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Reviews
| The Other Black Bostonians: West Indians in Boston, 1900–1950. By Violet Showers Johnson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. x + 181 pp. Photos, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.99 (cloth).
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At the outset of this short, insightful work, Violet Showers Johnson laments that most studies of West Indian immigrants limit their purview to New York. Another common characteristic of this literature is its preoccupation with West Indian–African American differences. Proclaiming that West Indians in other cities deserve a voice and that comparative studies of the two groups of blacks are based on "biased impressionistic accounts" (p. 4), Johnson offers a study of Boston's West Indians that resolutely avoids intrablack comparisons. |
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Johnson's main sources of information are government archives, organizational records, journalistic accounts, and twenty-five in-depth interviews undertaken between 1987 and 1997. She is ambivalent about whether incorporating statistical data would have strengthened her study. On the one hand, "statistical information is vital in examining themes such as socioeconomic mobility"; on the other hand, "sometimes they submerge the faces and voices of the human subjects whose experiences are being examined" (p. 101). Thus, her study is on firm ground when it draws on "faces and voices," less so when it estimates "that by 1950 no less than 40 percent of second-generation West Indians were college-educated" (p. 114). Despite this inferred educational edge, Johnson suspects that because racism was so pervasive, there were few occupational differences between West Indians and African Americans. Yet she cannot be certain because published tabulations did not distinguish nativity among blacks—a policy that she reads as evidence of "official contempt" (p. 114) for foreign-born blacks. One way to redress this problem would have been to examine federal census manuscripts, but Johnson did not pursue this strategy. |
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Johnson is at her best when she describes the many resources of Boston's West Indian community that to some degree compensated for their marginal economic status: St. Cyprian's Episcopal Church, the Boston Chronicle, recreational clubs—especially cricket clubs—and the Boston branch of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. In a society where skin color trumped all other characteristics, involvement in these institutions affirmed the distinctiveness of West Indian culture and eased the pain of separation from kith and kin. |
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Boston's West Indians—like their New York neighbors—made valiant efforts to distinguish themselves from African Americans. They flaunted their allegiance to Britain, wore distinctive clothing, and communicated in melodic accents. Johnson hints that this strategy had greater potential to succeed in New England—with its Yankee traditions—than in cosmopolitan New York. The disdain of Boston's Protestant upper class for Catholics meant that wealthy Yankees preferred to have black workers in their households than "Popish" Irish or Italians. Of course, most African Americans were Protestants, too, but Johnson does not pursue the implications of this fact. Her logic leads to expectations that West Indians' identity as "black British" gave them advantages over African Americans, but Johnson does not pursue this further. |
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Johnson is right to conclude that regardless of West Indians' attainment vis-à-vis African Americans, they fared poorly relative to whites, immigrant or native. Nonetheless, she maintains that West Indians viewed their economic situation in positive terms because their frame of reference was the West Indies, not the United States. Indeed, considering that most immigrants had to finance their journey and later send remittances home, they "were viewed by many West Indians at home as middle-class almost immediately upon their departure" (p. 105). Though other studies have shown that, with the passage of time, immigrants' frame of reference shifts from sending to receiving country, Johnson's sources imply that Boston's West Indians swallowed their disappointment by basking in their high status in the islands and by taking pride in their children's educations. Home ownership was another goal that many achieved and which gave satisfaction. |
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Johnson ends her narrative with anecdotes about the lives of some of Boston's more prominent second-generation West Indians. Nevertheless, she suspects that West Indians were wrong to believe that their children could convert education into occupational success at the same rate as whites. Within the racist context of pre–civil rights Boston, Johnson concludes that Boston's West Indians were just another group of black Americans, despite their Protestant ethic and British "connection."
Suzanne Model
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
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