The Black Political Tradition in New York

Abstract

The migration of Afro-Americans from the American South to Northern cities during and after World War I is a familiar tale. The other major African migrant stream of early provenance and significant political resonance has been the English-speaking West Indian from the Commonwealth Caribbean and Virgin Islands. Ira Reid's The Negro Immigrant is probably still the best known scholarly appraisal of this group. Some of the major results of these migrations, for instance, the Harlem Renaissance and the multifaceted phenomena of urbanization, are now very familiar. This article explores different ground. It is an account of three areas of the constantly evolving New York Black political tradition of the twentieth century and of the West Indian role, fundamental or adaptive, in their evolution. We shall examine the strange phenomena of street journalism which for a time graduated into larger tasks than reportage and chronicling, the assimilation of West Indian migrant women to the political standards of their Afro-American sisters, and a necessarily limited account of the growth of a political sense of community in Black New York.