28.1  
Journals link Search link Partners link Information link
Fall, 2008
Previous
Next
Journal of American Ethnic History

Table of Contents
List journal issues
Home
Get a printer-friendly version of this page
 
 


 Article


"What, Then, Is the African American?" African and Afro-Caribbean Identities in Black America

VIOLET M. SHOWERS JOHNSON


      IN HIS EXAMINATION of status ascriptions in American society, sociologist Everett Hughes illustrated the rigidity and power of blackness as a designation for all peoples of African descent in the United States: "membership in the Negro race, as defined in American mores and/or law, may be called a master status–determining trait. It tends to overpower, in most crucial situations, any other characteristics which might run counter to it."1 This 1945 study provides the pivot—the master status—around which the present discussion revolves. From the beginning of voluntary black immigration in the late nineteenth century to the present, this master status has been at the center of the history of black foreigners in the United States.2 Much of this history is shaped by a complex set of ambivalent processes marked by the immigrants' understanding of, acquiescence to, and outright challenge of the master status. The determination not to let this phenomenon overpower their nonracial distinctiveness has led immigrants of African descent to embark on, in Erving Goffman's term, "presentation of self," through which, individually and collectively, they have presented themselves as "the other" in black America.3 The diverse and complex outcomes of this presentation of the self have, in turn, contributed to the ethnicization of black America—in short, the creation of ethnic groups within a racialized American ethnicity, thus shattering the erroneous, even if enduring, notion of a monolithic black America. 1
      The "othering" of black immigrants and their children, self-consciously and by others, questions the master status in important ways that get to the core of who is African American. This interrogation has been crucial since the early twentieth century, when, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois and other American-born black leaders challenged the legitimacy of Jamaican Marcus Garvey as a black American activist. It gained significant momentum with the phenomenal increase of the foreign black population at the close of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. The emergence of Barack Obama, a biracial American with a white mother and a Kenyan immigrant father, has provided the single most glaring illustration of the sharper attention to the black immigrant factor. During the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois, black Republican Alan Keyes remarked about his Democratic opponent: "Barack Obama and I have the same race—that is, physical characteristics. We are not from the same heritage. My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country. My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage."4 The "Obama heritage" debate gained new life with the senator's announcement of his candidacy for the 2008 presidential race. Immediately, some people began to ponder the implications of the first black American president tracing his blackness not to ancestors who experienced American slavery but directly to ancestors in Kenya, instructively, an African country that was not even a source of supply for the Atlantic slave trade, which laid the foundations for the native-born black community. From soul food restaurants to hairdressing and barber salons, Obama's authenticity as a "real African American" was put under scrutiny.5 The outcomes of developments around Obama's candidacy, which are bound to provide useful insights for future analysis, are unfolding: the endorsement by Oprah Winfrey, arguably the most influential black icon of contemporary America; Obama's surprisingly sound victory in predominantly white Iowa; and his postracial politics.6 2
      Whatever the outcomes, Barack Obama is a central figure in the discourse on race relations and the foreign black factor in African American identities and society. He exemplifies some of the questions about black immigration and black America: Who are America's foreign blacks? How qualified or entitled are they and their children to claim the identity or designation of African American? What implications does their presence have for how policies like affirmative action are interpreted and implemented? In a general sense, this essay considers these questions. But more specifically, it focuses on the identities of immigrants of African descent within the complex and changing configuration known as black America. Exploring vital settlement experiences, especially the immigrants' understanding of and reactions to race and racism in different American epochs, it demonstrates two salient points: that cultural production and reproduction are at the center of the development and articulation of counter identities, and that ultimately, rather ironically, the diasporic transnational identities created are situated in the master status and, in apparent or subtle but significant ways, are shaped and reshaped by it. 3
      Counter identities have a long history, best told in the immigrants' own voices. This study is challenged by the incompleteness of valuable community sources like ethnic newspapers and church, mosque, and association records. This challenge is especially formidable in the case of continental Africans, the newest black arrivals, whose communities and subcultures are still unfolding. Still, this discussion incorporates oral and written life histories and other personal testimonies. These firsthand accounts illuminate the realities behind invisible enclaves and spotlight the immigrants' own voices in their history. 4
   

FOREIGN BLACKS: AN OVERVIEW

 
      America's foreign black population is made up of immigrants and refugees from different parts of the world, from Brazil and Guyana in South America to Panama and Belize in Central America to Jamaica and Haiti in the Caribbean to a host of nations in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Senegal, and South Africa. While acknowledging this vast diversity, this essay examines foreign blacks under two main blocks—non-Hispanic Afro-Caribbeans and Africans. Specific examples in this overview and other sections will illustrate the differences and nuances. 5
      Afro-Caribbeans, also products of the Atlantic slave trade, slavery, and European colonialism, are the most established foreign black group. Like other immigrants, their arrival occurred in distinctive waves. Although free Afro-Caribbeans or West Indians had been coming to the United States in trickles since the late nineteenth century, significant migration started in the early twentieth century. The first major wave began around 1900 and continued to the era of the Great Depression. The introduction of passenger steamships, especially those of the United Fruit Company, facilitated immigration from the Caribbean. Following the routes of the steamers, black immigrants, mostly from English-speaking Barbados, Jamaica, and Montserrat, began to come to major cities like New York, Miami, and Boston on the eastern seaboard. Some of the immigrants also came from the Danish Virgin Islands as well as the Spanish and French Caribbean. In 1900, 714 black immigrants were admitted. After 1910 they numbered in the thousands, as in 1924, when over 12,000 entered. By 1925 immigration restrictions under the 1924 immigration law had begun to take effect, severely reducing the numbers of blacks admitted into the country—791 in 1925 and only 84 in 1933.7 6
      By the end of this first wave, impressions of the English–speaking black foreigners as a model minority had been established, especially in New York, which had the heaviest concentration. The immigrants were touted for outpacing African Americans in all socioeconomic spheres, despite the modest premigration backgrounds of the majority. According to Ira Reid, who conducted the first comprehensive study of black immigrants, 31.4 percent had been industrial workers and 40.4 percent had been servants or laborers.8 Emphasizing social capital—work ethic, thriftiness, immigrant community institutions—early researchers of this wave constructed the immigrants' American success story. Also crucial to the story was the immigrants' contribution to the black struggle, an important point that will be raised again later in this essay. In this overview, it would suffice merely to state that in the first wave of non-Hispanic Afro-Caribbean migration, there effectively began what came to be a lasting model minority, immigrant-activist West Indian American history. 7
      Immigration from the Caribbean virtually ceased during the Great Depression, so significant migration in the second wave did not start until after World War II. Even so, it was short lived, as the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act imposed severe restrictions. The new policy limited Anglo-Caribbean entry to the unused quota of the mother country, Britain. After Jamaica and Trinidad gained their independence, they were granted tiny quotas of one hundred per year in 1962. 8
      The 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Act jump-started Afro-Caribbean immigration and paved the way for the third wave, which continued into the twenty-first century. Partly the outcome of the civil rights movement, the new immigration policy discarded the national origins quota, making ample provisions for family reunification and ethnic diversity. Immigration from the English-speaking West Indies increased nearly sixfold in five years, from 4,700 in 1965 to 27,300 in 1970.9 Post-1965 non-Hispanic Caribbean immigration demonstrated a significant diversity in the composition of the immigrants, perhaps most underscored by the phenomenal increase in the number of French-speaking Haitians. According to Michel Laguerre, even though the 1990 official Census recorded 289,521 legal residents and 88,000 undocumented, the Haitian population in the United States by 1996 was more accurately around 1.5 million, with major concentrations in New York, Florida, Massachusetts, and Illinois.10 9
      The 2000 Census revealed that the non-Hispanic Afro-Caribbean population grew almost 67 percent in one decade. John Logan highlights some key characteristics of the contemporary Afro-Caribbean population: Afro-Caribbeans are heavily concentrated on the East Coast; six out of ten live in the New York, Miami, and Fort Lauderdale metropolitan regions; in Miami more than half are Haitian; Haitians are well represented, but outnumbered by, Jamaicans in New York and Fort Lauderdale; Atlanta saw a fourfold increase; and Orlando had an almost threefold increase. By 2005, at over 60 percent, non-Hispanic Afro-Caribbeans still made up the largest segment of the 1.8 million foreign black population from the Caribbean and Latin America. Among the top sending countries were Jamaica at 30 percent, Haiti 25 percent, and Trinidad and Tobago 9 percent.11 10
      Although English-speaking Afro-Caribbeans became prominent as the pioneers of voluntary black immigration, they share this distinction with Portuguese-speaking Cape Verdeans. By the 1860s, as recounted by Marilyn Halter, who rescued the Cape Verdean Americans from intellectual obscurity, these West African immigrants had begun to settle in New England. They came on old whaling vessels that, as a result of the decline of the whaling industry, had been transformed into affordable passenger ships.12 However, until the mid-1970s blacks from Africa constituted a very small proportion of the foreign black population. Following long-established colonial links, most of the young Africans who left the continent to study in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century went to European institutions of higher learning. The few who came to the United States, like Kwame Nkrumah and Nnamdi Azikiwe, returned home after their studies.13 In the late 1970s, developments in Europe, Africa, and America prompted the beginning of a permanent and more visible African immigrant presence. As Britain and other European nations were closing their doors to their former colonials, the United States, recently transformed by the civil rights struggle and other movements, was implementing more inclusive immigration laws. Furthermore, American awards like the AFGRAD and Fulbright scholarships encouraged a growing African interest in American education. 11
      In Africa economic globalization and internal corruption and mismanagement triggered economic crises that prompted mass emigration. Military coups, civil wars, and repressive one-party governments weakened economies further and, in some cases, led to a temporary total collapse of the state. These vicissitudes have been at the center of the African refugee crises since the 1970s— from the Biafran war to the Ethiopian famine to the Rwanda genocide and the Somali, Liberian, and Sierra Leonean civil wars.14 12
      More than Afro-Caribbeans, it was Africans who most exemplified the explosion of the foreign black population at the close of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. From 1980 to 1989, 134,000 black Africans were admitted into the United States. The number more than doubled in the next decade, when 323,000 arrived between 1990 and 1999. The 2000 Census revealed that the African immigrant population had almost tripled in the preceding decade. In all the top metro areas settled by this population, the growth rate exceeded 100 percent: in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, 148.9 percent; New York City, 134.2 percent; Atlanta, 284.6 percent; Minneapolis-St. Paul, 628.4 percent; Houston, 129.1 percent; Chicago, 122.5 percent; Boston, 102.1 percent; Dallas, 159.5 percent; and Philadelphia-New Jersey, 220.6 percent. In terms of regional representation, at 36 percent, West Africans, with Nigeria and Ghana as the major sending countries, topped the list. Second, at 26 percent, was East Africa. Refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia are the major groups from this region. West Africans constitute the largest group of Africans in Washington, D.C. (53 percent), New York (69 percent), Atlanta (48 percent), Boston (60 percent), Houston (61 percent), Chicago (58 percent), and Philadelphia (53 percent). East Africans, mostly Somalis, predominate in Minneapolis (61 percent). 13
      The African immigrant population has continued to grow remarkably since the 2000 Census. Immigration statistics of the Department of Homeland Security show that 41 percent arrived between 2000 and 2005. The admission of refugees and the implementation of the State Department's Diversity Visa Program (DV Lottery), introduced in 1990 to increase the entry of immigrants from countries not well represented among America's immigrant population, contributed substantially to this growth. From 2001 to 2006, 29 percent of sub-Saharan Africans arriving entered as refugees, and 22 percent "won" the DV Lottery. Somalia, Liberia, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Sierra Leone are the top sources of refugees.15 14
      Like the Afro-Caribbeans before them, the Africans were being assessed as a model minority by the beginning of the twenty-first century. No study fails to bring up the educated, professional pre-migration socioeconomic backgrounds of a substantial proportion of this group. The brain drain is often a concomitant theme of the new African diaspora. Indeed, educated professionals are a large proportion of this group of immigrants. According to the 2000 Census, the educational attainment of Africans was higher than that of Afro-Caribbeans, African Americans, and even that of whites and Asians. In 2005, 38 percent had at least one college degree, a figure higher than the 20 percent of Caribbean and Latin American blacks, 16 percent of U.S.-born blacks, and 27 percent of foreign-born of all races.16 The premigration emphasis on education has become even sharper in the immigrants' new home, where they are known for their perseverance in attaining further education.17 Like the Anglo-Caribbean immigrants who developed an immigrant-activist tradition, Africans are beginning to develop their own tradition—the immigrant-student. This is one of the most defining characteristics of the African immigrant population, which this analysis, being an overview, cannot develop further. 15
      As the twentieth century drew to a close, not only had America's foreign black population grown, it had become highly variegated in a matter of a few decades, consisting of peoples of many modern black nations—Jamaica, Barbados, Haiti, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, among others. Religious diversity in the foreigners' affiliations as Muslims, Episcopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, and Pentecostals exemplified the vast pluralism of the immigrants. Linguistic variety further illustrated the extent of the diversity. Still prominent were English-speaking former colonials from the Caribbean and Africa. Now also visible, however, were Francophone nationals such as those from Haiti, Senegal, Martinique, Rwanda, and Mali. Mozambicans and Angolans from Africa and increasing numbers of Afro-Brazilians joined Cape Verdeans, once the only significant Portuguese-speaking black group of the pre-1975 era. In addition to the European languages, linguistic diversity manifested itself in the variety of native tongues, from Jamaican patois to Haitian French Creole to the legion of indigenous African languages such as Amharic, Fula, Mandinka, Yoruba, Hausa, Twi, Temne, and Wolof. These same African ethnicities and languages were crucial centuries earlier in the foundation of black America, but by the end of the twentieth century they underscored the differences between native-born and immigrant blacks. 16
   

RACE IN AMERICAN EPOCHS

 
      Race is an unavoidable subject in U.S. history. As former New York mayor Edward Koch noted in 1992, it is "the most important subject facing the United States."18 Scholarly affirmation of this significance is clear in the impressive literature, which is still growing, on the subject. Included in this body are classics and seminal works like Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (1944); August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto (1966); Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993); Peter Rose, They and We: Racial and Ethnic Relations in the United States (1997); Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-first Century (2000); Stephen Steinberg, ed., Race and Ethnicity in the United States (1994); and Cornell West, Race Matters (1993).19 These studies and others emphasize that race, racism, and race relations are not static. As many questions as the scholarship answers, it also lays bare the extent of the problem of grasping or, to quote Holt, "corralling a concept which by its very nature is parasitic and chameleonic."20 The debates are unending: What exactly is the impact of race? How have race relations changed? What are the distinctions between race and ethnicity? How is culture affected by race? How does race intersect with class and gender? How is globalization affecting how race works in America? And how feasible is it to talk about a postracial America? This discourse, though very important, is too huge to be covered fully here. However, in order to contextualize the counter identities developed and projected by black foreigners, it is important to consider the changing history of race, racism, and race relations that influenced the master status and from which the foreigners could not escape. 17
      To historicize black immigrants' encounter with American race and racism, this discussion examines the subject in two periods—pre–civil rights and post–civil rights. The first groups of voluntary black immigrants came in the pre–civil rights era. They arrived when Jim Crow, though officially a southern institution, defined all of America. This caste system affected in varying degrees almost every facet of American life. Occupational restriction based on race was blatant, even in the North. In Boston, "freedom's birthplace," job advertisements like the following in the Boston Globe exemplify how racial and ethnic status determined employment positions in the first half of the twentieth century: "Colored man needed to work in tailor store as porter" (January 6, 1910); "Able- bodied Hungarian-speaking man wanted to act as assistant to foreman," "Supervisor needed, white man only," "Polish, non-Hebrew worker needed" (January 8, 1918); "Colored woman wanted for shining shoes" (October 4, 1918); "Catholic Collector Wanted" (January 7, 1940); "Girl Elevator Operator. Will train, neat well-mannered white girl, age 18 to 28, size 12 to 16" (January 3, 1945). These examples clearly underscore the variables at play: race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and physical stature. The racial and ethnic occupational niches carved by these categorizations were to define Boston as much as its Puritan and abolitionist traditions. The occupational niche for blacks, as the advertisements begin to suggest, consisted for the most part of unskilled, menial positions like janitor, domestic, and laborer, jobs that by 1930 were known as the traditional Negro jobs.21 18
      As in employment, housing discrimination was blatant in the pre–civil rights era throughout America, not just in the South. The 1925 Sweet case illustrated how endemic this problem was. The Sweets were attacked by a white mob for their "audacity" to move into an all-white Detroit neighborhood. Ossian Sweet, a Howard University MD, and his family were charged with the murder of one of the mob members. This case gained national attention and the assistance of the NAACP, which retained attorney Clarence Darrow, who successfully defended the Sweets. This high-profile case underscored the fact that housing, too, was about racial identity and the status it ascribed. The accomplished, upwardly mobile Sweets had dared to move out of the place they had been assigned by race. In Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (2004), historian Kevin Boyle uses this episode to shed light on the workings of race and racism in the pre–civil rights era. Recounting the Sweet story, Boyle shows how in Detroit, unfair economic structures; a racist real estate industry; an uninterested white press; the inertia of municipal, state, and federal government; and the misguided optimism of liberal whites merged, though not by design, with the bigotry and lawlessness of the Klan in producing the caste system that festered and exploded in the Sweet case. Boyle goes beyond Detroit. Arc of Justice exposes a national paradox in the 1920s: as major American cities "sparkled" with economic prosperity and vibrant human mobility, marked by heightened migration and immigration, they "simmered" with hatred, marked by nativist, anti-Semitic, and anti-black sentiments.22 It was in cities like New York, Boston, and Miami, caught in this paradox, that the first waves of voluntary black immigrants settled. 19
      The majority of Afro-Caribbeans during this period came from British colonies. While their identity as "British subjects" was officially acknowledged, racial ascription began immediately upon their arrival. The Immigrant Passenger Lists of the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization clearly listed them not simply as British but as British Negroes. Thus, their Britishness and other foreign identities did not provide an ironclad protection from the restrictions of American racism. Major West Indian publications like the Amsterdam News and the Boston Chronicle reported extensively on racial injustice generally against blacks and more specifically against the black foreigners. Studies of pre-civil rights Afro-Caribbean communities, from Irma Watkins-Owens's Blood Relations (1996) to Philip Kasinitz's Caribbean New York (1992) and Violet Showers Johnson's The Other Black Bostonians (2006), discuss how foreign blacks experienced these restrictions, which landed them in predominantly black neighborhoods in major cities like New York and Boston.23 Confronted by American racism, these immigrants often appealed to their nonracial, premigration affiliations, like the woman in Boston who, when she heard about Jim Crow in the South, declared: "They had better not bring that here to us, because if they do, they would have to contend with the wrath of his majesty the King of England."24 Indeed, there was evidence of selective discrimination that reinforced belief in the potency of foreign identities. Black foreigners, including the renowned Claude McKay, related how they were treated favorably once they established their foreignness, mainly through their languages or accents. In the early 1920s, Marcus Garvey's Negro World admonished blacks, especially the native born, to learn Spanish— in other words, become foreign to avoid racism. 20
      In spite of attempts at distancing themselves from the race problem, an undeniable feature of the pre-1965 cohorts is their contributions to America's black struggle. One cannot talk about the activism of the New Negro during the Harlem Renaissance without talking about Jamaican Claude McKay; or Virgin Islander Hubert Harrison, who pioneered soapbox agitation; or Barbadian Richard B. Moore; or Nevisian Cyril Briggs, who founded the radical African Blood Brotherhood. Jamaican Marcus Garvey left indelible imprints on the history of black American activism with his Universal Negro Improvement Association, the spearhead of Garveyism, the first mass black movement in the United States.25 In the modern civil rights movement, some of the activists, like Stokely Carmichael, were Afro-Caribbeans or of Afro-Caribbean descent.26 21
      Caribbean activists like Jamaicans W. A. Domingo and Marcus Garvey relentlessly invoked their indispensability to the black struggle, an assessment vehemently challenged by American-born black leaders. The ugly, name-calling quarrel between W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey was well publicized; so was the acidic remark by the African American Howard University sociologist, Kelly Miller, that a Negro radical was an "over-educated West Indian without a job."27 And Robert L. Vann, the famous editor of the reputable African American publication, the Pittsburgh Courier, was so incensed by the claims of the black immigrants that he called for their mass repatriation to the repressive British colonial regimes from which they had fled. 22
      The heyday of Afro-Caribbean activism was in the early decades of the twentieth century. The post-1965 immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa came to an America that had changed remarkably, mainly because of the civil rights movement. That development removed many barriers as the state became more involved in the regulation of race relations. Unlike the immigrants of the first half of the twentieth century, who encountered unconcealed racism in job advertisements and housing, post–civil rights arrivals have seen advertisements with boilerplate like "affirmative action employer" and "women and members of minority groups are encouraged to apply." The civil rights movement, for all its successes and transformative impact, however, did not eradicate racial injustice. Sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton concluded in their study of race relations that racial segregation persists, not too subtly, in many areas of American life. Ellis Cose, in his study of the rage of a disillusioned black middle class, wonders why "a full generation after the most celebrated civil rights battles were fought and won, are Americans still struggling with basic issues of racial fairness." And Thomas Holt illustrates the incongruity as he juxtaposes the viability of African American Colin Powell, the first black Joint Chief of Staff (and a second-generation Jamaican), as a Republican presidential candidate with the brutal murder of a black couple in North Carolina by a group of white military neo-Nazis.28 The anomaly can be illustrated further in more recent times by juxtaposing the strong showing of presidential candidate Barack Obama with the Jena Six case and the resurgence of the noose as a symbol of American racism.29 23
      The complicated face of race in America is lost on many of the post-1965 arrivals who see a post-racial America. Jamaican American scholar Patrick Grant observes that when it comes to race and racism, black immigrants have come to America "with their eyes wide shut."30 Convinced of their ability to tap into the social and cultural capital that they bring, black immigrants have relished their ability to "make it" in America, the "land of unlimited opportunities." Ghanaian Kofi Apraku, on arriving at New York's JFK International Airport, reassured himself: "Didn't America literally reach for the stars when it landed [a] man on the moon? Sure, everything is possible in this country." Nigerian Sabella Abidde notes:

      America has been good to Africans. America is a land of roses, fast cars, fancy homes, beautiful women, and expensive and exclusive life style. These Africans amass their wealth the old-fashioned way: through hard and smart work.... They toiled night and day and all the hours in-between to get to where they are in life. There are honest [sic] bunch of people who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and made it to the top of the mountain. They live the good life. They live the American dream.
 And Senegalese Cheikh T. Sylla is convinced that "the African American experience cannot be held as justification for one's inability to succeed."31		 24
      Immigration scholars have not only repeated the black immigrant success story; they have also used it to indict African Americans. For example, in What's So Great about America (2002), Dinesh D'Souza concludes: "the West Indians, Haitians, the Nigerians. All are darker than African-Americans, yet white racism does not stop them. The immigrants know that racism today [2002] is not systematic, it is episodic, and they are able to navigate around its obstacles. Even immigrants who start at the very bottom are making rapid gains, surging ahead of African-Americans and claiming the American dream for themselves."32 This model minority thesis has not gone unchallenged, as exemplified by the irritation of sociologist Stephen Steinberg:
Despite disclaimers to the contrary, the message that emerges from the canon of immigration scholarship is clear: if only African Americans had the cultural virtues, the perseverance, the pluck of immigrants—if only they were not saddled with self-deprecating and anti-intellectual subcultures—if only they could get rid of that defiant and surly "attitude" that whites abhor—if only they would stop seeing themselves as "victims" and stop whining about racism—then they too could climb the tree of opportunity.33
 		25
      Such indictments of African Americans are impressionistic. Any meaningful approach to African American history reveals that from the onset American blacks have displayed traits similar to those attributed to black foreigners. Social historians like Herbert Gutman have shown that African Americans created and maintained strong family ties that saw them through slavery, Jim Crow, and the transformations that came with the exodus to the North. Adopting the motto "To Seek for Ourselves," they used institutions like the church, associations, and small businesses to develop viable communities.34 26
      In the last quarter of the twentieth century, three high-profile incidents exposed the vulnerability of foreign blacks to the workings of race and racism in post–civil rights America. On November 13, 1988, the worlds of white supremacists and black immigrants collided in Portland, Oregon. A group of skinheads of the East Side White Pride brutally killed Mulegeta Seraw, an Ethiopian immigrant. After a successful suit filed on behalf of Seraw's family by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, Tom Metzger, founder of White Aryan Resistance, and his son, John, were found liable and ordered to pay Seraw's estate $12.5 million. The jury agreed that the Metzgers and their organization were responsible for inciting the violence that led to the Ethiopian immigrant's death.35 27
      New York City, which had seen far more black immigration than Portland, became a hotbed for a similar upheaval less than a decade later. This time the black immigrants' world collided not with the lunacy of lawless, self-professed white supremacist skinheads but with the tyranny of the city's law enforcement. On August 8, 1997, police officers of the 70th precinct brutally beat and sodomized with a toilet plunger Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant. Despite the "blue wall of silence," the "Plunger Cops," as the tabloids quickly labeled the officers, eventually faced justice. In a subsequent civil suit against the city, Louima won a settlement of $8.75 million, the largest police brutality settlement in New York City history.36 28
      It is surprising, then, that yet another police brutality incident against a black immigrant should come so close on the heels of this costly one. This time the victim was from Guinea, West Africa. On February 4, 1999, twenty-three-year old Amadou Diallo was gunned down in the vestibule of his residence in the Bronx by four plainclothes officers of the New York City Police Department's Street Crime Unit. Claiming that they felt that Diallo had reached for a gun, the officers fired forty-one shots, hitting him nineteen times. After a trial, which had been moved from New York to predominantly white Albany, a mixed-race jury acquitted the four officers of all charges, including second-degree murder. A civil suit followed, and in 2004 Kiadiatou Diallo, Amadou Diallo's mother, accepted a $3 million settlement from the city.37 29
      All three incidents elicited strong reactions across the country. The mainstream press covered the developments extensively. Most of the headlines highlighted the foreignness of the victims: "Ethiopian Immigrant Bludgeoned to Death by Skinheads," "Haitian Security Guard Brutalized by New York City Police Officers," and "Unarmed West African Immigrant Mercilessly Gunned Down by NYPD Street Crime Unit." Despite these immigrant-specific headlines, many saw the incidents as racially motivated. They represented not an attack on immigrants, but a continuing pattern of the historical racist assault on black Americans. African American leaders, already steeped in the tradition of their struggle, were poised to lead protest activities sparked by these events. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Johnnie Cochran surprised almost no one by the roles they assumed. 30
      The prominence of these native-born black leaders notwithstanding, the incidents raised several questions about the black immigrant experience in America: How do black immigrants negotiate national, ethnic, and racial identities? What is the extent of their knowledge and understanding of race relations in America? How do their interests and agendas converge with and diverge from those of native-born blacks? What is the level of race consciousness among black immigrants? And what is their level of participation in and contributions to black activism? 31
      The last two questions have prompted some of the most contested assessments of the consequences of black immigration for black America. In the Seraw, Louima, and Diallo episodes, black immigrants mobilized to protest. In Oregon, the young Ethiopian community made its presence known as never before. Joining forces with groups like the Oregon branch of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, its members participated in demonstrations and endorsed petitions and resolutions. In the Louima case, an already well-established Haitian American community,38 led by the Organization of Haitians, took its place right next to African American protesters. Guineans worked closely with Al Sharpton and Johnnie Cochran in protesting the death of Amadou Diallo. Therefore, opposition to these racially charged tragedies was not left solely to American-born blacks. Still, by the admission of the black immigrants, the overall reaction of foreign blacks illuminated their low level of race consciousness and inability to participate productively in the black American struggle. Asking the question, "Where were the continental Africans?" one New York African publication lambasted the disgraceful unconcern displayed by immigrants from Africa in the Diallo incident.39 The president of the Guinean Association of America admitted that his association did not do much beyond raising funds at "informal sporadic gatherings" to help repatriate the bodies of those who have died in the "strange land of America."40 Although African immigrants were enraged by what happened to a fellow immigrant, the majority did not publicly demonstrate this outrage. Instead, they explained the events as random, unfortunate, typical American violence. Some were convinced that if they only stuck to the business of "making it" in America, they could avoid, to quote a Nigerian immigrant, "all the dizzying complications of race, race relations and subtle and not so subtle racism."41 32
      Afro-Caribbean activists of the early twentieth century were criticized for their "pushiness" and arrogant meddling in the American black struggle, while the post–civil rights cohorts are faulted for their unwillingness to join the continuing struggle.42 Are post–civil rights transnationals too involved in their homelands to pay attention and react to American problems with uniquely racial ramifications? Have Haitians been too immersed in the vicissitudes of Haitian politics, from Duvalier to post-Aristide? Are Nigerians too involved in ensuring the hegemony of their respective ethnicities in the complex Nigerian federation? Are Sierra Leoneans too obsessed with rebuilding their former schools and a whole country after a protracted war and a temporary collapse of the state? 33
      Deep involvement in homeland politics and other "non-American" issues is not an unjustifiable characterization of late-twentieth- and early-twentieth-first-century foreign black communities. The black foreigners have capitalized on the vastly more tolerant climate in America, when compared to their homelands, to voice their opinions about conditions at home and chart actions. In the 1990s Eritrean drivers gathered outside their taxis at Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport to listen to the Voice of Eritrea in their Tigrinya language and to discuss homeland issues, from the war with Ethiopia to new strides in education.43 At association meetings and in specialty stores, nightclubs, and house and hall parties, the black foreigners, especially the men, spend an enormous amount of time dissecting homeland problems. As diasporic citizens, this should be expected. The question is to what extent these emerging and new Americans can juggle their transnational existence to also apply this determination—to question and agitate—to their experiences in their new home, especially as they relate to their being black in America? When they process the Louima tragedy, for example, can they relate it to the Rodney King incident and the long history of the complex relationship between race, race relations, and law enforcement?44 Or when they revisit the Diallo killing, do they ever consider that the police that night were looking for a black male rapist? Indeed, what do black immigrants know about the role of the image of the black male rapist in the history of race and race relations in America? As Elizabeth Alexander emphasizes, "Black bodies in pain for public consumption have been an American national spectacle for centuries."45 How firm a grasp of this collective traumatized past do foreign blacks have? What do they know about and how do they interpret the horrible murder of Emmett Till or the lynching of blacks in American history?46 When they see pictures or read about that "strange fruit" hanging from trees, can they feel the pain not only as any decent human beings committed to human rights, but also as an integral part of the agony on display? 34
      In varying degrees contemporary black immigrant communities are cognizant of the metaphoric "pain of the black body." Take the case of African immigrants, who are usually seen as the most apathetic about race and racism. Since the 1990s intellectuals, professionals, and leaders of associations and other African immigrant institutions have been encouraging members of their communities to consider "American" issues not just in general terms but through race prisms as well. NYU professor Manthia Diawara, originally from Mali, articulates the rationale for this stand:
Little do the Amadou Diallos of the world know that the black man in America bears the curse of Cain, and that in America they, too, are considered black men, not Fulanis, Mandingos or Wolofs.... They cut Amadou Diallo down like a black American even though he belonged to the Fulani tribe of his native Guinea. The tragedies of Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo—two immigrants submitted to the ritualistic white violence generally reserved for African Americans—should finally suffice as a political awakening for Africans and Caribbeans to the issues of race in America.47
 		35
      In the 140 years since the beginning of voluntary black immigration, the expressions and impact of race have evolved. While in many senses the workings of racism and racial injustice have become even more complicated, the changes are significant. Two scenarios help illustrate this. In the 1914 debate on immigration reform, U.S. representative Percy E. Quinn from Mississippi, arguing for the exclusion of all people of African descent, boldly lamented, "Of all the misfortunes that the civilization of this Republic has fastened to the body politic it is the African race which stands as the worst."48 On August 1, 1991, presidential hopeful Patrick Buchanan remarked on the ABC television show, This Week with David Brinkley, "If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?" Unlike Quinn's statement three-quarters of a century earlier, which quietly remained buried in the congressional records, Buchanan's insinuation that Africans were unsuitable for incorporation into American life was seen by many as so anachronistic that, immediately, it came under public attack. These two examples show the paradox—how much things had changed and yet remained the same. As different as the epochs are, the centrality of race in American identities remained constant. 36
   

IMMIGRANT CULTURES, COUNTER IDENTITIES

 
      Black immigrants, in different epochs and from different origins, come to the United States with well formed premigration, nonracial identities. The reconceptualization of these identities and the formation of new ones happen within the immigrant subcultures. How immigrant institutions produce and reproduce culture is essential in understanding how identities are perceived, formed, reformed, negotiated, manipulated, and projected. As this list begins to suggest, this is a huge subject with numerous ramifications. Religious institutions; the ethnic press; and ethnic, national, benevolent, sports, and literary associations are critical for cultural production. Their vital functions cannot be fully covered in this essay. For focus and brevity this discussion highlights two key areas—religion and festivals—within which to illustrate the complex cultural production of African and Afro-Caribbean identities in America. 37
      Since the early twentieth century, black immigrants have found religion a useful tool in articulating nonracial identities. The non-Hispanic Afro-Caribbeans were mostly Anglicans (Episcopalians in the United States) and first sought affiliation with predominantly white churches. When these churches shunned them, and in many cases overtly discriminated against them, they started their own congregations.49 St. Cyprian Church in New York and St. Cyprian's in Boston are good examples of how Afro-Caribbeans used the church to straddle their Caribbean and American (black American) identities. Although both were headed by African American clergy, they were strongholds of Caribbean culture. As members and nonmembers congregated for a variety of activities, these churches became sites for the formation of the immigrants' emerging collective identity as "West Indians."50 38
      Although there were sprinklings of Catholics among the early Anglophone Caribbean immigrants, the majority of foreign black Catholics in the early period were Portuguese-speaking Cape Verdeans. Anti-Catholicism and racial discrimination within the Catholic Church impeded the growth of Cape Verdean Catholic congregations in New England.51 Therefore, not until the influx of Haitians in the late 1960s did Catholicism emerge as a strong feature of the foreign black population. In her comparative study of Haitian and African American Catholics, Yanick St. Jean concluded that the French language and Catholicism have been such markers of Haitian identities since colonial times that "among Haitian Americans, Catholicism is so webbed with ethnicity that the two are not easily teased apart."52 Even this close affinity between Haitian identity and Catholicism has not remained static. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, although Catholicism was still an ethnic trait of Haitian Americans, there had been a marked increase of Pentecostal Haitian churches in New York, Miami, Boston, and even Atlanta, where the Haitian population was beginning to grow. A 2004 study of the Boston Emmanuel Research Institute revealed that in Boston alone, Haitian churches had grown from one in 1969 to fifty-four in 2004. These ethnic churches helped the immigrants as they confronted challenges as blacks as well as nurturing their identities as Haitian Americans.53 Importantly, this study also pointed to the weight of generational differences. Second- and third-generation Haitians, though professing that they are "true Haitians at heart," gravitated to African American churches, as their parents' churches, where services were conducted in French and Creole and where most of the news and references pertained to their Haitian backgrounds, stopped being relevant for them. Regine Jackson underscores the role of generation in determining ethnic relations. In her research on the Boston Haitian community, she found that social distancing between African Americans and Haitians lessened with intermarriage.54 39
      Religion as a glaring marker of foreign identities became more profound with the influx of Africans in the last quarter of the twentieth century, especially in the 1990s. By independence, African Christians were already diverse, as underscored by their affiliations to various denominations such as Anglicanism, Methodism, Catholicism. and Presbyterianism. And by 1990, the rapidly growing Pentecostal movement in Africa crossed the Atlantic to Europe and America to further diversify African immigrant communities. In only one decade there emerged in the United States hundreds of African churches, formed mostly along national and ethnic lines.55 Although some of the new churches purchased old church buildings and in a few cases constructed new ones, most of the new congregations occupy unconventional spaces in strip malls, vacant warehouses, and private homes. With names like Christ Chosen Church of God International, U.S.A.; the Christ Apostolic Church, U.S.A.; the Ethiopian Evangelical Church of God; and the Yoruba Aladura Congregation, these churches recruit clergy from the homeland and conduct worship and other activities in their native languages. Even some of the traditional denominations established by Europeans are making forays across the Atlantic. For example, the Presbyterian Church of Ghana created "immigrant outposts" in The Bronx and Harlem in the 1990s. Catering to the specific needs of Ghanaian immigrant communities, the Presbyterian extensions recruit ministers and elders from Ghana, conduct worship in Ghanaian languages like Twi, and facilitate contacts between the immigrants and their homelands.56 40
      The foreign cultural orientation of new African congregations has been a source of resentment. For example, an African American minister, commenting on the proliferation of African churches in New York, lamented that "Third World Christianity" had come to America. Another critic expressed similar chagrin: "African Christianity, in particular, permits a wide range of traditional practices, including polygamy, divination, animal sacrifices, initiation rites, circumcision, and the veneration of ancestors. I find these superstitions and practices highly offensive, and I don't want them in my country. They also give me a low opinion of the people who practice them and make me doubt they will be responsible citizens and voters." Another critic acquiesced: "It may not be Christianity as we know it, but at least it keeps them off the streets."57 These assessments are reminiscent of the reception of the storefront churches of southern black migrants in northern cities during the Great Migration of the early twentieth century.58 Like the migrant African American churches before them, the new immigrant black churches are pursuing a theology of relevance, providing vital faith-based development for their communities. Through a variety of pastoral initiatives that stress the divine intervention of God, Allah, and African deities, religious institutions directly assist with job-training, educational resources, housing, health care, and entrepreneurial opportunities. 41
      If the Africanization of American Christianity at century's end was intriguing, the simultaneous growth of African Islam was even more remarkable. The influx of Muslim refugees from Somalia and immigrants and refugees from Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Guinea, and Sierra Leone dramatically increased the proportion of Muslims in the new African diaspora to America. Unlike the Muslims of the Atlantic slave trade, who were prevented from freely practicing their faith, the newly arrived Africans, demonstrating their unwillingness to integrate into the well-established native African American Islamic milieu, have created and nurtured distinctive Islamic institutions.59 Some of the masjids, or congregations, are Pan-African. However, like the Christian congregations, their memberships are more commonly drawn along ethnic and national lines, and worship and other activities are conducted in a variety of rented spaces.60 42
      Senegalese Muslims have aroused the most interest, perhaps because they have created and sustained the most structured and most prosperous black immigrant Muslim communities. The overwhelming majority of Senegalese Muslims belong to the Muridiya, a Sufi brotherhood founded in Senegal in the nineteenth century by anticolonial activist Amadou Bamba. Emphasizing the sect's two principles of hard work and prayer, the Muridiya nurtures and regulates the entrepreneurial activities of its adherents—street peddlers, cab drivers, hair braiders, and storeowners. Since 1989, the spiritual leader of the Murids has traveled every year from his home in Touba, Senegal, to immigrant outposts in New York, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. With reverence, the immigrants and their children flock to the holy visitor to pay their respects and to be blessed and inspired.61 In 1991, during the tenure of African American mayor David Dinkins, New York City recognized the black foreigners by declaring July 28 Amadou Bamba Day.62 Thus, Islam among the Senegalese in America, as in the homeland, is more than a religion. In their new home it is instrumental in shaping solid transnational identities that connect the Senegalese Americans with the homeland and other Senegalese communities in the diaspora. The role of religion in identity formation and acculturation among Africans cannot be overstated. As Ghanaian theologian Kwasi Kwakye-Nuako notes, "Because religious congregations provide immigrants with ethnic, cultural and linguistic reinforcement and refuge ... religious based organizations are often the first link as newcomers adapt into American society."63 43
      Transnational, diasporic identities and cultures are shaped and displayed most ostentatiously by a variety of ethnic celebrations. Through tea parties and commemoration of British holidays like Empire and Coronation Day, the early Anglophone Afro-Caribbeans projected nonracial identities. In more recent times, black immigrants' festive, identity-ascribing culture has become more diverse and elaborate. By 1990, naming ceremonies, funerals, weddings, cricket and soccer matches, and independence celebrations were drawing sharper attention to Afro-Caribbeans and Africans as "the other blacks." Too detailed to tackle here, this essay will not explore all of these immigrant celebrations. Instead, it will highlight two high-profile annual celebrations that demonstrate how African and Afro-Caribbean ethnicities are displayed and how membership in black America continues to shape counter identities and cultures. The Afro-Caribbean carnival and the Nigerian independence celebration, two of the most dazzling representations of black immigrant culture, are fitting illustrations. 44
      No one talks of the Caribbean diaspora without mentioning the carnival. By 2000 there had emerged over fifty annual Caribbean carnivals in the United States, including the Brooklyn West Indian American Day Carnival; the Boston and Hartford, Connecticut, carnivals; and the Atlanta Caribbean Peach Festival.64 This discussion focuses on the Brooklyn carnival for the light it sheds as the oldest and biggest of the carnivals. The carnival has been a Labor Day fixture in New York since the 1940s. Its history, however, dates back to the 1920s, when immigrants, mostly from Trinidad and a few others from Jamaica and Barbados, began to put up modest carnival celebrations in their ethnic enclaves in Harlem. As an attempt to transplant a homeland institution, the organizers made sure that their celebration coincided with the traditional pre-Lenten period. In the mid-1940s not only, under the leadership of community leader, Trinidadian Jessie Wattle, was the event moved from the private side streets of Harlem to the more public Seventh Avenue; it was also now being celebrated on one of the biggest American holidays—Labor Day. The Harlem West Indian Carnival continued until 1964, when the parade permit was revoked after a street disturbance. Five years later a committee headed by Carlos Lezama obtained a permit to parade on Labor Day on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. Since then this committee, which later became the West Indian-American Day Carnival Association, has organized the annual Labor Day carnival celebrations. 45
      The foods, national flags, music, and dance showcase the origins of the celebrants and reaffirm their status as foreign blacks in the United States. Philip Kasinitz, who devotes a whole chapter to the carnival in his study of Caribbean New York, sums up the significance of this event as "a place where the idea of a Caribbean community can be put forward and dramatized."65 By 2003 American companies like Western Union, Money Gram, and American Airlines, which benefit from the Afro-Caribbeans' transnational existence, had joined politicians seeking "black" votes in participating conspicuously in the parade. The carnival, which began as an ethnic celebration organized by homesick foreigners, in a little over a generation had evolved into an American institution—or, some would clarify, a black American institution. 46
      In 1995 the Organization for the Advancement of Nigerians (OAN) established the first annual parade in America to celebrate Nigeria's independence from Britain on October 1, 1960. Occurring only a few weeks after the West Indian Labor Day Carnival, this parade has grown into one of New York City's spectacular events. During preparations for the 2006 celebration, the president of OAN, Michael Adeniyi, articulated one interpretation of the goals and meaning of this event: "The parade showcases the accomplishments of Nigerians in various fields in the United States. It also offers Nigerians the opportunity to show their growing influence back home in Nigeria where their estimated annual wire transfer to relatives has hit the $billion mark and in the USA where they have contributed their expertise in government, the law profession, the medical field, African supermarkets, fashion and beauty."66 Adeniyi also appealed to Nigerians in the tristate area of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and beyond to make September 30 (the day of the parade) a special day to show their identity. 47
      Indeed, Adeniyi hit at the core of its meaning—the parade is about identity, or more accurately, identities. It is an opportunity for Nigerian immigrants and their children to reassure themselves of and declare to others who they are. And this is done in the public sphere. An affirmation of homeland, Nigerian identities pervade the festivities. The Nigerian green and white flag plays a similar role as those of the Caribbean nations in the West Indian carnival. Again, as in the Caribbean case, the ethnic and cultural diversity of Nigeria is illuminated. The floats reflect differences based on states, ethnic groups, and religious affiliation. Since 2000, dignitaries from home, including state governors, and Nollywood movie stars have flown to New York to participate in the parade. Nigerian Americans seize the opportunity to protest a range of issues—concerns specific to their respective Nigerian ethnicities, the treatment of women, corruption of government officials, and political repression. 48
      There is no denying that the Nigerian celebration on the streets of Manhattan is about Nigerian nationality. One of the Nigerian reporters of the 2005 parade underscored this essence: "This October 1st like several before is an outing on behalf of Nigeria ... and we must remember that it is all about Nigeria and nothing else matters! Nigerians ought to thank OAN for keeping the flag of Nigeria flying high in New York."67 Even the 1.5 generation and the second generation, who are first-generation Americans, find ways to show that on that day "only Nigeria mattered." They come to the parade in their green and white T-shirts, which bear statements like "I am 100% Nigerian," "Nigerian born in the USA," "Born Nigerian, Nigerian Always," and "Naija Girl Powered by Garri." (Garri is a Nigerian staple made from ground cassava.) 49
      In spite of the exuberance based on the invocation of Nigerian pride, the reality of the participants' actions challenges the claim of "100% Nigerian." For example, the same reporter quoted above pointed to how American to the core the Nigerian parade really is. He said, "In New York, there is always some parade or some flag-waving ceremonies.... It feels wonderful that Nigeria has finally joined the fun in large numbers." Indeed, Italian celebration of Columbus Day and Irish celebration of St. Patrick's Day are widely acknowledged as distinct markers not of foreign exclusivity, but as expressions of American ethnicity. Nigerian Americans, newcomers to this practice, are well on their way to defining through a commemorative culture their position in America's multicultural tapestry. 50
   

CONCLUSION

 
      Arguing for a rejection of the label "African American" in favor of "Black" with a capital "B," Professor of Linguistics John H. McWhorter explains that
modern America is home now to millions of immigrants who were born in Africa. Their cultures and identities are split between Africa and the United States. They have last names like Onwughalu and Senkofa. They speak languages like Wolof, Twi, Yoruba, and Hausa and speak English with an accent. They were raised on African cuisine, music, dance and dress styles, customs, and family dynamics. Their children often speak or at least understand their parents' native language.... My roots trace back to working class Black people—Americans, not foreigners—and I'm proud of it.... Four men with my name and appearance, doing their best in a segregated America, came before me. They and their dearest are the heritage that I feel in my heart, and they knew the sidewalks of Philadelphia and Atlanta, not the sidewalks of Sierra Leone.68
 		51
      McWhorter alludes to an important point: the various black groups in America are not an ossified monolith in a Crèvecoeuran melting pot. The identities and cultures formed and dramatized by foreign blacks vividly underscore this. Still, McWhorter's vision of an unencumbered, native-born black ownership of "black" with a capital "B" is overly optimistic. The immigrants' changing identities do not evolve in a vacuum. Since the early twentieth century, these identities, though described as African and Caribbean, have never been entirely these. For while they reflect the nonracial, transnational identities of the immigrants and their children that connect them to their homelands and immigrant communities elsewhere, these identities are formed, negotiated, and projected mainly within their experiences as blacks in America. 52


NOTES

1.  Everett Hughes, "Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status," American Journal of Sociology 50 (1945): 353–59.

2.  The term "voluntary" is problematic, especially when it is used to describe refugees forced from their homes. In this essay, it describes the immigration of people of African descent to the U.S. as free persons since the 1860s.

3.  Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959).

4.  Quoted in Rachel Swarns, "'African-American' Becomes a Term for Debate," New York Times, August 29, 2004.

5.  See Rachel Swarns, "So Far, Obama Can't Take Black Vote for Granted," New York Times, February 2, 2007.

6.  For an analysis of Obama's postracial politics, see Janny Scott, "A Biracial Candidate Walks His Own Fine Line," New York Times, December 29, 2007.

7.  U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor (Washington, DC, 1900–1933).

8.  Ira Reid, The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics and Social Adjustments, 1899–1937 (New York, 1939), 244.

9.  For more on Hart-Cellar, especially its revolutionary outcomes, see David M. Reimers, "An Unintended Reform: The 1965 Immigration Act and Third World Immigration to the United States," Journal of American Ethnic History 13 (Fall 1983): 9–28.

10.  See Michel S. Laguerre, Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America (New York, 1998), 86.

11.  John Logan, "Who Are the Other African Americans? Contemporary African and Caribbean Immigrants in the United States," in The Other African Americans: Contemporary African and Caribbean Immigrants in the United States, ed. Yoku Shaw-Taylor and Steven Tuch (Lanham, MD, 2007), 49–53; Mary Mederios Kent, "Immigration and America's Black Population," Population Bulletin 62, no.4 (2007): Table 3.

12.  Marilyn Halter, Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860–1985 (Urbana, IL, 1993).

13.  Nnamdi Azikiwe, first president of Nigeria, and Kwame Nkrumah, first prime minister of Ghana, were among the first sub-Saharan Africans to study in the United States, doing so in the 1920s and 1930s.

14.  For more on the new African diaspora to America, see April Gordon, "The New Diaspora: African Immigration to the United States," Journal of Third World Studies 15, no. 1 (1998): 79–103; Khalid Koser, New African Diasporas (London, 2003); Sylviane Diouf, "The New African Diaspora," in In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, ed. Sylviane Diouf and Howard Dodson (New York, 2005); and Kwadwo Konadu-Agyemang, Baffour K. Takyi, and John Arthur, eds., The New African Diaspora in North America: Trends, Community Building and Adaptation (Lanham, MD, 2006).

15.  Department of Homeland Security, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, various years, http://www.dhs.gov (accessed January 29, 2008).

16.  Logan, "Who are the Other African Americans," 56; Kent, "Immigration and America's Black Population," Table 4; Jill H. Wilson, "African-Born Black Immigrants in the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Area," 13; Kent, "Immigration and America's Black Population." For more on the brain drain from Africa, see Arun Peter Lobo, "Unintended Consequences: Liberalized U.S. Immigration Law and the African Brain Drain," in Konadu-Agyemang, Takyi, and Arthur, eds., The New African Diaspora in North America, 168–88.

17.  In his ethnographical study, sociologist John Arthur recounts numerous stories of how Africans pooled resources together to educate family members in the United States. See John A. Arthur, Invisible Sojourners: African Immigrant Diaspora in the United States (Westport, CT, 2000). Oral history collected for this essay and a larger, ongoing study, with Marilyn Halter, on West Africans in America offers many insights into the emphasis on education at home and in America.

18.  Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Middle-Class Blacks Angry? Why Should America Care? (New York, 1995), 11.

19.  Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1944); August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto (New York, 1966); Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA, 1993); Peter Rose, They and We: Racial and Ethnic Relations in the United States (New York, 1997); Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Stephen Steinberg, ed., Race and Ethnicity in the United States: Issues and Debates (Malden, MA, 1994); Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston, 1993).

20.  Holt, Problem of Race, 8.

21.  Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 176–219.

22.  For more on the Sweet episode and its relevance for explaining race and race relations in the 1920s, see Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York, 2004).

23.  See Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington, IN, 1996); Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca, NY, 1992); and Violet Showers Johnson, The Other Black Bostonians: West Indians in Boston, 1900–1950 (Bloomington, IN, 2006).

24. Boston Chronicle, February 15, 1936.

25.  An excellent study of Caribbean activism in the first half of the twentieth century is Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London, 1998).

26.  Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Turé), at the age of eleven, emigrated with his parents from Trinidad. He is best known in the history of the black struggle as one of the founding members and leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and as an honorary figure in the Black Panther Party.

27.  Kelly Miller, Watchtower, New York Amsterdam News, September 15, 1934.

28.  Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Cose, Rage of a Privileged Class, 1; Holt, Problem of Race, 5–6.

29.  In the fall of 2006, racial tensions at a high school in Jena, Louisiana, exploded into a schoolyard fight between white and black students. The white students got away with lenient punishments because their actions, including a display of nooses, were seen as a "prank." The black students, dubbed the Jena Six, on the other hand, received harsh punishments, including an attempted murder charge for some. This twenty-first-century version of Jim Crow justice unleashed a national uproar and protest reminiscent of the civil rights era.

30.  Patrick Grant, "Coming to America with Eyes Wide Shut," in Foreign-born African Americans: Silenced Voices in the Discourse of Race, ed. Festus E. Obiakor and Patrick A. Grant (New York, 2005).

31.  Kofi Konadu Apraku, Outside Looking In: An African Perspective on American Pluralistic Society (Westport, CT, 1996), xiii; Sabella Abidde, "Wind of Change?" Nigerians in America, http://www.nigeriansinamerica.com/articles/597/1/Africans-At-Home-and-Abroad, March 21, 2005, (accessed March 31, 2005); Cheikh T. Sylla is quoted in Tracie Reddick, "Africans vs. African Americans: A Shared Complexion Does Not Guarantee Racial Solidarity," Tampa Tribune, May 15, 1998.

32.  Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great about America (New York, 2002), 129–30.

33.  Stephen Steinberg, "Immigration, African Americans, and the Race Discourse," New Politics 10 (2005), http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue39/steingerg39.htm (accessed October 12, 2005).

34.  Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1850–1925 (New York, 1976); John Sibley Butler, Entrepreneurship and Self-Help among Black Americans: A Reconsideration of Race and Economics (Albany, NY, 1991).

35.  For an analysis of the killing of Mulegeta Seraw and its aftermath, see Elinor Langer, A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America (New York, 2003).

36.  For a descriptive account of the Louima police brutality incident, see Marie Brenner, "Incident in the 70th Precinct," Vanity Fair, December 1997.

37.  For an account of the Diallo killing and aftermath, including the friction between Diallo's family and African American leaders over how to protest, see Kadiatou Diallo and Craig Wolff, My Heart Will Cross This Ocean: My Story, My Son, Amadou (New York, 2003).

38.  The Haitian American community got some of its early training in American activism from responding to the brazen AIDS stigmatization in the mid-1980s and in 1990. In 1985 Haitians came out en masse and successfully demanded that they be removed from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) list that singled them out as a national group most likely to have HIV. In 1990 another federal agency, the Food and Drug Administration, attempted a repeat stigmatization by cautioning that Haitian blood donors were potential HIV carriers. This assault was met with rage, protest, and ultimate victory for the Haitians, reminiscent of the 1980s showdown with the CDC.

39.  Frankie Edozien, "Remembering Amadou Diallo," The African, February 2002.

40.  Ibid.

41.  A. Olubode, interview by Violet M. Showers Johnson, May 17, 2003, recording in possession of Johnson.

42.  Ruel R. Rogers, "Race-Based Coalitions among Minority Groups: Afro-Caribbean Immigrants and African-Americans in New York City," Urban Affairs Review 39, no. 3 (January 2004): 283–317.

43.  Mark Bixler, "Across Metro Atlanta, African Immigrants Gather around Their Radios," Atlanta Journal and Constitution, November 29, 1999.

44.  On March 3, 1991, Los Angeles police brutally beat Rodney King, an African American, after a high-speed pursuit. The videotape of this incident convinced many that it was racially motivated. The outcry became louder when, a year later, the officers involved were acquitted. The "race" riots sparked by this episode remain one of the most glaring illustrations of America's enduring race problems.

45.  Elizabeth Alexander, "Can You Be Black and Look at This? Reading the Rodney King Video(s)," in The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book, by the Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago, 1995), 82.

46.  Emmet Till was an African American teenager from Chicago who, on a visit to Mississippi in 1955, was brutally murdered for allegedly insulting a white woman. His death is now acknowledged as one of the catalysts for the modern civil rights movement.

47.  Manthia Diawara, We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (New York, 2003), ix.

48.  U.S. Congress, Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 3rd sess., vol. 52, pt. 1, December 31, 1914, S 1134.

49.  For example, in the early 1920s, a group of Anglican West Indians in Boston held services in the predominantly white Church of the Ascension. The white members flagrantly displayed racism, bigotry, and contempt by fumigating the church after the black foreigners left. See Robert Hayden, Faith, Culture and Leadership: A History of the Black Church in Boston (Boston, 1983), 50–53.

50.  See Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 56–65; Showers Johnson, Other Black Bostonians, 55–59.

51.  Halter, Between Race and Ethnicity, 148–50.

52.  Yanick St. Jean, "Contrasting Religious Preferences between Catholic African Americans and Haitian Americans," in Shaw-Taylor and Tuch, eds., The Other African Americans, 154.

53.  Soliny Védrine, "The History off the Haitian Church in Boston: 1969–2004," Emmanuel Research Review 1 (2004), http://egc.org/research/issue_1.htm#Hatians_Boston (accessed August 17, 2006).

54.  Regine Jackson, "Beyond Social Distancing: Intermarriage and Ethnic Boundaries among Black Americans in Boston," in Shaw-Taylor and Tuch, eds., The Other African Americans, 217–53.

55.  PhD candidate Mark Gornik counted 110 African immigrant churches in New York alone in 2003. See Daniel Wakin, "Where Gospel Resounds in African Tongues," New York Times, April 18, 2004.

56.  The history of independent African churches in America, still unfolding, is only just being researched. Jacob Olupona, professor of African and African American Studies, received a substantial grant from the Ford Foundation to study African immigrant religious communities in major U.S. cities. The project yielded conferences; symposia; and, most recently, an anthology. Jacob K. Olupona and Regina Gemignani, eds., African Immigrant Religions in America (New York, 2007).

57.  From blog comments responding to article on African immigrant churches, "Christianity Turns Brown," October 2002, http://www.amren.com/news/o4/o4/20/africanchurches.html (accessed February 27, 2006).

58.  See Robert L. Boyd, "The Storefront Church Ministry in African American Communities of the Urban North during the Great Migration: The Making of an Ethnic Niche," Social Science Journals 35, no. 3 (1998): 319–32.

59.  See Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. (New York, 1998), chapter 2.

60.  Yoruba Islamic organizations in major American cities offer a good example of Islam and African ethnicity. See Yushau Sodiq, "African Muslims in the United States: The Nigerian Case," in Olupona and Gemignani, eds., African Immigrant Religions. For more examples, see Linda Beck, "West African Muslims in America: When Are Muslims Not Muslims?" in ibid.

61.  For a description of the 2003 visit of the spiritual leader, the eighty-three-year-old sheik, Mourtada Mbaké, see Susan Sachs, "In Harlem's Fabric, Bright Threads of Senegal," New York Times, July 28, 2003.

62.  For more on Senegalese Murids in America, see Cheikh Anta Babou, "Brotherhood, Solidarity, Education and Migration: The Role of the Dahiras among the Murid Muslim Community of New York," African Affairs 101 (April 2002): 151–70.

63.  Kwasi Kwakye-Nuako, "Still Praisin' God in a New Land: African Immigrant Christianity in North America," in Konadu-Agyemang, Takyi, and Arthur, eds., New African Diaspora in North America, 122.

64.  For a scholarly examination of the Caribbean carnival in the diaspora, see Philip W. Scher, Carnival and the Formation of a Caribbean Transnation (Gainesville, FL, 2003).

65.  Kasinitz, Caribbean New York, 159.

66.  Paul T. Adujie, "Nigeria's National Independence Day Celebrations, New York," African Abroad-USA, October 6, 2005.

67.  Ibid.

68.  John H. Mc Whorter, "Why I'm Black, Not African American," Los Angeles Times, September 8, 2004.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.

 



Fall, 2008 Previous Table of Contents Next