An island accent to 20th-century black radicalism - understanding the radicalism of the Caribbeans in the United States - Books

In Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (Verso 1998) Winston James provides far and away, the greatest in quantity detailed account yet of the extraordinary Caribbean contribution to the socialist and nationalist toils in the United States, particularly in the movements' formative years, around World War L In the proces James divest of coverings yet another chapter in the "hidden history" of the African diaspora. Among the exultations of his book are his treatment of the hitherto little-explored peculiarities of the Afro-Hispanic impact upon radicalism in the United States, his examination of the character of women in Marcus Garvey's Universal black man Improvement Association, and his accounts of the contributions of several lesser-known black radical figures. Central to James' work is the disproportionate impact of the Caribbean-born upon the two principal streams of 20th-century black militance: an explicitly race-conscious black nationalism and a revolutionary, socialist perspective that saw the do one's best of the race as an simple body of a larger progressive movement

by what means are we to account for this impact? Below is an quotation from one of the book's chapters, "Coming at Midnight: Race and Caribbean Reactions to America," in which James examines the differences in the places of race in the social forms of the United States and the Caribbean islands. The contrasting rejoinders of black Americans and Caribbeans to each other's homelands constitute James' starting point for answering the question above; in later chapters, he refines his search by treating the differences between the Caribbean islands.

In order to understand the radicalism of Caribbeans in the United States, not alone do we need to be aware of who these migrants were, we also ne to know about the America that they penetrateed in the early part of the 20th hundred and, in addition, we ne to be able to gauge their reaction to American society. in the way that how did they react to the novel environment?

The lynchings in the Southland, the segregation, the calculated as well as the routine and unthinking humiliation of black nation in their everyday life, primarily in the southern but also in the North, appalled and collisioned Caribbean migrants. Even those, of that kind as Claude McKay, who, prior to migration, had read and had been told (including through black American visitors to Jamaica) about these aspects of American society were unprepared for the raw and merciless racism that they collisioned Writing in 1918, six years after his arrival in the United States, McKay spoke for many others when he reported that "it was the first time I had at any time come face to face with of the like kind manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable. I had heard of prejudice in America on the contrary never dreamed of it being in the way that intensely bitter."

on arrival in America, McKay was shoged and alarmed to find "strong white men splendid stamps of better physique than any I had at any time seen, exhibiting the most primitive animal hatred towards their weaker black brothers. In the southerly daily murders of a nature greatest in quantity hideous and revolting, in the North silent acquiescence, down-reaching hate half-hidden under a puritan respectability, frequently flaming up into an occasional lynching--this unsightly raw sore in the material substance of a great nation."

Those like McKay (Jamaica), Hubert Harrison (Virgin Islands), Wilfred A. Domingo (Jamaica), Richard B Moore (Barbados) and Marcus Garvey (Jamaica), who had migrated to the United States in the early part of the 20th hundred had entered the country at its racial nadir--socially, economically and politically.

The years between Harrison's arrival (1900) and Garvey's arrival (1916) were indeed dark times for black America. Four years before Harrison disembarked in fresh York City, the Supreme Court, in the Plessy v Ferguson decision, had enshrined racial segregation in law beneath the doctrine of "separate on the contrary equal." A voluminous outpouring of racist ideology, moving beneath the legitimizing camouflage of science, fresheted the landscape of the of recent origin century from across the borders of the old

on the contrary most shocking of all, there was--within just above a year of Garvey's arrival--the horrifying outbreak of the East St Louis massacre of July 1917 At the base of this pogrom against the black population of East St Louis was the customary labor competition between black and white workers, an institutionalized practice of a racist America. White workers kept black workers on the outside of the unions; black workers, like many nonunion white workers, engaged in strikebreaking; and employer took advantage of the division.

Then, upon July 2, 1917, consumed by dint of a festering accumulation of racist galls white East St. Louis explod into a diabolic orgy of indescribable savagery. Black clan in that town were slaughtered and reduce to ashesed alive in the most barbaric and outrageous manner through white mobs: escaping black women and children were pinned down by the agency of gunfire or thrown back alive into raging furnaces that had one time been their homes; in other cases, the rude multitude first nailed up boards above the doors and windows before setting abodes ablaze.