West Indians

WEST INDIANS. Defined until recent times as the Anglophone or English speaking island dwellers, arrived in the United States in significant numbers at the end of the nineteenth century, mainly settling in New York City. Largely due to their education and political experience, by 1901 they controlled twenty percent of Harlem business and had begun to work in the left wing of the Democratic Party. The rise of a Harlem Left and the Left period of Garveyism soon placed a handful of West Indians in the leadership of some leftist African American organizations.

In the late teens, the most prominent politician in Harlem was the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, who had entered the United States in 1916. Garvey advocated community unity, black economic independence, and the celebration of Africa as a cultural homeland. Garvey praised the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and heartily endorsed anticolonial struggles throughout the world, but especially in Africa. His rhetorical call of “Africa for the Africans” made a deep and permanent imprint on African American thinking. His radicalism greatly concerned the attorney general of the United States. The young J. Edgar Hoover was chosen to monitor Garvey’s activities and was instrumental in barring Garvey’s return to the United States when Garvey undertook a month-long tour of the Caribbean in 1921.

After Garvey managed reentry into the United States, he began a long rightist drift. In 1923, Garvey was charged with and convicted of mail fraud involving his attempt to form a black-owned shipping line. He served two years in prison before he lost an appeal and was deported in 1927. From that time until his death in 1940, Garvey undertook various economic and political initiatives, but none reached the mass proportions of his years in Harlem. His speeches and writings eventually became overtly anti-Communist and anti-Semitic. Garveyism continued as an ill-defined movement in the United States, identified primarily by its insistence on cultural and economic independence.

Socialist Wilfred Domingo, the first editor of the Garveyite Negro World, broke with Garveyism in the early 1920s and joined Cyril Briggs, father of the African Blood Brotherhood, in the pages of The Crusader, the revolutionary nationalist affiliate of the Communist Party. A third Jamaican, Claude McKay, was an editor of The Liberator, a Comintern delegate, and a prominent figure, along with other West Indians, in the Harlem Renaissance. None of these individuals found themselves comfortable for lengthy periods within the American Left. Despite the claims of Harold Cruse in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Communist leaders did not favor West Indians over African Americans, nor did West Indians keep leadership of black movements for themselves. Only Trinidadian C. L. R. James ascended to anything like leadership of a predominantly white movement.

Beginning in the 1930s, English-speaking West Indians began a mass movement out of Harlem to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The West Indians who remained in Harlem continued to play pioneering roles in the Democratic Party. Bertram Baker of Nevis became the first black member of the New York state assembly in 1948, Hulan Jack of Saint Lucia became the first black president of the borough of Manhattan in 1953, and J. Raymond Jones of Jamaica became the first black leader of Tammany Hall in 1964. The influence of West Indians grew when the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 reopened the door of mass immigration shut by the quotas established by the immigration statutes of 1924 and reinforced by security measures of the 1950s. From 1965 through the 1990s nearly 100,000 Jamaicans immigrated to Brooklyn, making them the largest group of islanders in the city.

In the early post-1965 period, an upsurge of West Indian nationalism and the desire to pursue graduate studies placed select immigrants in the academy. Emigrés established political clubs, cultural organizations, and reading circles in New York, Montreal, and other large cities. Dozens of the graduate students involved were later prominent in left-leaning governments of Jamaica, Guyana, and Grenada as well as in opposition movements in Trinidad, Barbados, Saint Kitts, and Dominica. Many of them were under the influence of the peripatetic and avuncular C. L. R. James.

Ironically for these intellectuals, the strongest influence of West Indians upon American radical youth was through the arts. Harry Belafonte became the first West Indian to achieve enormous box office success. Although his music was politically sanitized, Belafonte was prominently identified with the civil rights movement and was an outspoken supporter of the Castro revolution in Cuba. American-born but Bahamian-raised Sidney Poitier, an intimate friend and political ally of Belafonte who eventually eclipsed Belafonte in motion pictures, shared most of Belafonte’s views. Both were major fund-raisers for black liberation and radical initiatives, and both spoke warmly of the advice and support they had received from Paul Robeson when they were unknowns living in Harlem. The interface of West Indian and African American interests was not unusual, and numerous individuals who identified themselves as African American were also aware of and proud of their West Indian heritage. Examples from the civil rights movement are numerous and include leading personalities such as Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Bayard Rustin, the tactical coordinator of the March on Washington. From time to time, conflicts between distinctly African American and West Indian interests arose but had aspects of a family quarrel.

A prominent example of an individual who seamlessly combined West Indian, African American, and radical issues was Cleveland Robinson (1915–1995). For forty years Robinson was an officer in District 65 of New York City, one of the most radical unions in the nation. Robinson was among the first labor leaders to assist the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956 and became the labor adviser thereafter to Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. During the course of the civil rights movement, Robinson was identified as a figure on the Left who could maintain warm relationships with both A. Philip Randolph and Paul Robeson. At Robinson’s funeral, Harry Belafonte, another long-time friend, noted that Robinson had given him his first paid singing job and had impressed upon him that art that did not serve the cause of human rights was no art at all. In the later years of his career, Robinson was a fervent supporter of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, even committing civil disobedience in its service. In 1990 his efforts in behalf of that historic struggle were honored by his being named cochairman of the triumphal ticker tape parade accorded by the city of New York to Nelson Mandela.

With the advent of the New Left and counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, reggae music, particularly the work of Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff, became a rage with American youth. Touring campuses heavy with the smell of marijuana but also wrapped up in revolutionary dreams, such musicians roused young and not-so-young left-wingers with songs such as “Let’s Seize the Time.” The Harder They Come, a low-budget film starring Jimmy Cliff as a reggae singer, became an underground hit.

By the late 1970s, West Indian immigrants and their children were enrolling in growing numbers in public colleges. Caribbeans of all backgrounds made the annual Labor Day carnival in Brooklyn not only the largest cultural event of the boroughs but one still influenced by remnants of an earlier Left. Musicians like the Trinidadian schoolteacher “Chalkdust” (Hollis Liverpool) taught history and political lessons through music, making frequent trips to venues in the United States. Tim Hector, a James disciple and the opposition leader on the small island of Antigua, likewise served as a prominent figure on the Caribbean American political stage through appearances and his widely circulated left-wing newspaper, the Outlet.

Non-English-speaking Caribbeans, especially Dominicans and Haitians, also played steadily more important roles in the middle and lower ranks of community organizations, electoral efforts, and labor organizations. Haitians, in particular, had a vibrant press that was usually sympathetic to reformist and revolutionary initiatives in the United States and the Caribbean. One widening community of immigrants in particular, from the Dominican Republic, began to find a way for themselves within the Leftward edges of the Democratic Party. Especially in Rhode Island where their population grew rapidly, they gained local and state offices.

The decline of the Anglophone Caribbean Left after 1980, and the aging of the remaining activists, had heavy consequences for diasporic members who might, for instance, as late as the 1990s, find themselves gathering at lectures by Tim Hector in Brooklyn (Hector died in 2001). On the intellectual side, erstwhile political allies and descendants of James such as theorist Sylvia Winter gained prominence, as did once-radical but increasingly centrist West Indian intellectuals such as Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott and political scientist Orlando Patterson. The younger generation of leftist black intellectuals included many prominent individuals of West Indian descent, including the philosopher Lewis Gordon.

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Henry, Paget, and Paul Buhle, eds. C. L. R. James’s Caribbean. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992.

Hill, Robert A., and Barbara Bair, eds. Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Perry, Jeffrey. Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918-1927. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Perry, Jeffrey. Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.