Chapter 9
The New Negro
Immigration and Migration
During the nineteenth century, the American racial dilemma had appeared to be a regional problem. The Northern states had abolished slavery early in the century, and the abolitionists self-righteously condemned Southern slaveholders while remaining unaware of their own racism. However, the twentieth century showed that racism was really a national issue. Thousands of Afro-Americans moved from the rural South into the urban North, creating a more even distribution of that population throughout the country. At the same time, there was a fresh wave of voluntary immigration into America by peoples with an African heritage. Most of these newcomers also moved into Northern cities. As thousands of blacks spread into the North and West, the inhabitants there developed sympathies with Southern racists. Actually, this population shift only unearthed attitudes which had been there all the time. This gigantic migration of peoples was symptomatic of the change in the heart of the black community. It signaled a new dynamism and a new aggressiveness.
The voluntary black immigration which occurred during the twentieth century was a new and unusual phenomenon. Almost all blacks who had previously come to America had been brought in chains. Those who came voluntarily during this century came in spite of their knowledge that racism would confront them. Their awareness of American racism, however, was an abstraction and was only partially understood by them. Nevertheless, they saw America as the land of prosperity and opportunity at a time when, for many of them, social and economic conditions in their homeland did not seem promising. While only a few came from Africa itself, except as students staying for a limited period, there was a swelling flow from the West Indies and the entire Caribbean area.
At the beginning of the 1920s, the United States imposed a new quota system on new immigrants and this drastically slowed the influx of people from South and East Europe. In spite of the racist and ethnic overtones of this legislation, it failed to build significant barriers to movement by blacks within the western hemisphere. During the 1920s large numbers of blacks came to the United States from other parts of the Americas. By 1930 eighty-six percent of the foreign-born Negroes living in the United States were born in some other country in this hemisphere. By far the largest number of these, seventy-three percent, came from the West Indies and most of them were from the British West Indies.
By 1940, there were some eighty-four thousand foreign-born Negroes living in the country. As large as this total might appear, still less than one percent of the twelve million Negroes were recorded in the 1940 census. Most of these new immigrants went to live in large cities in the Northeast, with by far the majority being concentrated in New York City itself. At the point when the influx was at its highest, in 1930, seventeen percent of the Negroes in New York City were foreign born.
An unusually high percentage of these newcomers had held white-collar occupations--mostly young professionals with little hope of advancement in the static economy of the Islands. Although they were aware of the American racial situation, they were still unprepared to cope with it. Most of them were accustomed to being part of the majority in their homeland. They had experienced discrimination before, but it had not been as uncompromising as what they found on arrival in America. Society, as they knew it, was divided into whites, mulattoes, and blacks instead of into black and white. Many mulattoes were not psychologically ready for the experience of being lumped in with the Blacks. Moreover, the racism they knew had been modified by an economic class system which left some of the poor whites with less status than that of professional blacks. Coming to America, for them, meant a loss of status although it might also mean an increase in affluence.
James Weldon Johnson described the West Indian immigrants as being almost totally different from the Southern rural Negroes who had moved into New York City. He said that the West Indians displayed a high intelligence, many having an English common-school education, and he noted that there was almost no illiteracy among them. He also said that they were sober-minded and had a genius for business enterprise. It has been estimated that one-third of the city's Negro professionals, physicians, dentists, and lawyers, were foreign born.