| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Other Black Bostonians: West Indians in Boston, 1900–1950. By Violet Showers Johnson. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. xii, 181 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-253-34752-1.)
For Ralph Waldo Emerson (the same was true for J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and others before him) America was this "asylum of all the nations ... of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles & Cossacks, & all the European tribes—of the Africans" who together would become a new people (Joel Porte, ed., Emerson in His Journals, 1982). The numerous European tribes—the English, Irish, Italians, and Jews—and the Africans brought to or who settled in Boston, have found their storytellers. Indeed, few American cities can boast a historiographical pedigree as old and as rich as that centered on "freedom's birthplace."	1
The Other Black Bostonians focuses on a small segment of the Afro-Caribbean outmigration, namely those from Barbados, Jamaica, and Montserrat, who came to Boston in the first half of the twentieth century. Using European as well as foreign and native-born blacks in Boston and New York as a template for comparison, the study is intended to rescue from obscurity "a hitherto understudied community whose history reveals deep insights into West Indian migration and Boston history" (p. 124).	2
By the outbreak of World War I, the number of black foreigners coming to Boston from the British West Indies placed the city behind only New York and Miami as a favored destination. Most of these "step-migrants" came from New York with smaller numbers emigrating from the nearby cities of Providence and Hartford. As a percentage of the city's total black population, the number of West Indians remained very small throughout the fifty years studied. In 1910 West Indians numbered 566 or 5 percent of blacks in the city, and by the end of the period their number was estimated at 5,000 or some 12 percent.	. . .

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