BY the 1920s, and some would argue earlier in the 1900s, a quiet revolution was stirring in the black communities across the Americas. Outlooks and attitudes were beginning to change as the people reflected on their circumstances.

The system of plantation slavery that had characterised the region from the 16th century was, by that time, a thing of the past. It had ended in Jamaica for nearly a century and for over five decades in the southern states of the United States of America — the last territory to abolish the system in the Western Hemisphere. Yet by the 1920s the descendants of these enslaved people were still in a transitional phase and there were no signs of impending improvements to their condition.

They were no longer shackled to the plantation but power still resided with one racial group — the whites. Their situation virtually remained stagnant because adequate provisions were not made on the heels of Emancipation to accommodate the newly freed class who expected the change to bring about prosperity and equality.

In Jamaica, for instance, although the majority of blacks were emancipated almost three decades before southern blacks, their circumstances were hardly better than those of the newly emancipated people in the United States at the close of the 19th century. This was made manifest with the Morant Bay Rebellion which was, undoubtedly, a vehement expression of the plight of the masses.

While the colonial authorities in Jamaica failed to implement appropriate measures to attend to the needs of the newly freed population, the United States Congress put in place policies and programmes to facilitate this new class. In 1866 a civil rights Bill was passed and a new Freedmen’s Bureau was established in an effort to thwart the inevitable racial discrimination by southern legislators. Also, the Congress passed a 14th amendment to the constitution, stating, “All persons born or naturalised in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and the state of which they reside.”

This policy of reconstruction (1865-1870) was all a part of the effort by the United States to remodel its social, political, and economic life after the devastation brought about by the civil war in 1861. Of course, a significant part of rebuilding concerned the former enslaved people, many of whom were homeless and jobless. This period therefore brought about some degree of success for blacks but the extent of this was measured against the yardstick of the increase in violence and intimidating tactics employed, especially by southern whites desperate to keep in place as much of the old south as possible. Jim Crow laws, and other austerity measures imposed on blacks, caused a mass migration of southern blacks to the north, in search of greener pastures.

This Great Migration, as it came to be called, coincided with that of the West Indian migrant workers who travelled to the United States in search of better job opportunities. Unemployment in the colonies for blacks was high, and the limited scope of social and economic advancement drove West Indians to other countries.

“They had been migrating within the region throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, to work on the sugar estates in Trinidad, Cuba, and British Guiana; on banana plantations and the rail system in Costa Rica; and on the building of the Panama Canal. Some 20,000 had even [gone] to the United States by 1900, particularly after the United Fruit Company began importing bananas in the 1880s, paving the way for fairly inexpensive travel (and increased tourism) between the Caribbean and the United States,” states the Louis J Parascandola-edited Look For Me All Around You Anglophone Caribbean Immigrants in the Harlem Renaissance.

Attention turned to the northern states of the USA in the early 1900s because World War I halted travel to Europe, and the demand for unskilled workers dried up in places such as Panama with the completion of the canal in 1914. Further, with the industrial boom in full swing in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and New York, opportunities for unskilled industrial labour were plenty.

As such, thousands of West Indians flocked these areas in search of work. Harlem was one of the areas with the highest concentration of the West Indian migrant population — “one in four Harlemites [being] foreign born, mostly from the Anglophone Caribbean”. This commingling of southern and West Indian blacks with blacks from other sections of the United States, as well as those who were already resident in these parts, gave rise to an earnest reshaping of black ideology in the 1920s and 1930s.

The problem of racial discrimination in the United States of America was rife. Though racism was a problem in the West Indies as well, the high ratio of blacks to whites in the West Indies and the complexities presented by a significantly large coloured middle class and a small but emerging number of middle class blacks made class distinctions feature more prominently than race.

Thus, the degree of racial discrimination in the United States was shocking for West Indian migrants who believed that they were to be judged not on the basis of the colour of their skin, but by their performance and contribution to the society. Nevertheless, despite the achievements of black people on United States soil, it was the colour of their skin that was ultimately used to define their status. This was counter to the experience of those who originated from the West Indies, as there, class elevation could, in a sense, ‘whiten’ their complexion and enable them to move among the social elites and accord them with the respect usually reserved for whites and their near-white progenies. It is not surprising, therefore, that West Indians rejected this notion of racial discrimination in the United States and spoke out against it.

While not all migrant workers became agitators for change, a number of intellectuals among them took up the cause. The effort of these West Indians to combat discrimination was not initially supported by the native blacks who themselves discriminated against West Indians on the basis of the competition they presented for jobs and their cultural differences in terms of language, mode of dress, traditional practices, and their perceived arrogance.

As a result, it may perhaps be argued that the displaced status of West Indians in the United States helped to fuel their quest to carve out not just a place for their racial kind in that society, but also to secure for themselves a place that they could truly call theirs — where they were accepted by their own kind, formed the majority of the population, and were free from colonial control.

The integrationist approach strived for by prominent native black leaders, such as Booker T Washington, had reaped little success. West Indian intellectuals who emerged, the most prominent and forceful of whom was Marcus Garvey, touted instead the concept of black unity — separatism and the creation of black-owned enterprises. Garvey took this further by promoting a “Back to Africa” programme which was to help bring about the regeneration of mother Africa, a necessary prerequisite for positioning the continent as a powerful black nation.

The move away from integration was a reflection of the failure of the black man in American society to get the respect he deserved based on his accomplishments. The success of many West Indian migrants in business became an inspiration to many native blacks who began to realise the potential that resided within the black community. They began to accept that change was not going to come from white society — it had to come from within the black community.

This idea of black self-determination resonated with blacks, regardless of their cultural differences, and soon their shared experiences of oppression and suppression stemming from racial discrimination bonded them. Out of this flowed reinterpretations of blackness and redefinitions of the nation state that made it no longer tenable for black people to accept the social and political construct of the societies from which they originated and in which they lived and worked.

TOMORROW: Jamaican migrants and the New Negro Movement

— Kesia Weise is a researcher at the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica/Jamaica Memory Bank