c 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