Civil War. Indeed, the foreign-born blackpopulation, which was almost wholly Caribbean in origin, increased fivefold between 1850 and 1900, from 4,067 to 20,236. [ 14 ] Anddistinguished Caribbean migrants populate the annals of nineteenth-century Afro- America. Since most of them have been so undeservedlyforgotten, a brief reminder is in order.

Denmark Vesey (c.1767-1822) in 1822 organized in Charleston, South Carolina, what one authority accurately described as the mostelaborate insurrectionary project ever formed by American slaves. In boldness of conception and thoroughness of organization there hasbeen nothing to compare with it. [ 15 ] The conspiracy was betrayed and Vesey, along with his coconspirators, executed. Vesey wasfrom the Virgin Islands. [ 16 ] John B. Russwurm (1799-1851) of Jamaica, one of the early New World settlers of Liberia, was also oneof the first three black people to graduate from an American college, Bowdoin College, in Maine, in 1826. [ 17 ] In the spring of 1827,Russwurm, with his Afro-American colleague Samuel E. Cornish, started Freedom's Journal, the first black newspaper published in theUnited States, and a militant one at that. Russwurm's compatriot, Peter Ogden, organized in New York City the first Odd-Fellows Lodgeamong the black population. [ 18 ] Robert Campbell (1827-84), another Jamaican, left the island for Central America in 1852, thenmoved to New York in 1853. By 1855 he had become assistant principal of Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth. He served withdistinction and was respected and admired by his colleagues and students. But exasperated by the racism he encountered in the UnitedStates, he resigned his post in 1858 to join Martin Delany in a two- man Niger Valley Exploring Party. Frustrated in his attempts to raisefunds and attract Afro- American settlers for Africa but with the new hope that came with the outbreak of the Civil War, Delanyabandoned his African dream and became an officer in the Union Army. Campbell, like Russwurm, before him was less optimistic aboutthe prospects for black people in the United States. In August 1861, with his wife and four children, he left American shores, bound forwhat he called his Motherland. [ 19 ] Despite setbacks in his new country, Campbell never regretted his decision and made Nigeria hishome up to his death in 1884. [ 20 ] Robert Brown Elliott (1842-84), the brilliant fighter and orator of the Reconstruction era, claimedJamaican parentage. [ 21 ] David Augustus Straker (1842-1908), a law partner of Elliott's, a fighter for civil rights, educationalist,journalist, chronicler of the dark post-Reconstruction days, and a distinguished lawyer in his own right, was from Barbados. [ 22 ] JanEarnst Matzeliger (1852-89), the inventor of a revolutionary; shoe-making machine, had migrated from Suriname. [ 23 ] Edward WilmotBlyden (1832-1912), a brilliant man and major contributor to the stream of black nationalist thought in America and abroad, was born inthe Virgin Islands. He had left his native Saint Thomas in 1850 to study theology in the United States but found it impossible to gain a placein an American school—he was rejected by Rutger's Theological College and two others—on account of his color. Frustrated by theseracist barricades and seized by the dread of being kidnapped as a slave under the Fugitive Slave Law passed that year, Blyden left sevenmonths later, in December 1850, bound for Liberia, where his legendary talents flourished. [ 24 ] William Henry Crogman (1841- 1931),Latin and Greek scholar, former president of Clark College, and one of the founders of the American Negro Academy, came from SaintMartin. Joseph Sandiford Atwell, a Barbadian, in 1867 became the first black man after the Civil War to be ordained in the EpiscopalChurch in the United States. [ 25 ] Bert Williams (1875-1922), the famous comedian, was born in Antigua. And at the beginning of thenew century Robert Charles O'Hara Benjamin (1855-1900), journalist, editor, lawyer, and writer, was gunned down, shot in the back sixtimes, in Lexington, Kentucky, because of his work of uplifting the race, including writing and speaking out against lynching, and defendingthe constitutional right of black people to vote. Benjamin had emigrated from Saint Kitts. [ 26 ] W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), JamesWeldon Johnson (1871-1938), his brother Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954), William Stanley Braithwaite (1878-1962), and GraceCampbell (1882-1943) were among some of the most distinguished sons and daughters of these nineteenthcentury Caribbean immigrantsto America.

A significant number of the nineteenth-century migrants were skilled craftsmen, students, teachers, preachers, lawyers, and doctors. [ 27 ] Even more skewed in social origins than the islanders who followed them to the United States in the twentieth century, these migrantsgained a reputation that distorted Afro-America's perception of the Caribbean reality. As one distinguished Caribbean migrant himselfobserved, it was taken for granted that every West Indian immigrant was a paragon of intelligence and a man of birth and breeding. [ 28 ] What was new in the early twentieth century was therefore not the Caribbean presence itself, but the scale and conspicuousness of it.

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Early Twentieth Century, 1900 to 1932

The number of black people, and especially Caribbeans, who migrated to the United States increased dramatically in the first three decadesof the twentieth century, peaking in 1924 and falling off during the Depression. From a trickle of 412 in 1899 black migration to the U.S.reached 12,243 per year by 1924 (Tables I, IIA, and IIB).

TABLE I: BLACK IMMIGRANT ALIENS ADMITTED AND BLACK EMIGRANT ALIENS DEPARTED: UNITED STATES, 1899-1937

YEAR ADMITTED DEPARTED NET ADMISSION

1899 412 NA NA

1900 714 NA NA

1901 594 NA NA

1902 832 NA NA

1903 2,174 NA NA

1904 2,386 NA NA

1905 3,598 NA NA

1906 3,786 NA NA

1907 5,235 NA NA

1908 4,626 889 3,737

1909 4,307 1,104 3,203

1910 4,966 926 4,040

1911 6,721 913 5,808

1912 6,759 1,288 5,471

1913 6,634 1,671 4,963

1914 8,447 1,805 6,642

1915 5,660 1,644 4,016

1916 4,576 1,684 2,892

1917 7,971 1,497 6,474

1918 5,706 1,291 4,415

1919 5,823 976 4,847

1920 8,174 1,275 6,899

1921 9,873 1,807 8,066

1922 5,248 2,183 3,065

1923 7,554 1,525 6,029

1924 12,243 1,449 10,794

1925 791 1,094 -303

1926 894 865 29

1927 955 870 85

1928 956 789 167

1929 1,254 425 829

1930 1,806 776 1,030

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1931 884 737 147

1932 183 811 -628

1933 84 1,058 -974

1934 178 604 -426

1935 246 597 -351

1936 272 502 -230

1937 275 433 -158

1899-1937 143,397 33,518 85,731

Table II: Black Immigrants by Region of Last Residence, 1899-1932

CARIBBEAN CENTRALAMERICA

SOUTHAMERICA

BRITISHNORTHAMERICA

PORTUGUESEATL. (CAPEVERDE &AZORES)

OTHERS

YEAR TOTAL NO. % NO. % NO. % NO. % NO. % NO. %

1899-1932 142,740 107,892 75.6 7,253 5.1 3,050 2.1 6,153 4.3 15,275 10.7 3,205 2.2

Source:ImmigrationReports,1899-1932.

Consequently, the foreign-born black population increased from 20,000 in 1900 to almost 100,000 by 1930. Over 140,000 blackimmigrants, exclusive of black visitors or tourists, passed through the ports of America between 1899 and 1937. And this occurred despitethe viciously restrictive legislation of 1917, 1921, and 1924 (the figure for those admitted in 1925 was 95 percent below that for theprevious year). [ 29 ] It should also be noted that the increase occurred in spite of the economic and migratory reversals of theDepression years in the thirties, when more Caribbean people returned to the islands than entered the United States (see Figure 1.1).Despite all this, the black population of foreign origin and their American-born offspring grew from 55,000 in 1900 to 178,000 in 1930.The overwhelming majority of America's black immigrants came from the Caribbean islands, over 80 percent of them if we include those ofCaribbean origin coming from Central America between 1899 and 1932 (see Table IIB). From the end of the nineteenth century up to1905, Florida was the primary state of destination, reflecting a large wave of migration from the Bahamas to South Florida and a smallerflow of black cigar makers from Cuba. [ 30 ] New York was the second most popular state for settlement, followed closely byMassachusetts. But Florida's preeminence was soon eclipsed by New York as the primary destination, and the number and proportionheading for Massachusetts dropped sharply by 1920. During the peak years of migration, 1913 to 1924, the majority headed not only forthe state of New York, but also for New York City, settling primarily in Manhattan and Brooklyn (see Table III and Figure 1.2).

TABLE III: STATE OF INTENDED RESIDENCE OF BLACK IMMIGRANTS, 1899-1931

NEWYORK FLORIDA MASSACHUSETTS OTHER

STATES

YEARS NUMBERADMITTED NO. % OF

IMMIGRANTS NO. % OFIMMIGR. NO. % OF

IMMIGR. NO. % OFIMMIGR.

1899-1905 10,710 1,847 17.2 5,783 54.0 1,655 15.5 1,425 13.3

1906-12 36,398 12,802 35.2 11,183 30.7 6,337 17.4 6,076 16.7

1913-19 44,817 21,097 47.1 8,006 18.0 7,001 15.6 8,713 19.4

1920-26 44,777 26,084 58.3 7,665 17.1 4,292 9.6 6,736 15.0

1927-31 5,855 3,998 68.3 329 5.6 375 6.4 1,753 19.7

1899-1931 142,557 65,828 46.2 32,966 23.1 19,660 13.8 24,103 17.0

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Source:ImmigrationReports,1899-1931.

By 1930 almost a quarter of black Harlem was of Caribbean origin. Less than a decade later, the New York Amsterdam News informed its readers that with the exception of Kingston, Jamaica, Harlem was the largest West Indian city in the world. [ 31 ] Theexplanation for the significant growth in the Caribbean presence in the United States in the early part of the century is not hard to find. It layin the increasing economic hardship and disenchantment in the British Caribbean, on the one hand, and the simultaneous expansion of theU.S. economy (especially during World War I and the 1920s) with its relatively high wages and increasing employment opportunities, onthe other.

The British Caribbean, the primary source of black migration to the U.S., experienced a catastrophic stagnation and decline in its sugareconomy, the mainstay and primary employer in the region since the seventeenth century. The crisis was especially deep in the so-calledOld Colonies of Jamaica, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands, whose economies were most heavily dependent upon sugar. The Britishcolonies were out-competed by Cuban and Brazilian sugar, and from the mid-nineteenth century also by European beet-sugar producers.In the 1820s, Britain's colonies accounted for more than half the sugar produced in the Caribbean. A century later, it had fallen to less than6 percent. In marked contrast, Cuba over the same period had increased its share from 17 to just under 80 percent. [ 32 ] The price ofsugar fell dramatically. Jamaican sugar in 1900 fetched almost 80 percent less than it did in 1840. The number of sugar estates on the islandfell from 670 in 1836 to just 74 by 1910, drastically reducing the number of people employed in the industry. [ 33 ] Though bananacultivation expanded rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it could never make up for the shortfall created by thecollapse of the sugar economy. The Barbadian ruling class managed to break the fall of King Sugar in Barbados, but it did so on the backsof black Barbadians, instituting a mercilessly exploitative system akin to that which prevailed during slavery. A similar dynamic unfolded inSaint Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, and Antigua. The death rate, especially infant mortality, soared in these islands. Malnutrition wascommonplace and even outright starvation was not unknown. As one petitioner to the British government put it in 1899, “Her Majesty'sblack and coloured subjects in the West Indies have had to choose between death from starvation in their native islands and suffering ill-treatment as immigrants in the Dominican Republic because their native islands are merely Islands of Death.” [ 34 ]

Despite a recommendation of land reform by a royal commission in 1897, none of the colonies took up the idea. On the contrary, theoligarchy in all of these territories, especially in Jamaica and Barbados, engrossed the land with even greater zeal, pushing more and moreof the rural population into overcrowded and increasingly dilapidated and unhealthy urban centers. Thus the problem in the Caribbean wasnever one of so-called overpopulation, as is so frequently claimed by historians and commentators. It was one of distribution: of the wealth,especially land, gobbled up by a greedy few at expense of the poverty and landlessness of the many. It was a problem of white power andblack oppression. As the case of Grenada illustrates, where the people had access to the land, they proved quite capable of feeding andlooking after themselves, without resorting to migration, as the Jamaicans, Barbadians, and Antiguans did in alarming numbers.

On top of these problems, a series of natural disasters aggravated the condition of the people and contributed to the migration flow.Hurricanes, floods, and droughts afflicted the islands with unusual frequency and intensity in the decades between 1880 and 1920. Tomake matters worse, the capital of Jamaica, Kingston, and surrounding areas were devastated by a massive earthquake in 1907, the firstmajor earthquake in over two hundred years. The impact of these catastrophes could have been attenuated by the colonial authorities, butthey made little effort to alleviate the suffering of the people, especially in Barbados. [ 35 ]

It was not only the workers and peasants who had problems with the structure of colonial rule on the islands. The aspiring black middleclass had their problems, too. Coming out of the black peasantry and working class, to which they were organically connected, members ofthis class became increasingly dissatisfied. As teachers, they received meager salaries and went without a pension at the end of theircareers. Insofar as they were allowed entry into the colonial civil service at all, they were locked down in low-level jobs, well below theircapabilities, reduced to passing papers from the men downstairs . . . to the man upstairs, as C. L. R. James put it. [ 36 ] Matters weremade even worse in 1911 when the Jamaican authorities decided to scrap competitive examinations for the civil service and replaced themwith an undemocratic and iniquitous system of nominations that favored the whites and the light-skinned. Objections were strong and loudbut went unheeded by the colonial authorities. [ 37 ]

The motivation for migration, then, was strong not only for the working class but also for members of the emergent black middle class. Butthe different classes did not move to the United States in equal number. The majority of immigrants from the British Caribbean during thisperiod headed for Central America to work on the Panama Canal and the expansive banana plantations being laid out and developed bythe United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and elsewhere in the isthmus. They also migrated in large numbers toCuba to work on the sugar plantations in Oriente province, and to a lesser extent to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, whose sugar

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industries, like that of Cuba, were in the ascendant. They were Jim-Crowed and ill treated in all of these destinations. Conditions wereespecially bad on the Panama Canal. After observing the color hierarchy in the canal zone in 1912, the American journalist and travel writerHarry Franck concluded, “Panama is below the Mason-Dixon Line.” [ 38 ] In one key respect the Isthmian Canal Commission, theAmerican body in charge of building the canal, even managed to out-Dixie Dixie: white American employees were paid in U.S. goldcurrency whereas non-Americans, overwhelmingly black and Caribbean, were paid in local Panamanian silver currency, with half the valueof the former. Furthermore, Jim Crow was augmented by yellow fever, malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis and ghastly accidents thatdevastated the black workforce. And the scale of that devastation was in turn determined by Jim Crow—the racial division of labor and theinferior sanitary, housing, and medical facilities provided to black workers account for a large proportion of the illnesses, injuries, anddeaths. The excavation of Culebra Cut, one of the most challenging and dangerous phases of the work on the canal, entailed the use of800,000 sticks of dynamite per month. The work on this one stretch lasted seven years, from 1907 to 1913. The dynamite was unstable,accidents frequent. “The flesh of men flew in the air like birds many days,” one worker on the Cut recalled. [ 39 ] But these Caribbeanworkers endured—and when they could, struggled against—the humiliation, dangers, and afflictions of exile. Wages were higher here andtheir families back home could eat. As Claude McKay put it in his 1912 poem, “Peasants' Ways O' Thinkin'”: “Though ober deh de law isbad,/ An' dey no know de name o' God,/ Yet dere is nuff work fe we han's,/ Reward in gol' fe beat de ban's [hunger].” [ 40 ] They senthome money to their loved ones, made frequent visits, and bought land in their native island. Most, in the end, settled in the lands to whichthey had migrated. [ 41 ]

The dispersal of Caribbean people was facilitated by a remarkably dense network of transportation in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. Bridgetown, Barbados, had since the seventeenth century served as the first port of call for British ships coming acrossthe Atlantic. This advantage of the first landfall developed over the centuries to make Barbados into the Clapham Junction of the WestIndies by the end of the nineteenth century, with shipping networks extending to all parts of the Americas and the world. [ 42 ] Bridgetown was the busiest port in the British Caribbean, with facilities and connections far better than any other island in the easternCaribbean. It is not surprising, then, that when the Guyanese Peter Griffith (later known as Ras Makonnen) and his friends decided to go toOriente in Cuba in the 1920s they first left Georgetown on a small boat to Bridgetown for a ship to Cuba. And it was back in Bridgetownthat they caught another boat for New Orleans. Similarly, Hugh Mulzac left Union Island in the Grenadines and went to Bridgetown inorder to serve on a ship that would take him to the United States. During the building of the Panama Canal, Caribbean workers fromeastern Caribbean islands, such as Saint Kitts, typically caught boats to Central America from Bridgetown. It was therefore not just theintolerable conditions that prevailed in Barbados or the existence of opportunity for work abroad that account for the extraordinary migrantstream from Barbados. An indispensable element in accounting for the size and far-flung destinations of the Barbadian diaspora (somesettled as far away as Japan and Cape Town, South Africa) was its working class's almost unique access to relatively cheap transportationto a bewildering variety of different points on the globe. Barbados also had more than its fair share of black seamen plying the seas, manyof whom abandoned the peripatetic life and settled far from home. [ 43 ]

Jamaica, in the western Caribbean, had also benefited from an extensive shipping network since its capture by the British in 1655. And atthe end of the nineteenth century this was augmented by the development of the banana trade. Lorenzo Dow Baker, founder of the BostonFruit Company (which later developed into the United Fruit Company), established his base in Port Antonio (eastern Jamaica) in the1880s. From Port Antonio and other port towns on the island he developed an extraordinary trade between the island and the U.S. Hisships always made room for passengers as well as his cargo of bananas. Beginning with Boston as the primary American port of call, hewould later add New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, and others as his business expanded. This facilitated greater andcheaper access for immigrants from the island to the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [ 44 ]

Domestically, the islands, especially Jamaica and Barbados, adapted institutionally to mass migration during these years. For migration,especially on the scale that it took in these islands, required transformations of family forms and kin networks, especially as they relate tochild care, during these pivotal decades. [ 45 ]

In marked contrast to the flow to Central America and Cuba, that to the United States was relatively small. While 108,000 Caribbeansentered the United States between 1899 and 1932, it took only two islands, Jamaica and Barbados, to supply over 240,000 laborers toPanama between 1881 and 1915, the majority going during the peak years of construction, 1907 to 1914, when the canal was opened fortraffic. [ 46 ] The figure does not include the other tens of thousands who went to work on banana plantations in Central America or thehundreds of thousands who went to Cuba. [ 47 ] The migration to the U.S. was also distinct in another important respect: those whoemigrated to the U.S. were disproportionately literate and skilled, with a significant number being professionals or white-collar workers.

This wave of black humanity entering the U.S., it is true, was also small in comparison to the gigantic white one that rushed in from acrossthe Atlantic, bringing Southern and Eastern Europeans at the turn of the century in the millions. But it was focused on the northeastern coastof America and broke mainly on the shores of Manhattan. And its impact on the nation as a whole, and on Afro-America in particular, wasmuch greater than its size would first suggest. In tens of thousands, Caribbeans went through Ellis Island, but one would not know this fromthe literature on, and the iconography of, Ellis Island. It is this elision that has led even careful historians to refer to Sullivan's Island, off the

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Charleston coast, where incoming enslaved Africans were quarantined, as the Ellis Island of black Americans. [ 48 ] Evocative thoughthe reference may be, it nonetheless obscures an important truth of American history and Afro-American life: for thousands of Afro-Americans, there is another Ellis Island. It is a slip of land between Manhattan and the New Jersey coast called Ellis Island. [ 49 ] Andsince the 1960s, thousands more have John F. Kennedy and Miami International Airports as their Ellis Islands. It is this kind of blindness tothe Afro-Caribbean strands within the American tapestry that led Roy Bryce-Laporte to bemoan the double invisibility of black immigrants:invisible because of their blackness and invisible because they are black foreigners, a combination of characteristics that, until relativelyrecently, was apparently unthinkable and certainly imperceptible to most Americans, including scholars of immigration. [ 50 ]

The relative neglect of black immigrants is paradoxical, for as one scholar noted, these immigrants have been simultaneously perhaps theleast visible but most articulate and active of America's ethnic constituencies. [ 51 ] Furthermore, the members of this group of immigrantsand their children were to distinguish themselves in all spheres of American life business: the professions, politics, sports, and the arts. Fromthis group came outstanding men and women such as Hubert Harrison, Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey,Otto Huiswoud, Hugh Mulzac, Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, Joel A. Rogers, W. A. Domingo, Joshua Cockburn, Claudia Jones, C. L.R. James, Oliver Cromwell Cox, George Padmore, Kenneth B. Clark, Mabel Keaton Staupers, Maida Springer-Kemp, Richard B.Moore, James Watson, Ewart Guinier, Hulan Jack, J. Raymond Jones, Sidney Poitier, Nat Adderley and his brother, Julian CannonballAdderley. Hubert Harrison was aptly dubbed by A. Philip Randolph as the Father of Harlem Radicalism. Another from this group, MarcusGarvey, was the founder of the largest black political organization in the United States and the first and only truly Pan-Africanist movement,which reached and moved millions of people of African descent around the world; here, too, are leading black communists and socialists(Huiswoud, Briggs, Moore, Domingo, Claudia Jones, Mulzac), including a leading member of the American Trotskyist movement in the1930s and 1940s (James); the first black sailor to earn a captain's license in the United States (Mulzac); another sailor, Joshua Cockburn,said to be the only Negro captain in the United States licensed to command any ship on the ‘seven seas’; [ 52 ] two of the mostoutstanding writers of the Harlem Renaissance (McKay and Walrond); the highest ranking black officials in the Communist International inthe 1920s and 1930s (Padmore and Huiswoud); the first black Manhattan Borough President (Jack); one of the first two black municipaljudges in the state of New York (Watson); a former president of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (Staupers); the firstblack head of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine in New York (J. Raymond Jones); the first and, until 2002, the onlyblack actor to win an Oscar in a leading role (Poitier); two of the most outstanding jazz musicians of the twentieth century (the Adderleybrothers). [ 53 ]

This first cohort of twentieth-century Caribbean immigrants to the U.S. was not only more literate and skilled compared with theircompatriots left behind, but also more educated and skilled compared to the European immigrants who entered the country at the sametime. Moreover, they were more literate than the native-born white population in the United States, and not just more so than Afro-Americans, to whom they have been frequently compared. [ 54 ]

Table IV: Occupational Status of Black Immigrants Entering the United States, 1899-1931

YEARS 1899-1905

1906-1912

1913-1919

1920-1926

1927-1931

1899-1931

ADULTS 9,214 33,134 40,423 38,060 4,804 125,635

No. % ofadults No. % of

adults No. % ofadults No. % of

adults No. % ofadults No. % of

adults

Adults without Occupation 1,383 15.0 4,010 12.1 4,646 11.5 5,334 14.0 1,393 29.0 16,766 13.3

Adults with Occupation 7,831 85.0 29,124 87.9 35,777 88.5 32,726 86.0 3,411 71.0 108,869 86.7

Professional 204 2.2 811 2.4 1,152 2.8 1,286 3.4 289 6.0 3,742 3.0

Teachers 69 - 248 - 405 1.0 448 1.2 94 2.0 1,264 1.0

Physicians 11 - 31 - 36 - 36 - 16 - 130 -

Skilled 2,787 30.2 9,552 28.8 13,291 32.9 13,802 36.3 1,789 37.2 41,221 32.8

Carpenters & Joiners 234 2.5 940 2.8 1,643 4.1 1,574 4.1 120 2.5 4,511 3.6

Dressmakers &Seamstresses 298 3.2 2,773 8.4 4,493 11.1 4,645 12.2 632 13.2 12,841 10.2

Clerks & Accountants 182 2.0 777 2.3 1,236 3.0 1,563 4.1 320 6.7 4,078 3.2

Servants, Farm Laborers & 3 804 41 3 16 901 51 0 18 801 46 5 15 150 39 8 1 106 23 0 55 820 44 4

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Laborers 3,804 41.3 16,901 51.0 18,801 46.5 15,150 39.8 1,106 23.0 55,820 44.4

Source: ImmigrationReports, 1899-1931.

TABLE V: LITERACY OF BLACK IMMIGRANTS, 1899-1932

YEARS ADULTSADMITTED LITERATE SEMI-

LITERATE ILLITERATE

no. % ofadults no. % of

adults no. % ofadults

1899-1910 30,177 24,444* 81.0 n.a. n.a. 5,733 19.0

1911-1917 42,593 35,341 83.0 145 0.3 7,107 16.7

1918-1924 46,815 46,185 98.7 68 0.1 562 1.2

1925-1932 6,284 6,250 99.5 3 — 31 0.5

1899-1932 125,869 112,220 89.1 216 0.2 13,433 10.7

*Includes semi-literates.

Note: Between 1899 and 1917, adults weredefined as those fourteen and older; from 1918 to1932, sixteen and over. Literates were defined asthose who could read and write; semi-literates,those who could read but not write; illiterates,those who could do neither.

Source: Immigration Reports, 1899-1933.

TABLE VI: ILLITERACY IN THE POPULATION TWENTY-ONE AND OLDER, BY COLOR AND NATIVITY, FOR THE UNITED STATES, 1900-1930 (PERCENTAGES)

YEAR NATIONAL BLACK WHITE*

Native Foreign-born

AllWhites

1900 12.0 51.7 5.3 13.3 7.3

1910 8.9 35.7 3.5 12.9 5.9

1920 7.1 27.4 2.4 13.7 5.0

1930 5.3 20.0 1.8 10.3 3.4

*Mexicans included with the white population in 1910 and 1920.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), Table 5, p. 232.

TABLE VII: BLACK ALIENS ADMITTED INTO AND DEPARTED FROM THE UNITED STATES BY SELECTED OCCUPATION, 1908-1924

OCCUPATION ADMITTED DEPARTED DEPARTURES AS PERCENTAGE OF ADMISSIONS

Professionals 2,951 424 14.4

Teachers 1,005 56 5.6

Clergy 238 113 47.4

Physicians 88 46 52.3

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Merchants and Dealers 538 104 19.3

Skilled Workers 33,233 2,767 8.3

Seamstresses 6,650 269 4.0

Dressmakers 4,041 312 7.7

Carpenters and Joiners 3,826 271 7.1

Clerks and Accountants 3,348 471 14.1

Servants 22,204 2,961 13.3

Farm Laborers 12,338 5,022 40.7

Laborers 12,449 4,789 38.5

Source: Immigration Reports, 1908-1924.

TABLE VIII: DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRANTS' OCCUPATIONS ON ENTRY INTO THE UNITED STATES, 1899-1910 AND 1913-1914 (BY PERCENTAGES OF THOSE WITH OCCUPATIONS)

Occupation/Year Black English German Greek Hebrew Irish Italian(N)*

Italian(S)* Polish Professional

1899-1910 2.9 9.0 3.5 0.3 1.3 1.3 1.1 0.4 0.2

1913 2.7 9.4 4.1 0.3 1.5 2.6 1.3 0.3 0.2

1914 2.9 10.4 4.2 0.4 1.4 3.3 1.5 0.2 0.2

Skilled

1899-1910 38.2 48.7 30.0 7.7 67.1 12.6 20.4 14.6 6.3 1899-1910

1913 29.6 44.5 27.7 6.3 70.1 17.0 17.6 11.8 6.5

1914 31.0 42.6 29.6 7.0 69.0 16.0 17.5 12.0 7.3 FarmLaborers

1899-1910 13.8 2.5 17.9 19.4 1.9 4.6 18.7 34.5 30.5

1913 23.2 3.3 23.4 22.8 3.4 10.0 12.3 48.0 58.0

1914 18.2 3.4 21.1 6.6 3.7 9.3 11.1 46.2 52.5

Laborers

1899-1910 17.4 11.6 19.8 66.8 11.8 30.6 47.8 42.5 44.8

1913 16.6 9.4 11.6 60.0 6.5 23.4 55.3 29.3 13.6

1914 16.8 9.1 10.5 70.0 6.4 22.4 55.4 28.6 14.2

*Italian (N) = Italian, North

Italian (S) = Italian, South.

Sources: Adapted and calculated fromAbstracts of Reports of the ImmigrationCommission, vol. 1, table 13, p. 101;and Immigration Reports, 1913 (TableX, pp. 66–69), and 1914 (Table X, pp.62–67).

It was this first wave of twentieth-century black migrants that laid the groundwork for the institutional infrastructure of Afro-Caribbean lifein New York City and elsewhere in the U.S. It has been estimated that, by the 1930s, a third of New York's black professionals, includingdoctors, dentists and lawyers, came from the ranks of Caribbean migrants—a figure well in excess excess of the group's size within thecity's black population. [ 55 ] Furthermore, the Caribbean newcomers accounted for a disproportionately large number of blackbusinessmen and -women in New York City. A study of the entries in Who's Who in Colored America, the most comprehensive guide

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to Afro-America's elite at the time, covering the period from 1915 to 1932, yielded a disproportionately high presence of black migrants.In 1930 only 0.8 percent of the black population of America was of foreign birth. Yet 6 percent of those listed were migrants. Over 8percent of the doctors, 4.5 percent of the lawyers, more than 14 percent of the businessmen, 4.5 percent of the clergymen, over 3 percentof the professors, and 4 percent of the writers/authors listed for the period were migrants. [ 56 ] No doubt the proportion would havebeen higher if the data included those of immigrant descent, instead of being confined to those of foreign birth. Among the sons anddaughters of this first generation of Caribbean migrants is a phalanx of distinguished Afro-Americans: Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, HarryBelafonte, Colin Powell, St. Clair Drake, Clifford Alexander, Bruce Llewelyn, Cicely Tyson, Maida Springer Kemp, Vincent Harding,Robert Moses, Shirley Chisholm, Constance Baker Motley, Mamie Phipps Clark, Margaret Walker, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, AudreLorde, Michelle Wallace, Paule Marshall, Yaphet Kotto, Sonny Rollins, Rosa Guy, June Jordan, and Lani Guinier.

But the Immigration Act of 1924 drastically turned the tide of Caribbean immigration to the United States. Caribbean migration droppedfrom 10,630 in 1924 to 321 (including 13 from British Honduras) in 1925. The act, primarily aimed at restricting and choking offimmigration by nonwhites and Eastern and Southern Europeans, stipulated an immigration quota system of 2 percent of the foreign-born foreach nationality as recorded by the 1890 census. Thus in 1925, the year the act came into effect, Italian immigration, for example, could notexceed 2 percent of foreign-born Italians enumerated in the American census of 1890. Visas would now be required before immigration,thus minimizing the processing at American ports such as Ellis Island. Northwestern Europe was favored in this quota system, and thosefrom the European colonies could only enter under the designated quota allotted to their colonial masters. Thus those from the BritishCaribbean entered under the British quota, set at 34,007 in 1925. Remarkably, although Britain consistently underused its quota by severalthousands, the migration from the Caribbean was kept consistently low, never rising in the late 1920s and 1930s to the levels reachedbefore the 1924 act. Caribbean immigrants complained of collusion between British and American authorities to keep out black immigrants.Although the charge has never been properly substantiated, partly because no one has researched it, the anecdotal and prima facieevidence suggests that the charge was probably true. Certainly prospective Jamaican immigrants at the time complained of discouragementand obstacles placed in their way of getting a visa from the American consulate in Kingston. The annual report of Commissioner Generalfor Immigration reveals that a suspiciously large proportion of black immigrants was refused admission in the late 1920s. [ 57 ] During theDepression, the red tape was deliberately entangled to further restrict immigration. And in 1930, acceding to demands that immigration befurther reduced during the economic crisis, the Hoover administration ordered a more rigorous enforcement of the clause of the 1917immigration act prohibiting the admission of persons likely to become a public charge. Roosevelt continued this policy of administrativerestriction up to 1937; according to one authority, this ensured the exclusion of all but the most prosperous European immigrants. [ 58 ] Small wonder, then, that during the 1930s more Caribbean people were leaving the U.S. than entering it. Between 1921 and 1931 some75,000 people (black and white, from the different colonial and linguistic groups) left the Caribbean for the U.S. But a decade later, 1931to 1940, that figure had fallen to 15,500. [ 59 ]

It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that a deliberate attempt would be made to block the entry of black people into the UnitedStates. Despite the dramatic fall in immigration to the U.S. after the outbreak of World War I, at the end of 1914 a bill was tabled inCongress to restrict immigration drastically. Democratic Senator James Reed of Missouri proposed and secured quick passage in theSenate of an amendment to the bill, excluding members of the black or African race from entry into the country. The Afro-American pressunanimously condemned the measure, and the NAACP voiced its strong opposition. [ 60 ]

But, remarkably, the greatest opposition to the amendment came from the otherwise cautious and conservative Booker T. Washington.Uncharacteristically passionate and combative on the question, Washington, to his credit, pulled out all the stops to kill the measure. Hemobilized his influential network of clients and supporters, black and white, and he personally waged a campaign in the press, sendingletters to the New York World and the Atlanta Constitution, among others. He pointed out that only a few thousand people ofAfrican descent had been entering the country and noted the hardship the measure would impose upon the small islands of the Caribbean.He reminded Americans of the indispensable labor that Jamaicans and other Caribbeans had performed in building the Panama Canal, onlyrecently completed, and suggested that they should not be slapped in the face and told that they could not enter this country even when theymet the requirements of our government. In his letter to the New York World, Washington expressed the hope that all people “will seethe justice of asking Congress to refrain from perpetuating this unjust act upon my race.” [ 61 ] With little time to spare before the billcame before the House of Representatives, Washington wrote letters and sent telegrams, calling upon his lieutenants and the NegroBusiness Leagues, the black newspapers, and our various organizations for swift action to defeat this unjust measure. He asked them towrite their Senators and Representatives. Robert Russa Moton, who would succeed him as head of Tuskegee, promised to get his man inWashington to pull every possible string to defeat this unfortunate clause. Washington's secretary, Emmett Scott, sent to the black presscopies of Washington's letter that had appeared in the white dailies. He urged them to build up concern over the issue. Washington himselfdirectly instructed others, such as Kelly Miller, a black professor at Howard, to go before the conference committee and enter protestagainst exclusion of colored people. They all followed his commands. [ 62 ]

Though he was the most powerful and influential, Washington was not the only black leader to take part in the fight. William Monroe

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Trotter of Boston, Washington's nemesis, was so exercised over the issue that he even offered a truce, lasting at least until the fight againstthe bill was over. He went so far as to suggest, according to one of Booker T. Washington's emissaries, that Washington, Du Bois, andhimself should appear in Washington, D.C., arm in arm, fighting against the measure—an extraordinary idea to come from Trotter, whodetested Washington. [ 63 ] It did not happen, but the bill was defeated in the House on January 7, 1915.

Along with the great rejoicing came many congratulations to Booker T. Washington. Even the Jamaican black radical W. A. Domingo, whonever had anything nice to say about Washington, praised the man, albeit posthumously, for his farsighted leadership on the issue. [ 64 ] But the message of congratulation that Washington treasured most was signed by fifty-eight foreign-born black teachers and students ofTuskegee. “We do feel and believe, Sir,” they wrote,“that the strength and force of your letter made a great impression on the minds of thelegislators and thus helped considerably, if not altogether, in the defeating of the bill.” They expressed the belief that the bill was not onlyaimed at the foreign-born, but at the entire race. Hyperbolically, they further declared, grossly overstating Washington's power andcourage, that it is a consoling thought that the colored people can take care of themselves, whether in the United States, or in the mostremote corner of the earth, “that in you they have one who will always have the courage of your convictions to champion their cause.”Replying, Washington wrote: “I was very glad to do this as the measure was thoroughly unreasonable and unjust. I think the matter willnever come up again. It was my intention, if the bill had passed Congress, to have gone direct to President Wilson and ask him to veto thebill.” [ 65 ] It was one of Washington's finest moments, but it was also his swan song. He died within the year, in November 1915. Andwithin a decade of his passing, contrary to his belief, the matter did come up again, if only in disguise. Moreover, this time, in 1924, theracists and nativists largely succeeded in blocking the entry of black immigrants to the United States. Black immigration fell from 12,243 in1924 to 791 the following year. And, as we shall see, within a generation the job of proscribing black immigration to the U.S. was virtuallydone.

Restrictions and Openings: From the Second World War to the 1965 Immigration Act

From a state of negative net black emigration from the United States in the 1930s, the level of Caribbean immigration picked up afterAmerican entry into the Second World War in 1941. Almost 50,000 Caribbeans (black and white) entered the United States between1941 and 1950, taking advantage of the rapidly expanding war economy and the postwar economic boom. [ 66 ] Approximately 17,000entered from the non-Hispanic Caribbean, with an additional 911 Haitians. [ 67 ] Furthermore, beginning in 1943, thousands of migrantworkers were brought from the Caribbean to work in American agriculture to help the war effort. The sugar plantations of Florida were theprimary destinations, but the scheme soon spread to others states and sectors of the American economy. By war's end, over 40,000workers from the Bahamas, Jamaica, Barbados, Saint Vincent, Saint Lucia, and Dominica were in the U.S. under the scheme. Theyworked in nearly 1,500 localities, in thirty-six of the forty-eight contiguous states. Over 16,000 of them worked in industry. [ 68 ] Forsome, especially those in Florida, conditions were intolerable. And many not only went on strike, despite the no-strike clause in theircontracts, but also engaged in other forms of overt resistance, and not without some success. [ 69 ] An unknown number of theseworkers broke their contracts and absconded from the jobs they were assigned. Apart from the perils of being illegal aliens in the U.S.,these men also had to forego the 25 percent or more of their gross income from contract work that had been deducted by their employersand sent back to a government saving scheme in their native island. [ 70 ] Others, such as some of the Jamaican tobacco workers inConnecticut, took flight to New York and Boston rather than return to Jamaica after their contracts came to an end in 1950. Still othersamong the tobacco workers were able to transform their status from migrant laborer to immigrant and remain legally in the U.S. [ 71 ] Many returned to the Caribbean and then made their way back to the U.S. as bona fide immigrants, rather than contract laborers.

Though originally intended to alleviate the alleged labor shortage in Florida agriculture during the war, and unlike the Mexican bracero program in California, of which it was an East coast imitation, the Caribbean program continues to this day. The bracero program, underwhich more than 500,000 Mexican migrant workers labored as late as 1959, came under severe pressure from the U.S. labor movement,and President Lyndon Johnson ended it in 1964. In 1989 there were over 14,000 H-2 workers, as the Caribbean migrant laborers arecalled, from the provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, on America's farms. [ 72 ] The important and fascinating story oftheir American sojourn is still to be properly told, but the telling has begun. [ 73 ]

But the postwar Caribbean immigrant flow to the U.S. suffered a major setback with the passage in 1952 of the Immigration andNationality Act, better known as the McCarran-Walter Act after its congressional pilots, Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada andRepresentative Francis Walter of Pennsylvania. While allowing Caribbean farm workers to enter the U.S. (albeit in drastically reducednumbers), it simultaneously closed off opportunities for virtually every other would-be black immigrant to enter the country. The McCarran-Walter Act decoupled the quota for the colonies in the Western hemisphere from that allocated to the European metropoles. Thus whileBritish Caribbean immigrants could, in theory at least, enter after the 1924 immigration act under the quota for Britain, with the newprovisions they could not and were given individual quotas instead. Colonies in the Caribbean, such as Jamaica, were now given a quota of100 per year, compared with the annual average for the 1940s of about 1,000. [ 74 ] The McCarran-Walter Act was a rigorousreinforcement of the inherent racism of the 1924 law, with continued preference for immigrants from northwestern Europe and even greaterrestrictions on non- European immigration. While allowing Japanese-Americans to become naturalized citizens of the U.S. (the ban that

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prohibited the Chinese from becoming citizens was lifted in 1943), the act placed severe restrictions on Asian immigration. For the vastarea it dubbed the Asia-Pacific Triangle, encompassing over nineteen different territories, it placed a limit of 2,000 per year. China itselfwas allowed an additional 105 (only 5 more than Antigua's allocation) and Japan 185. People of Asian descent who lived outside theTriangle would be allowed into the country only under the quota of their ancestral home. Thus a Brazilian of Japanese descent who wishedto immigrate to the U.S. could only do so under the Japanese quota, regardless of how long ago his ancestors had left Japan. In markedcontrast to the Asian quotas, the U.K., Ireland, and Germany were given two-thirds of the annual international limit of 154,657. In contrastto India's 100 and China's generous 105, the U.K. was allocated 65,351, which it never came close to using up. Representative EmmanuelCeller of New York, who was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, valiantly fought against the racist provisions of the bill, but every oneof his many amendments was defeated. Among them was a proposal that underused quotas should be put in the general pool. It wasroundly rejected, as was his amendment that emigrants from colonies, such as Britain's in the Caribbean, should be allowed to draw uponBritain's unused allocation. There was no obligation on the part of the United States, said Francis Walter, to see that the annual quotaswere always filled. [ 75 ] And that was that.

The law passed despite Harry Truman's presidential veto and opposition from various ethnic organizations whose groups were adverselyaffected by the law, black pressure groups, including the NAACP, and individuals such as Harlem's black Congressman, Adam ClaytonPowell Jr. Powell had also opposed the precursor of the McCarran-Walter Act, the Judd Bill, in 1949. He had behind him the activesupport of Caribbean-Americans, many of whom were his Harlem constituents and longtime supporters. In 1949 they had formed inHarlem the United Caribbean American Council and actively protested against the Judd Bill. Chaired by Augustine Austin and later HughMulzac, with Richard B. Moore as secretary, the group lobbied Congress, submitted a memorandum to the Senate Judiciary Committee,campaigned in the press, and called upon the British Embassy to lend its support. Powell tabled an amendment to remove the colonialrestriction, but it was soundly defeated by a vote of 118 to 19. The Judd Bill easily passed in the House of Representatives, went intocommittee in the Senate and emerged three years later as the McCarran-Walter Bill. [ 76 ] They mobilized again to slay the new monster,this time as the Committee to Act Against the McCarran and Walter Bills, chaired by J. A. Rogers with Moore once again as secretary. [ 77 ] But not even a presidential veto could vanquish the McCarran-Walter Bill.

The law had the desired effect of drastically retarding the rate of Caribbean migration to the U.S. Thousands still came, but overwhelmingthey were close relatives of existing Caribbean residents in the U.S. rather than new immigrants as such. The migration stream was nowdiverted to Britain, which was to receive approximately 300,000 Caribbean immigrants between 1948 and 1966. [ 78 ]

Though its effects were diluted by ad hoc exceptions made to its provisions (for example, President Eisenhower used parole powers toallow thousands of Hungarian refugees to enter in 1956), the McCarran-Walter Act endured, despite continuous talk of reform. But asustained attack, initiated after the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, ended with the defeat of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1965. Apowerful confluence of opposing forces came into play: increasing disgruntlement of employers' organizations, which always want toincrease the pool of laborers earning moderate wages; an organized and increasingly powerful ethnic lobby, comprising Jewish, Italian,Catholic, and black groups, among others. As was the case with the Jim Crow laws and the denial of citizenship rights to black people, theMcCarran-Walter Act was also seen as an unnecessary handicap in the Cold War struggle. It was hardly helpful to American self-image asthe bastion of democracy and fair play when, on its statute books, sat a blatantly racist immigration law in an age of mass immigration. Thisimperative was made abundantly clear by President Truman when he vetoed the bill. In a remarkably strongly worded rebuke, Trumancomplained of the bill“hamper[ing] the efforts we are making to rally the men of east and west alike to the cause of freedom, andintensify[ing] the repressive and inhumane aspects of our immigration procedures.” He welcomed the bill's provision to allow naturalizationregardless of race but deplored the draconian quotas placed on Asian immigration. He spoke of the membership of Italy, Greece andTurkey in the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and their contribution to keeping the peace of the world. “Yet theMcCarran-Walter Bill is saying to their people:

You are less worthy to come to this country than Englishmen or Irishmen; you Italians, who need to find homes abroad in the hundreds ofthousands, you shall have a quota of 5,645; you Greeks, struggling to assist the helpless victims of Communist civil war, you shall have aquota of 308; and you Turks, you are brave defenders of the eastern flank, but you shall have a quota of only 225.

In short, the bill is not a fitting instrument for our foreign policy and a true reflection of the ideals we stand for, at home and abroad.” [ 79 ]

Francis Walter dismissed the president's message, describing it as fictional and amateurish, and he attributed the effort to presidentialghostwriters. He and his supporters easily overrode the president's veto in the House with more than the requisite two-thirds of the votes,gaining 278 against Truman's veto to 113 votes to uphold it. The vote was closer in the Senate (57 to 26), but it, too, was sufficient to killthe veto. [ 80 ] The McCarran-Walter Act would stay on the statute books for more than a decade.

But Lyndon Johnson's and the Democrats' landslide in the 1964 elections cleared the way for reforms. As a senator for Texas, Johnson

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had voted for the McCarran-Walter Act, but as president he behaved differently. Prior to the 1964 elections he had pledged to continuethe work of President Kennedy in reforming the immigration laws of the United States. The balance of forces in the country and Congresswere favorably aligned for change. Many of the more conservative Republicans had been defeated in the election and more liberal-mindedDemocrats took their place and lent support to Johnson's Great Society reform programs. The Democrats now had clear majorities in boththe House (295 to 140) and the Senate (68 to 32). As chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, under whose remit the business ofimmigration policy fell, Celler saw his position strengthened, as the majority of his committee's members were in favor of reform. The samebalance of force in favor of reform existed on the Senate Judiciary Committee under the chairmanship of Philip Hart of Michigan. [ 81 ] An energetic and reforming president, Johnson linked the civil rights legislation (the Civil Rights Act [1964] and the Voting Rights Act[1965] to a new and more just immigration law. But his reform of America's immigration laws were by no means solely driven by domesticconsiderations. On the contrary, the language for reform was almost identical to that of Truman in 1952. Indeed, perhaps even more thanTruman's did, the Johnson administration stressed the importance of immigration reform for the effective conduct of U.S. foreign policy.Johnson's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, made one of the main statements for reform, linking the renovation of the immigration laws to theconduct of foreign affairs. [ 82 ] That Rusk apparently privately wished that the national origins provision of the 1952 law be kept addseven greater support to the weight of America's Cold War struggle in the transformation of its immigration laws. His private doubts weresubordinated to the greater interests of U.S. foreign policy. In his 1964 speech attacking the McCarran-Walter Act, Attorney GeneralRobert Kennedy combined considerations of foreign policy and humanitarianism. The act, he said, was a standing affront to manyAmericans and to many countries. Furthermore, it implied what Americans know from experience to be false:

that regardless of individual qualifications, a man or woman born in Italy, or Greece, or Poland, or Portugal, or Czechoslovakia, or theUkraine, is not as good as someone born in Ireland, or England, or Germany, or Sweden. Everywhere else in our national life, we haveeliminated discrimination based on national origins. Yet, this system is still the foundation of our immigration law. [ 83 ]

Advocates of reform, however, also appealed to naked forms of national self-interest: it would be good for our expanding economy, theysaid. Moreover, the reforms will not mean a significant increase in immigration into the country. Partly because of the extraordinaryeconomic boom that the U.S. economy was experiencing at the time, opposition was muted inside and outside of Congress. The stage wasset and the new immigration bill, the Hart-Celler Act, as it became known, was passed in September 1965.

The 1965 Act and Its Aftermath

The new act got rid of the national origins quota and instead provided a quota of 170,000 visas for the Eastern hemisphere and 120,000for the Western hemisphere. No country would receive more than 20,000 visas per year. But outside of these quotas, the act also providedgreater scope for relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent residents to enter the country. The new act became fully effective on July 1,1968. It marked a major turning point in U.S. immigration legislation and a new wave of immigration from the Caribbean. For those in theBritish Caribbean who sought better opportunities abroad, it was especially welcomed, for beginning in 1962, Britain, the so-called MotherCountry, had started to systematically block the entry of her swarthy children from her former empire with a battery of racist immigrationlaws. Caribbean citizens now headed north to the U.S., from which they had been deprived entry since 1952, rather than east, across theAtlantic to Britain.

In the aftermath of the new act, the growth in American immigration was much greater than the advocates of reform had anticipated. From123,000 for the decade of the 1950s, the number of Caribbean immigrants to America grew to 470,000 for the 1960s. True, the figureswere inflated by the massive flow of those leaving Castro's Cuba, but for Jamaica alone, the number of immigrants jumped more thaneightfold over the period, from less than 9,000 to just under 75,000. Between 1971 and 1980, the Jamaican figure, at almost 140,000,was almost double that of the previous decade. And between 1981 and 1990 a further 208,000 made their way to the U.S., among the872,000 from the Caribbean [ 84 ] .

Reception, Settlement, and Adaptation

Where in the United States did the Caribbean immigrants settle? How were they received and perceived by American society, particularlyby African Americans, among whom they dwelt and worked? How did they react and adapt to life in the United States?

One of the most striking features of the settlement pattern of Caribbean immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century is its widedistribution. Another noteworthy aspect is the relative rapidity with which New York became their primary site of settlement. In 1900Florida had the highest concentration of black immigrants, just under 22 percent of them. New York State followed with 17.3 percent,closely followed by Massachusetts with 17 percent. Every state of the union had black foreigners, including five each in Alaska andNevada, the states with the smallest number. But by the census of 1910, the process of concentration had begun, with New York leadingthe way, with almost one-third (32 percent) of black immigrants residing there. Florida had fallen into second place with 16.3 percent,followed by Massachusetts, which had also lost out, its proportion dropping to just over 15 percent. The concentration in New York

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became even more intense in the following two decades. In 1920 more than 43 percent of black immigrants lived there, rising to 59 percentby 1930 and over 61 percent a decade later. This contrasted sharply with Florida and Massachusetts, the other two most populardestinations. Between 1900 and 1930 the proportion of black immigrants living in Florida fell by more than a half (from 21.8 to 10.5percent); Massachusetts fared only slightly better, with a drop from 17 to 9.1 percent. Indeed, both these states experienced not onlyrelative but absolute decline in their black immigrant population. New York not only attracted the new arrivals in greater numbers, butappears to have served as a magnet for those who had previously resided in other states, with the Southern, Midwestern, and Mountainstates especially losing out. [ 85 ] It was in the 1920s, then, that New York became preeminent as a Caribbean destination, a position itwould maintain for more than half a century.

The explanation for New York's rapid preeminence, though multifaceted, is not hard to find: improved and cheaper transportation from theislands to the city, accompanied by extensive advertising in the islands, [ 86 ] and news reports on immigrant life in the United States (the Jamaica Times was especially attentive to this subject). One immigrant writing in Harlem's Amsterdam News in the 1930s went sofar as to claim, “Seventh and Lenox Avenues were as well known to people in Kingston, Jamaica; Bridgetown, Barbados; Port-of-Spain,Trinidad; and other West Indian capitals, as to the people of Brooklyn. Everybody wanted to get to New York.” [ 87 ] Other factorsspurring immigrants to move to New York included the remittances sent home from relatives and friends in New York, undergirding thenotion that money could be made there. Also, the growing awareness that New York City was one of the safer places to be in the U.S.must have dawned upon those black immigrants scattered over the country, especially after East St. Louis anti-black pogrom of 1917 andthe nationwide clashes between blacks and whites during the Red Summer of 1919. Through sustained chain migration, New York'sCaribbean population increased over the decades. The Bahamians, who constituted by far the majority of islanders in Miami, could nottake advantage of the same process of growth. Many of them were seasonal workers in agriculture and construction. Less literate than theirisland counterparts who went further north, they were disproportionately hit by the literacy test introduced for immigrants in 1917; numbersfell dramatically. [ 88 ]

The reception, perception, reaction, and adaptation of Caribbean immigrants have undergone changes since the migration flow began inearnest at the end of the nineteenth century, but there has also been remarkable continuity. One of the historical and seemingly unavoidableconstants is the perception of the immigrants, because of their skin color, as black. This placed them in the same category as AfricanAmericans and made them subject to the same disadvantages as their American counterparts: racial discrimination and violence, especiallyin the South, and routine humiliation in daily life. There were, however, especially in the Jim Crow South, bizarre exceptions allowed forblack immigrants. Greeted with the words “What you damned niggers want here?” the Trinidadian airman Hubert Julian and the othermembers of his black troupe were, in the end, treated royally at a Texas gas station and roadhouse in 1931. Julian and his group hadpassed themselves off as Ethiopians, which was enough to secure a wonderful meal for them, as well as gas for their car. During the meal,the Texan racist denounced local niggers, but let it be known to Julian's party, “you royalty folks is fine.” The teenaged Sidney Poitier wasdealt with leniently by the racist Miami police, once they realized he was a black foreigner. At a drive-in hamburger joint near Fort Benning,a black Vietnam veteran and army officer was quizzed by the waitress: “Are you Puerto Rican?” “Are you an African student?” The yearwas 1963. Colin Powell answered no to both questions. “I'm a Negro. I'm an American. And I'm an Army officer.” He was refusedservice and invited to go to the Jim Crow window at the back of the restaurant. [ 89 ] As I have argued elsewhere, “Any foreign accent,the sound of a little Spanish or French, the sight of a turban or a fez—anything suggesting, ‘Here is a foreign Negro,’ generally carried in itswake relative leniency.” [ 90 ]

But their nationality, especially in the South, could also bring special negative attention to Caribbean immigrants. In Miami, they were seenby the authorities as troublemakers. And as early as 1908 one of the city's judges praised the Miami police for altering the views of“Nassau Negroes who upon arrival here consider themselves the social equal of white people.” [ 91 ] In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klantargeted them, especially the supporters of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In 1921 the Klankidnapped the vice president of Cocoanut Grove's UNIA branch, Rev. R. H. Higgs, and released him only after he promised to go back tohis native Bahamas. A sympathetic white minister of a largely Caribbean congregation was also kidnapped by the Klan, beaten, tarred andfeathered, told to leave town, and thrown out of speeding car. He left. [ 92 ]

Each generation of Caribbean immigrant has expressed shock at encountering American racism. [ 93 ] And the horror frequently led totheir radicalization in the U.S. Many have figured prominently in radical and dissenting movements, stretching from the eighteenth century tothe present. [ 94 ] But others, though relatively few in number, have also been broken by the encounter, literally driven mad by Americanracism, some even driven to suicide. [ 95 ] Their relationship with Afro-Americans has drawn much scholarly attention. But on balance,the literature has overstated tensions at the expense of a genuine collaboration that also existed. [ 96 ] There was undoubtedly tension,especially during the Garvey Must Go campaign of 1922-23, and tension between these two elements of the African Diaspora still exists.But there has also been remarkable level of collaboration and cooperation between the two groups. Afro-Americans and Afro-Caribbeansmarried one another, shared their culture (including cuisine, music, and sartorial tastes), learned to live with one another in the most denselypopulated place on earth (Harlem in the 1920s), and joined forces, shoulder to shoulder, in the various political movements to fight racist

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and class oppression. Largely confined to the petty bourgeois and professionals of both groups, the tensions that did exist abatedsignificantly during the common calamity experienced by Caribbeans and Afro-Americans during the Depression. The new postwar waveof immigration also brought tensions, but as in previous generations, collaboration, especially during the Civil Rights struggle, once againcame to the fore, with Caribbean figures such as Stokely Carmichael playing a leading role in the struggle.

Conclusion: Change and Continuity

There are interesting lines of continuity and discontinuity between the recent immigrants and the earlier cohorts. With the exception ofCubans, Caribbean immigrants have made New York State and New York City their primary destinations and sites of settlement in theU.S. Cubans, in continuity with trends established as long ago as the 1870s, have made Florida, and Miami in particular, their primaryhome in the U.S. New York City, however, has maintained its preeminent position over the generations. By 1980 it was the home to morethan half of the Barbadian, Guyanese, Haitian, Jamaican, and Trinidadian immigrants living in the country. Unlike their prewar compatriots,these immigrants make their home in Brooklyn and Queens, rather than Harlem. For those from the Dominican Republic, the proportion iseven higher: threequarters of them now live in New York. [ 97 ] But Florida, especially over the last two decades, has grown increasinglypopular among Haitian and Jamaican immigrants, with more of the latter opting for Fort Lauderdale over Miami. Perhaps the most strikingfeature of the settlement pattern of Caribbean immigrants over the last decade is its greater dispersal. From 1920 to the 1980s, the majorityof black immigrants to the U.S. made New York their destination. Since then, they have not. Jamaican immigrants, historically the largestgroup from the Englishspeaking Caribbean, now generally head for other places. By 2001, less than a third of them made their way to NewYork City—5,059 out of 15,393. To be sure, New York still attracts by far the largest group of Jamaican immigrants, but no longer themajority of them. [ 98 ]

The preponderance of females among Caribbean immigrants, what Aubrey Bonnet called the female skew, has drawn considerableattention from anthropologists and sociologists over the last two decades. [ 99 ] But the argument that this sexual imbalance is a newphenomenon, one beginning in the 1970s, is false. As I have shown elsewhere, female migrants outnumbered male migrants from theCaribbean as long ago as 1918, and this trend has continued ever since. [ 100 ] And by 1940, not only did Caribbean female immigrantsoutnumber their male counterparts in New York State; they also did so in New York City and Miami, the two largest urban settlements ofblack immigrants in the U.S. [ 101 ] The present pattern, then, is one of continuity, not change; there is nothing new to the female skew. Itis true, however, that given the postwar preference for female immigrant workers, especially nurses and domestic workers, Caribbeanwomen have frequently found it easier to obtain American visas than their male counterparts. This has in many instances strengthened thehand of Caribbean women in the domestic sphere, since they are now in a position to sponsor the emigration of their spouses and childrenfrom the Caribbean. [ 102 ]

What of the class and occupational profiles of the immigrants? The evidence suggests that, at least since 1960, the proportion ofprofessionals among Caribbean immigrants has declined overall. Between 1962 and 1964, 23.2 percent of Jamaican immigrants wereprofessional and technical workers. By contrast, those who came to the U.S. between 1975 and 1979 had only 14.4 percent in thiscategory. The decrease in the proportion of those categorized as professional and technical workers typifies the migration stream overrecent decades. The explanation is not hard to find because the number of those immigrating to the U.S. as relatives of citizens orpermanent residents has increased at a much faster rate than those immigrating under the preference scheme for professionals. Indeed, in1970 this later category accounted for only 2.7 percent of all immigrants to the U.S. By 1980 it had fallen to 1.5 percent. By contrast,those entering under the relatives preference scheme had risen from 25 percent in 1970 to 41 percent by 1980. [ 103 ] The patternpersists. Of the 726 Barbadians who immigrated to the U.S. in 1998, only 72 of them, or 10 percent, came under the employmentpreference scheme; for Jamaicans, it was 649 out of 15,146 (or 4.3 percent); for Haitians, the figure was 225 out 13,449 (or 1.7 percent);for those from the Dominican Republic, it was 265 out of 20,387 (or 1.3 percent). [ 104 ] The rigorous sifting to which the earliercohorts of Caribbeans (and other immigrants) were subjected no longer applied. The full implications of these changes for the Caribbeanpopulation in the U.S. still need to be fully explored. [ 105 ]

Bibliography

General Works

Books

Bryce-Laporte, Roy, and Delores Mortimer, eds. Caribbean Immigrants to the United States, 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.:Smithsonian Institution, 1983.

Foner, Nancy, ed. Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

James, Winston. Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America. London and

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New York: Verso, 1998.

Kasinitz, Philip. Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.

McKay, Claude. Harlem: Negro Metropolis. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940.

Palmer, Ransford, ed. In Search of a Better Life: Perspectives on Migration from the Caribbean (New York: Praeger Publishers,1990.

Palmer, Ransford. Pilgrims from the Sun: West Indian Migration to America. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.

Rahming, Melvin. The Evolution of the West Indian's Image in the Afro-American Novel. Millwood, N.Y.: Associated FacultyPress, 1986.

Reid, Ira. The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics and Social Adjustment, 1899-1937. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1939.

Sutton, Constance, and Elsa Chaney, eds. Caribbean Life in New York City: Social and Cultural Dimensions. New York: Centerfor Migration Studies, 1987.

Vickerman, Milton. Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race . New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Waters, Mary. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1999.

Watkins-Owens, Irma, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 . Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1996.

Essays

Bryce-Laporte, Roy. “Black Immigrants: The Experience of Invisibility and Inequality.” Journal of Black Studies 3, no. 1 (September1972).

Butcher, Kristin. “Black Immigrants in the United States: A Comparison with Native Blacks and Other Immigrants.” Industrial andLabor Relations Review 47, no. 2 (January 1994).

Foner, Nancy. “West Indians in New York City and London: A Comparative Analysis.” International Migration Review 13, no. 2(summer 1979).

——. “Sex Roles and Sensibilities: Jamaican Women in New York and London,” in International Migration: The Female Experience, ed. Rita Simon and Caroline Brettell. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld, 1986.

Hellwig, David. “Black Meets Black: Afro-American Reactions to West Indian Immigrants in the 1920s.” South Atlantic Quarterly J77, no. 2 (spring 1978).

Holder, Calvin. “The Rise of the West Indian Politician in New York City, 900–1952.” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 4, no. (January 1980).

——. “The Causes and Composition of West Indian Immigration to New York ity,1900– 1952.” Afro-Americans in New York Lifeand History 11, no. 2 (January 1987).

——. “Making Ends Meet: West Indian Economic Adjustment in New York City, 1900– 1952.” Wadabagei: A Journal of theCaribbean and its Diaspora 1, no. 1 (winter/spring 1998).

James, Winston. “Explaining Afro-Caribbean Social Mobility in the United States: Beyond the Sowell Thesis.” Comparative Studies inSociety and History 44, no. 2 (April 2002).

Johnson, Howard. “Bahamian Labor Migration to Florida in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” InternationalMigration Review 22, no. 1 (spring 1988).

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Kalmijn, Matthijs. “The Socioeconomic Assimilation of Caribbean American Blacks.” Social Forces 74, no. 3 (March 1996).

Model, Suzanne. “Caribbean Immigrants: A Black Success Story?” International Migration Review 25, no. 2 (1991).

——. “West Indian Prosperity: Fact or Fiction?” Social Problems 42, no. 4 (November 1995).

Mohl, Raymond. “Black Immigrants: Bahamians in Early Twentieth-Century Miami.” Florida Historical Quarterly 65 no. 3 (January1987).

Palmer, Ransford. “Decade of West Indian Migration to the United States: An Economic Analysis,” Social and Economic Studies 23,no. 4 (December 1974).

Sowell, Thomas. “Three Black Histories,” in Essays and Data on American Ethnic Groups, ed. Thomas Sowell. Washington, D.C.:The Urban Institute, 1978.

Autobiographies

By those born or raised in the Caribbean

Carmichael, Stokely, with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (KwameTure). New York: Scribner, 2003.

Chisholm, Shirley. Unbought and Unbossed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1970.

Ferguson, Ira Lunan. I Dug Graves at Night to Attend College by Day: An Autobiography, vol. 1, New York: Theo. Gaus' Sons,1968; vols. 2 and 3, San Francisco: The Lunan-Ferguson Library, 1969, 1970.

Jack, Hulan. Fifty Years A Democrat: The Autobiography of Hulan Jack. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1980.

McKay, Claude. A Long Way From Home. New York: Lee Furman, 1937.

Makonnen, Ras, as recorded and edited by Kenneth King. Pan-Africanism from Within. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Mulzac, Hugh, as told to Louis Burnham and Norval Welch. A Star to Steer By. New York: International Publishers, 1963.

Poitier, Sidney. This Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.

——. The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000.

Somerville, J. Alexander. Man of Colour: An Autobiography. Los Angeles: Lorrin L. Morrison, 1949.

Staupers, Mabel Keaton. No Time for Prejudice: A Story of the Integration of Negroes in Nursing in the United States. NewYork: Macmillan, 1961.

Walter, John C. The Harlem Fox J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920–1970. Albany: State University of New York Press,1989.

Williams, Eric. Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister. London: Andre Deutsch, 1969.

Autobiographies by those of Caribbean parentage

Guinier, Lani. Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback Into a New Vision of Social Justice. New York: Simon andSchuster, 1998.

Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way. 1933, reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1990.

Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. 1982, reprint: Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, 1994.

Motley, Constance Baker. Equal Justice under Law: An Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Powell, Colin, with Joseph Persico. My American Journey. New York: Random House, 1995.

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X, Malcolm, with the assistance of Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

Footnotes:

1.

Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted, 2nd ed. (1951; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973).

2.

John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), xvii.

3.

Of all the studies of American immigration, Maldwyn Jones's, published in 1960, has by far the greatest claim to comprehensiveness oftreatment. This is true both in terms of its historical range and the width of its coverage of the different groups of immigrants, including non-Europeans. His is the only general study to address the migration and presence of Caribbeans in the United States before the SecondWorld War. It may not be merely coincidental that Jones is not an American, but a man from the margins, a Welshman based in Britain.Unfortunately, Jones's study, despite its erudition and elegant prose, is little known and seldom referred to. See Maldwyn Jones, American Immigration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

4.

Roy Bryce-Laporte, “Black Immigrants: The Experience of Invisibility and Inequality,” Journal of Black Studies 3, no. 1 (September1972): 30; also see Bryce-Laporte, “Black Immigrants,” in Through Different Eyes: Black and White Perspectives on American RaceRelations, ed. Peter Rose, Stanley Rothman, and William Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 44–47; Ira Reid, TheNegro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics and Social Adjustment, 1899-1937 (New York: Columbia University Press,1939).

5.

Thus the absence of any mention of black immigration in a recent forum on American immigration in the nation's premier history journal isnot surprising; it is par for the course. See “People in Motion, Nation in Question: The Case of Twentieth-Century America,” Journal ofAmerican History 84, no. 2 (September 1997): 524–80. Of course, Reid's work is not mentioned in Bodnar's book. After all, heignored the subject of the Negro Immigrant, and so Reid's book does not even make the bibliography. More surprising is the absenceof any reference to Reid in Handlin's The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis (New York: AnchorBooks, 1962), a pauper's fare compared to The Uprooted because there Handlin mentions West Indians. Once again Maldwyn Jonesbettered his American counterparts. He had read Reid and incorporated his key findings. Indeed, he explicitly recognized Reid's work as apioneering study of foreign-born Negroes (Jones, American Immigration, 340). Roy Bryce-Laporte, himself a pioneer and enabler ofresearch on black migration to the United States, has written a fine essay on the trailblazing role of Ira Reid (see Bryce-Laporte, “ACelebration in Perspective: Legacies of Ira Reid and Furthering the Study of Caribbean Immigrants to the United States,” Wadabagei: AJournal of the Caribbean and Its Diaspora 1, no. 1 [winter/spring 1998]). Martin Kilson also discusses Reid (who was one of hisformer teachers at Lincoln University) and his work in a monumental forthcoming study, The Making of Black Intellectuals: Studies onthe African-American Intelligentsia. I thank Professor Kilson for sharing this work with me.

6.

The best general treatment of the subject are: David Reimers, Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America, 2nd ed.(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) and Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait, 2nd ed.(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

7.

See in particular, Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), passim; Jack P. Greene, “Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection,” in Imperatives,Behaviors and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 68–86;Daniel C. Littlefield, “The Colonial Slave Trade to South Carolina: A Profile,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 91, no. 2 (April1990); Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton &

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Company, 1975), esp. pp. 303–07, 327; Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies,1624-1713 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 110–16; and Richard Dunn, “The English Sugar Islands and the Founding of SouthCarolina,” in Shaping Southern Society: The Colonial Experience, T. H. Breen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); PhilipMorgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1998), 2–3; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

8.

Peter Wood, Black Majority, 32–34; Betty Wood, The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the EnglishColonies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 65; and Greene, “Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection,” passim.

9.

Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 3; Littlefield, “The Slave Trade to Colonial South Carolina,” 69–71.

10.

Greene, Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection; see also William Smyth, Blacks and the South Carolina Interstate andWest Indian Exposition, South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 88, no. 4, October 1987.

11.

Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey,1613-1863 (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1999), 77–78; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 7–49. The Commercial connections between the Caribbean andNew York in this period are analyzed in Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 118–37, while Richard Pares, Yankees and Creoles: The Trade between North Americaand the West Indies before the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956) is especially good on theNew England-Caribbean connection.

12.

Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, rev. ed. (Amherst:University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 202–03; cf. James Horton, Free People of Color: Inside the African AmericanCommunity (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 42, who declares that Hall was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, in1748.

13.

Horton, Free People of Color, 26–27. In 1638 the first group of black slaves/servants was brought to Boston from the Caribbean, thusbecoming the first black inhabitants of the city. Horton, Free People of Color, 25; Pares, Yankees and Creoles, documents theextraordinarily strong commercial ties between Barbados and Boston in the colonial era.

14.

Bureau of Census, Negro Population of the United States, 1790-1915 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office 1918), 61.

15.

Thomas Wenworth Higginson, Black Rebellion: Five Slave Revolts (1889; New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 107.

16.

See John Lofton, Insurrection in South Carolina: The Turbulent World of Denmark Vesey (Yellow Springs, Ohio: The AntiochPress, 1964); Douglas Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1999); DavidRobertson, Denmark Vesey: The Buried History of America's Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It (New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 1999); and David Pearson, Designs against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of1822 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

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17.

Recent scholarship goes against the accepted notion that Russwurm was the first black person to graduate from an American college. Atleast one authoritative source now suggests that he may have in fact been the third black person to so graduate, for Edward Jones receivedhis B.A. degree from Amherst College two weeks before Russwurm's graduation, and Alexander L. Twilight graduated from MiddleburyCollege [in Vermont] in 1823. Clarence G. Contee Sr., John Brown Russwurm, in Dictionary of American Negro Biography, ed.Rayford Logan and Michael Winston (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 538; cf. Carter G. Woodson and Charles Wesley, The Negroin Our History, 12th ed. (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1972), 269–70. There is no scholarly biography of Russwurm, butsee William M. Brewer, “John Brown Russwurm,” Journal of Negro History, January 1928, and Mary Sagarin, John BrownRusswurm: The Story of Freedom's Journal, Freedom's Journey (New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1970).

18.

A. M. Wendell Malliet, “Some Prominent West Indians,” Opportunity (November 1926), 350; Carter G. Woodson and Charles H.Wesley, The Negro in Our History, 12th ed. ([Washington, D.C.]: Associated Publishers, 1972), 144–45.

19.

Campbell penned a vivid and engaging report of his trip to Africa, A Pilgrimage to My Motherland: An Account of a Journey amongthe Egbas and Yorubas of Central Africa in 1859-60 (1861). In the final passage of his report he struck a blow on behalf of hisMotherland against her detractors. “There is certainly,” he wrote, “no more industrious people any where, and I challenge all the worldbesides to produce a people more so, or capable of as much endurance. Those who believe, among other foolish things, that the Negro isaccustomed lazily to spend his time basking in the sunshine, like black-snakes or alligators, should go and see the people they malign. Thereare, doubtless, among them, as among every other race, not excepting the Anglo-American, indolent people, but this says nothing moreagainst the one than the other.” Campbell's report, along with that of Martin Delany ( Official Report of the Niger Valley ExploringParty [1861]), is reprinted in Howard Bell, ed., Search for a Place: Black Separatism and Africa, 1860 (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1969). Campbell's remark comes from page 248 of this edition of the report.

20.

The most authoritative and detailed biographical portrait of Campbell is provided by R. J. M. Blackett, Beating against the Barriers:The Lives of Six Nineteenth-Century Afro-Americans (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1986), 139–82. Campbell, alongwith Russwurm and others, is also discussed in Winston James, “The Wings of Ethiopia: The Caribbean Diaspora and Pan-AfricanProjects. From John Brown Russwurm to George Padmore,” in African Diasporas: Consciousness and Imagination, ed. GenevièveFabre, Benedicte Alliot, and Klaus Benesch (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003).

21.

Elliott claimed that he was born in Boston of Jamaican parents and attended school in England and Jamaica. His biographer, however,thinks he was probably born in Liverpool. But this in itself, given the strong and long connection between Liverpool and Jamaica, does notpreclude Jamaican antecedence. Peggy Lamson, The Glorious Failure: Black Congressman Robert Brown Elliott and theReconstruction in South Carolina, (New York: Norton 1973), esp. chap. 1; see also Thomas Holt, Black over White: NegroPolitical Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977) for more on the widercontext of Elliott's career.

22.

D. Augustus Straker, Reflections on the Life and Times of Toussaint L'Ouverture (Columbus, S.C., 1886); Straker, The New SouthInvestigated (Detroit: Ferguson Company, 1888); Straker, A Trip to the Windward Islands; or Then and Now (Detroit: James H.Stone and Co., 1896); Straker, Negro Suffrage in the South (Detroit: privately published, 1906); Dorothy Hawkshawe, “DavidAugustus Straker, Black Lawyer and Reconstruction Politician, 1842-1908” (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1974) Glenn O.Philips, “The Response of a West Indian Activist: D. A. Straker, 1842-1908,” Journal of Negro History 66, no.2 (summer 1981).

23.

The most detailed and informed portrait of Matzeliger's life and work is Sidney Kaplan's extraordinary feat of historical recovery andanalysis: “Jan Earnst Matzeliger and the Making of the Shoe,” Journal of Negro History (January 1955); reprinted in Sidney Kaplan, American Studies in Black and White: Selected Essay, 1949-1989 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991).

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24.

Hollis Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

25.

Harold Lewis, Yet with a Steady Beat: The African American Struggle for Recognition in the Episcopal Church (Valley Forge:Trinity Press International, 1996), 89.

26.

Details on Benjamin are drawn from William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (Cleveland: Geo. M. Rewell& Co. 1887), 991–94; Arnold H. Taylor, R[obert] C[harles] O['Hara] Benjamin, in Logan and Winston, eds., Dictionary of AmericanNegro Biography, 39–40; and in particular George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, andLegal Lynchings (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 67, 296–97. Further details on the lives of many of thosementioned here may be gleaned from Simmons, Men of Mark; Logan and Winston, eds., Dictionary of American Negro Biography; J. A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color vol. 2 ([1947] New York: Collier Books 1972); Woodson and Wesley, The Negro in OurHistory . For Crogman's relation to the American Negro Academy see Alfred A. Moss, Jr., The American Negro Academy: Voice ofthe Talented Tenth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).

27.

Harold Lewis has recently drawn attention to the remarkable role of Caribbeans in the Episcopa Church in the United States. Though wellunder 1 percent of the American black population at the time, between the Civil War and the First World War, some 45 percent of theblack clergy in the Church in the US was born in the Caribbean. The tradition continues to the present. He estimates that as recently as themid 1990s, a third of the black clergy was born in the islands. He pointed out that the proportion would have been significantly higher ifthose of Caribbean descent (as opposed to those of Caribbean birth) were counted. Lewis, Yet with a Steady Beat, 86–108 .

28.

Hubert Harrison in Pittsburgh Courier, January 29, 1927; see also William Ferris, in Pittsburgh Courier, January 28 and February4, 1928.

29.

For the political background to and impact of immigration restrictions, see Jones, American Immigration, chaps. 9 and 10; and JohnHigham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1970), esp. chaps. 7–11.

30.

For Bahamian migration to South Florida, see Howard Johnson, The Bahamas in Slavery and Freedom (Kingston: Ian RandlePublishers, 1991), chaps. 9 and 10; Johnson, The Bahamas: From Slavery to Servitude, 1783-1933 (Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 1996), chap. 9; Raymond A. Mohl, “Black Immigrants: Bahamians in Early Twentieth-Century Miami,” Florida HistoricalQuarterly , 65, no. 3 (January 1987); Paul S. George, “Colored Town: Miami's Black Community, 1896-1930,” Florida HistoricalQuarterly 56, no. 4 (April 1978); and Marvin Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,1997). For Afro-Cubans, see James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, chap. 8; and Susan Greenbaum, More Than Black:Afro-Cubans in Tampa (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).

31.

Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, 2nd. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 131; Amsterdam News, March5, 1938.

32.

James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, Table 1.4, p. 359.

33.

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Ibid., 16–17.

34.

Quoted in ibid., 42.

35.

These matters are discussed in detail in James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, chap. 1.

36.

C. L. R. James, “Discovering Literature in Trinidad,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, no. 7 (July 1969): 75.

37.

James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, 38–41.

38.

Quoted in Velma Newton, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850-1914 (Kingston: Institute of Social andEconomic Research, University of the West Indies, 1984), 131.

39.

Quoted in David McCullough, The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1977), 546. See also Newton, Silver Men, 119–30, 139–59; Elizabeth McLean Petras, Jamaican Labor Migration: WhiteCapital and Black Labor, 1850-1930 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), 71–75, 187–203.

40.

Claude McKay, “Peasants' Ways O' Thinkin',” Daily Gleaner, January 27, 1912.

41.

Newton, The Silver Men; Bonham Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, 1900-1920 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,1985).

42.

Anthony DeV. Phillips, Modernizing Barbados, 1880-1914 (Bridgetown: Ancestor Press, 1996), 13; Cecilia A. Karch, “The Transportand Communications Revolution in the West Indies: Imperial Policy and Barbadian Response, 1870-1917,” Journal of CaribbeanHistory 18, no. 2 (1983). Clapham Junction, located in London, was and is the busiest and most densely networked railway intersectionin Britain.

43.

Ras Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from Within (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1973); Hugh Mulzac, A Star to Steer By (NewYork: International Publishers, 1963); Richardson, Panama Money in arbados; Alan Cobley, “‘Far From Home’: The Origins andSignificance of the Afro-Caribbean Community in South Africa to 1930,” Journal of Southern African Studies 18, no. 2 (1992).

44.

B. W. Higman, “Jamaican Port Towns in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in theAtlantic World, 1650-1850, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); and WilsonRandolph Bartlett, “Lorenzo Dow Baker and the Development of the Banana Trade between Jamaica and the United States, 1881-1890”(Ph.D. diss., American University, 1977).

45.

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There is a growing body of literature on this subject, but see in particular Raymond T. Smith, Kinship and Class in the West Indies: AGenealogical Study of Jamaica and Guyana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Elizabeth Thomas-Hope, Explanation in Caribbean Migration: Perception and Image—Jamaica, Barbados, St. Vincent (London: Macmillan Press, 1992).

46.

Calculated from Newton, Silver Men, Table XI, p. 96.

47.

The literature on the subject has grown dramatically over the last two decades. For some of the best analyses in English, see FranklinKnight, “Jamaican Migrants and the Cuban Sugar Industry, 1900-1934,” in, Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-SpeakingCaribbean in the Nineteenth Century, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Frank Moya Pons and Stanley Engerman (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1985); Philippe I. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); “Ethnicity, Class and the State in Central America,” special issue of Cimarrón (vol. 2,nos. 1–2, spring/summer 1989); Trevor Purcell, Banana Fallout: Class, Color, and Culture among West Indians in Costa Rica (LosAngeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 1993); Aviva Chomsky, West Indian Workers andthe United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Edmund Gordon, Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African-Nicaraguan Community (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); MarcMcLeod, “Undesirable Aliens: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in the Comparison of Haitian and British West Indian Immigrant Workersin Cuba, 1912-1939,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 3 (1998): 599–623; McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens: Haitian and British WestIndian Immigrant Workers in Cuba, 1898 to 1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2000); Lara Putnam, The Company TheyKept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2002).

48.

Wood, Black Majority, xiv; Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake andLowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 79.

49.

During the centenary celebration of the Statue of Liberty, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture mounted a fine exhibition tocounter the dominant narrative of Ellis Island. See the exhibition's catalogue, Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor...? Voluntary BlackMigration to the United States (New York: Schomburg Center, 1986); also see James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia formore on the pattern of the migration and some its consequences along with photographic evidence of the existence of black Ellis Islanders;I discussed some of these questions at greater length in “Visible But Unseen: Afro-Caribbean Migration and Ellis Island,” paper presentedto New Jersey Council for History Education conference Ellis Island: First Steps to Freedom and Frustration, Ellis IslandImmigration Museum, March 23, 1998.

50.

Bryce-Laporte, “Black Immigrants: The Experience of Invisibility and Inequality,” 31.

51.

Ibid..

52.

Amsterdam News, March 5, 1938.

53.

For more biographical information, see James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia; Mulzac, A Star to Steer By; Kent Worcester, C. L. R. James: A Political Biography (Albany: State University of New York, 1996); J. R. Hooker, Black Revolutionary: GeorgePadmore's Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976); Hulan Jack, Fifty Years a Democrat:The Autobiography of Hulan E. Jack (New York: Benjamin Franklin House, 1982); John C. Walter, The Harlem Fox: J. RaymondJones and Tammany, 1920-1970 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Sidney Poitier, This Life (New York: Alfred

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Knopf, 1980); Calvin Holder, “The Rise of the West Indian Politician in New York City, 1900-1952,” Afro-Americans in New YorkLife and History 4, no. 1 (January 1980); Mabel Keaton Staupers, No Time for Prejudice: A Story of the Integration of Negroes inNursing in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1961); Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict andCooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean NewYork: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).

54.

For more details, see Winston James, “Explaining Afro-Caribbean Social Mobility in the United States: Beyond the Sowell Thesis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 2 (April 2002).

55.

Reid, The Negro Immigrant, 121. Cf. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York:Pantheon Books, 1976), where a radically different pattern of occupational distribution is given for 1925; but see discussion of Gutman'sfindings below.

56.

J. C. Walter and J. L. Ansheles, The Role of the Caribbean Immigrant in the Harlem Renaissance, Afro-Americans in New York Lifeand History, vol. 1, no.1, January 1977, pp. 51–52. Walter and Ansheles accept, perhaps a little too uncritically, Who's Who inColored America as a guide to black people of distinction. The guides early issues certainly kept out many black radical intellectualsregardless of how outstanding they were. In the late 1930s, Charles Johnson, the distinguished African-American sociologist, noted that Who's Who in Colored America was the most extensive compilation of biographical sketches of black people of merit in the country.But in carrying out his own study of black college graduates, the guide, he said, cannot, for many reasons, be regarded as wholly adequatefor the purpose at hand. Who's Who in Colored America, he adjudged, does not contain all of the outstanding Negroes, and it includesmany who are not. He did conclude, however, that it does contain most of the distinguished individuals of the race who are now living, andit is an exceptionally useful index to the relationship of such persons to their communities. Charles S. Johnson, The Negro CollegeGraduate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938), pp. 345–346. Also see Malliet, Some Prominent West Indians, p.351; and Alfred E. Smith, West Indian on the Campus, Opportunity, August 1933.

57.

See Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration, 1925 to 1928.

58.

Jones, American Immigration, 279–80.

59.

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1998 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2000), Table 2, pp. 20–21. This publication is hereafter abbreviated as INS, StatisticalYearbook, 1998 .

60.

David J. Hellwig, Black Leaders and United States Immigration Policy, 1917-1929, Journal of Negro History 66, no. 2 (summer1981): 113; Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press,1983), 413–14.

61.

Booker T. Washington to New York World, January 2, 1915 (published in that newspaper on January 6, 1915); reprinted in Louis R.Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 13 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp.209–10. Also see Washington's telegram to Whitefield McKinlay, Jan. 3, 1915, in ibid., p. 213.

62.

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Harlan and Smock, eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 13, pp. 213–15 and 220; Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 414–15.

63.

Harlan and Smock, Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 13, pp. 216–17.

64.

W. A. Domingo, “Restricted West Indian Immigration and the American Negro,” Opportunity (October 1924): 299.

65.

Quoted in Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 416. Also see letter of thanks from William H. Walcott to Washington, in Harlan and Smock,eds., Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 13, pp. 222–23.

66.

INS, Statistical Yearbook, 1998, Table 2, pp. 20–21. Unfortunately, the breakdown of these figures on the basis of color is notavailable for all of these years.

67.

Ibid.

68.

Terry McCoy and Charles Wood, Caribbean Workers in the Florida Sugar Cane Industry, Occasional Paper No. 2 (Gainesville:Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida, 1982), 6–8, and Cindy Hahamovitch, “‘In America Life Is Given Away’:Jamaican Farmworkers and the Making of Agricultural Immigration Policy,” in The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State:Political Histories of Rural America, ed. Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,2001), 158.

69.

Hahamovitch, “‘In America Life Is Given Away,’” 146–55; and my own conversations over the years with Lambert Keise and ClestonTaylor, two Jamaicans who partook in the scheme and later, in the 1950s, migrated to Britain.

70.

It appears that the deduction from gross earnings was even higher during the war but settled down around 23 percent in the postwar years.See Ken Post, Strike the Iron: A Colony at War Jamaica, 1939- 1945, vol. 2 (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981), 345, inwhich he spoke of a $1.00 deduction from a daily pay of $3.00 or less. For the postwar rates of deduction see, McCoy and Wood, Caribbean Workers, 14; Nancy Foner and Richard Napoli, “Jamaican and Black-American Migrant Farm Workers: A ComparativeAnalysis,” Social Problems 25, no. 5 (June 1978): 494–95; and Palmer, Pilgrims from the Sun, 47.

71.

Fay Clarke Johnson, Soldiers of the Soil (New York: Vantage Press, 1995), 100.

72.

McCoy and Wood, Caribbean Workers, 6, and Palmer, Pilgrims from the Sun, 45.

73.

Foner and Napoli, “Jamaican and Black-American Farm Workers”; McCoy and Wood, Caribbean Workers; Post, Strike the Iron, vol. 2, passim; Johnson, Soldiers of the Soil; Hahamovitch, “‘In America Life is Given Away.”’

74.

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Reimers, Still the Golden Door, 19.

75.

A good summary of the provisions of the law and the debate over it may be gleaned from Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1952(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952), 154–60.

76.

Reimers, still the Golden Door, 19 and 268n27; Joyce Moore Turner, “Richard B. Moore and His Works,” in Richard B. Moore,Caribbean Militant in Harlem: Collected Writings, 1920-1972, ed. W. Burghardt Turner and Joyce Moore Turner (Bloomington:Indiawn University Press, 1988), who mistakenly claimed that the Judd Bill wad defeated.

77.

Turner, “Richard B. Moore and His Works,”87.

78.

The most systematic analysis of the postwar migration to Britain is Ceri Peach, West Indian Migration to Britain: A Social Geography (London: Oxford University Press, 1968).

79.

For the full text of the president's message, see Congressional Record, 82nd Congress, 2nd Session, June 25, 1952, pp. 8082–85.

80.

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1952, 159.

81.

Reimers, Still the Golden Door, 65–66.

82.

Ibid., 66–67.

83.

Quoted in Reimers, Still the Golden Door, 67.

84.

INS, Statistical Yearbook, 1998, Table 2.

85.

Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government PrintingOffice, 1904), Table 6, p. 112; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920-32 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), Table 10, p. 23; U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940 - Population: Characteristics of the Nonwhite Population by Race (Washington,D.C. Government Printing Office, 1943), Table 1, p. 5.

86.

A perusal of the pages of the newspapers of two of the major sources of the immigrants, Jamaica and Barbados, reveals extensiveadvertising in Jamaica's Daily Gleaner and Jamaica Times, as well as in the Barbados Globe and the Barbados AgriculturalReporter during this period.

87.

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New York Amsterdam News, July 10, 1937; quoted in Calvin Holder, “The Causes and Composition of West Indian Immigration toNew York City, 1900-1952,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 11, no. 2 (January 1987): 9.

88.

Howard Johnson, The Bahamas from Slavery to Servitude, 1783-1939 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), chap. 9;James, “Explaining Afro-Caribbean Social Mobility,” 232–33.

89.

John Peer Nugent, The Black Eagle (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 83–85, quotation from p. 83; Sidney Poitier, This Life (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 46; Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), 107–08, quotation fromp. 108.

90.

James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, 86.

91.

Quoted in Paul. S. George, “Colored Town: Miami's Black Community, 1896-1930,” Florida Historical Quarterly 56, no. 4 (April1978), 444.

92.

Robert Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 3 (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1984), 512–15; Paul S. George, “Criminal Justice in Miami, 1896-1930” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1975),185–97.

93.

See James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, esp. chap. 3, and references therein for the responses of the early-twentieth-centurycohort of immigrants; and for those of the most recent cohort, see Milton Vickerman, Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 3; Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams andAmerican Realities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 5.

94.

See James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, passim.

95.

This is an important dimension of the black immigrant story that is yet to be told. For some instructive and moving cases of collapse inpersonality among some of these immigrants, see Reid, Negro Immigrant, 198–200; Constance Baker Motley, Equal Justice underLaw: An Autobiography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 15–16. Baker Motley, whose parents were immigrants fromNevis, was born and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. She paints a rich and insightful potrait of this immigrant world in the early part ofthe twentieth century. Reid suggests that insanity and suicide were more common among the black immigrants of middle-class background,especially those from the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean, than among their working-class counterparts. In his study of blackHarlem in the early 1960s, Kenneth Clark found that while the black suicide rate in Harlem was below that for New York as a whole, inthe more middle-class sections of Harlem, including Morningside Heights and Strivers' Row, the rate was more than twice that of the city.Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 84–86.

96.

Harold Cruse's influential The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1967) remains the locusclassicus of the tension thesis. I have expressed my demurral elsewhere: James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia , 262–91,which also points to others with similar misgivings about Cruse's argument.

97.

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James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, chap. 8; Nadia H. Youssef, The Demographics of Immigration: A Socio-Demographic Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in New York State (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1992), 62–65;INS, Statistical Yearbook, 1998, Table 19, pp. 63–64.

98.

New York's 5,059 was followed by Fort Lauderdale's 2,110; Miami's 1,040, with the next major destination being the West Palm Beach-Boca Raton area with only 589. INS, Statistical Yearbook, 2001, Table 18, 58–59.

99.

Aubrey W. Bonnett, “The New Female West Indian Immigrant: Dilemmas of Coping in the Host Society,” in In Search of a BetterLife: Perspectives on Migration from the Caribbean, ed. Ransford W. Palmer (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990), 140.

100.

James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, 89–90 and Tables 2.4(A) and 2.4(B), p. 364.

101.

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Table 15, p. 69.

102.

Nancy Foner, “Sex Roles and Sensibilities: Jamaican Women in New York and London,” in International Migration: The FemaleExperience, ed. Rita Simon and Caroline Brettell (Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld, 1986); Bonnett, “The New Female West IndianImmigrant, and Monica Gordon Dependents or Independent Workers?: The Status of Caribbean Immigrant Women in the UnitedStates,”in In Search of a Better Life ed. Palmer.

103.

Figures from Palmer, Pilgrims from the Sun, 33–34.

104.

INS, Statistical Yearbook, 1998, Table 8, p. 47.

105.

But see Palmer, Pilgrims from the Sun; Nancy Foner, ed., New Immigrants in New York (New York: Columbia University Press,1987); and Youssef, The Demographics of Immigration.

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Documents

The History of Afro-Caribbean Migration