City of Islands: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York

By Tammy L. Brown

Tammy L. Brown uses the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals as “windows” into the dynamic history of immigration to New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America. The majority of the 150,000 black immigrants who arrived in the United States during the first-wave of Caribbean immigration to New York hailed from the English-speaking Caribbean—mainly Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad. Arriving at the height of the Industrial Revolution and a new era in black culture and progress, these black immigrants dreamed of a more prosperous future. However, northern-style Jim Crow hindered their upward social mobility. In response, Caribbean intellectuals delivered speeches and sermons, wrote poetry and novels, and created performance art pieces challenging the racism that impeded their success.

Brown traces the influences of religion as revealed at Unitarian minister Ethelred Brown's Harlem Community Church and in Richard B. Moore's fiery speeches on Harlem street corners during the age of the “New Negro.” She investigates the role of performance art and Pearl Primus's declaration that “dance is a weapon for social change” during the long civil rights movement. Shirley Chisholm's advocacy for women and all working-class Americans in the House of Representatives and as a presidential candidate during the peak of the Feminist Movement moves the book into more overt politics. Novelist Paule Marshall's insistence that black immigrant women be seen and heard in the realm of American Arts and Letters at the advent of “multiculturalism” reveals the power of literature. The wide-ranging styles of Caribbean campaigns for social justice reflect the expansive imaginations and individual life stories of each intellectual Brown studies. In addition to deepening our understanding of the long battle for racial equality in America, these life stories reveal the powerful interplay between personal and public politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Sep 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781626746398

Tammy L. Brown

Tammy L. Brown is assistant professor of history and black world studies at Miami University of Ohio-Oxford. Her work has appeared in Southern Cultures, American Studies Journal, and Callaloo.

Book preview

City of Islands

City of Islands

Caribbean Intellectuals in New York

TAMMY L. BROWN

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member

of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2015 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2015

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Tammy L., 1976–

City of islands : Caribbean intellectuals in New York / Tammy L. Brown.

pages cm. — (Caribbean studies series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62846-226-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-1-62674-639-8 (ebook) 1. West Indian Americans—New York (State)—New York—Intellectual life. 2. West Indian Americans—New York (State)—New York—Politics and government. 3. Intellectuals—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 4. Immigrants—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Intellectual life. 6. New York (N.Y.)—Emigration and immigration—History. 7. New York (N.Y.)—Race relations—History. 8. Social justice—New York (State)—New York—History. 9. West Indies—Emigration and immigration—History. 10. New York (N.Y.)—Emigration and immigration—History. I. Title.

F128.9.W54B76 2015

2015006780

305.896’9729074710922—dc23

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Stephen, Marion, Darren, Lamont,

and Charnée Brown

With love and gratitude—always.

Contents

Abbreviations

Prologue: An Autobiography of the Biographer

The Personal Is Political: An Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Caribbean New York

CHAPTER 2

Ethelred Brown and the Character of New Negro Leadership

CHAPTER 3

Richard B. Moore and Pan-Caribbean Consciousness

CHAPTER 4

Pearl Primus and the Performance of African Diasporic Identities

CHAPTER 5

Shirley Chisholm and the Style of Multicultural Democracy

CHAPTER 6

Paule Marshall and the Voice of Black Immigrant Women

CODA

Garvey’s Ghost: Life after Death

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

Prologue: An Autobiography of the Biographer

Finding out and writing about people, living or dead, is tricky work. It is necessary to balance intimacy with distance while at the same time being inquisitive to the point of invasiveness. Getting too close to your subject is a major danger, but not getting to know her well enough is just as likely.¹

—JILL LEPORE

This book is about the power of biography and the complex cultural landscapes that are formed and transformed through the struggles and triumphs of an individual’s life. I use the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals as windows into the dynamic history of immigration in New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America, from the time of the New Negro through the post-civil rights era. The historical subjects that I’ve selected, Ethelred Brown, Richard B. Moore, Pearl Primus, Shirley Chisholm, and Paule Marshall, show how black immigrant intellectuals leveraged their African diasporic identities to both challenge racism and to push for the reform of American democracy during four important political movements: the era of racial uplift, anti-colonialism, the civil rights movement, and third-wave feminism. In each case, personality, cultural upbringing, and historical context shaped the intellectual’s chosen mode of resistance. These life stories prove that the personal is political and the political is personal. The public and private realms of each life are inextricable, and the very process of telling these life stories is a personal and political endeavor for me as the author.

In presenting the delicate balance between the personal and political meanings of a life story, the biographer takes center stage alongside her historical subjects. No matter how objective a writer claims to be, the author’s personal and political views dictate the substance, shape, and tenor of the story told. Yes, historical objectivity is a myth—a fact that impressed me so much as a freshman at Harvard University in my first reading assignment for a course called The History of Modern Africa. I still recall the provocative quote from British historian Edward Carr’s seminal text What is History?: The facts of history never come to us ‘pure.’ . . . They are always refracted through the mind of the recorder.² It follows that, to understand the meaning of any historical narrative, we also must understand the life story and cultural perspective of the author. This mandate might sound like the words of an anthropologist in the mouth of a historian, but instead of an act of ventriloquism, I consider it sage advice.

The author’s identity is fundamental because her worldview determines which stories she deems worthy of being told. Historian David Levering Lewis, known for his epic accounts of celebrated black (male) intellectuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr., underscored this point in his keynote address titled The Autobiography of Biography, which he delivered at the sixth annual Leon Levy Biography lecture at the City University of New York in September 2013. In his meditation on the relationship between the biographer to the chosen subject, Lewis attributed his own success as an author to his privileged upbringing in an upper-middle class, stable family that valued education and his training at two of the world’s premier institutions of higher learning, Columbia University and the London School of Economics. Referencing Du Bois’s classic vision of racial uplift, Lewis’s description of himself as a newly minted . . . pure [member of the]‘talented tenth’ reveals a productive self-awareness that is characteristic of exceptional writers, but it also suggests a tacit acceptance of elitist norms that influences his sole focus on highly educated black men.³ Lewis’s familial and educational background laid the foundation for his award-winning writing, but he also recognizes the role that curiosity and serendipity played in shaping his intellectual success. Scholars should do this more often—that is, reveal their own idiosyncrasies and humanity behind their academic methodology. After all, the intellectual path of even the most circumspect scholar has a few twists and turns. This is especially pertinent in the genre of biography. By fully acknowledging her own jagged edges, the biographer awakens her own humanity and the life stories that she tells are better for it.

It follows that all skilled biographers recognize the perils of their own biases when writing a life story. Historian Barbara Ransby is a prime example. In her award-winning biography of civil rights activist Ella Baker, Ransby cautioned Feminist biographers and scholar-activists like [herself] against the danger of imposing . . . contemporary dilemmas and expectations on a generation of women who spoke a different language, moved at a different rhythm, and juggled a different set of concerns.⁴ I share this sentiment. Scholars are often tempted, especially those who are socially conscious, politically astute, and passionate about the subject at hand, to apply current-day reality to issues of the past. This tendency to time travel is especially prevalent when writing about issues of race and cultural identity, because these concepts are fundamentally modern creations. Because academic and popular discussions of race and cultural identity can lend themselves to an anachronistic slippery slope, I have provided close readings of primary sources—including speeches, sermons, poetry, novels, and even choreography—in order to ground my analysis in the local cultural and historical context in which these documents were produced. At every turn, my methodology brings us back to the life witness of each historical actor as testimony to the lived experience of black immigrant and African diasporic peoples in twentieth-century New York.

I share Ransby and Lewis’s belief that authors should be fully forthcoming about how their own political ideals determine which stories they choose to tell and the manner in which they render them. In other words, my argument that the personal is political also applies to the author herself. So, to fully appreciate this book, you must first understand my own life story. I am, unapologetically, a feminist and humanist, and I’ve decided to tell the stories of lesser-known Caribbean intellectuals, especially women artist-activists, because I find value in telling stories that have not been told.

I was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. My interest in social justice and understudied events in black history dates back to my preteen years in the mid-1980s when my mother’s interest in African American history and quasi-radical politics encouraged me to devour classic texts such as Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro, Lerone Bennett’s Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, and Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X. A decade before I was born, the racial politics of the time sparked riots in Cincinnati that prevented my mother from enjoying a formal graduation ceremony from Hughes High School in 1967 and forever changed the neighborhood in which she grew up, Avondale. (Two decades later, at age eleven, I would attend my mother’s twentieth class reunion in the format of the graduation ceremony that they never had.) I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard my mom talk about the black- and white-owned businesses that were ransacked that summer. Usually, in that melancholy recollection, my mother also reminisces about the social and economic class diversity of the all-black neighborhood of her youth. Avondale was a neighborhood made up of single-family houses and modest apartment buildings with well-manicured lawns, and homes in which famous black baseball players, including Frankie Robinson and Vada Pinson, lived alongside working-class families like my mom’s. My maternal grandfather Clifford Wills did hard manual labor at a sweltering steel-casting factory while my grandmother Clara took on domestic work, doing laundry and cleaning houses. To earn extra money, Clifford and Clara together painted and mounted wallpaper in other folks’ homes. This was more than a decade before the civil rights movement effectively ended segregation throughout the nation and upwardly mobile blacks could move to more prosperous suburbs. My mother describes interaction among the members of the all-black neighborhood of her youth, even across class lines, as not only friendly but uplifting. These are the roots of my mother’s community-based black consciousness that helped shape my own racial and intellectual identity.

During my adolescent years, I had a strong interest in African history, stemming from my father’s travels to Central and Southern Africa as a non-denominational Christian pastor preaching and supporting the development of Christian congregations abroad, but I did not have any first-hand knowledge of black immigrants in America. As I came of age in a middle-class suburb west of Cincinnati called Mt. Healthy during the 1980s, most of my neighbors were either black or white and born in the United States. The majority of Cincinnati-born blacks were descendants of what scholar Cornel West has called post-Negros,⁵ or post-slavery American-born blacks who trekked from the South to the North in hope of finding better jobs. My family is no exception. Towards the end of this period known as the Great Migration, my maternal grandparents moved from Millers Ferry and Mobile by way of Selma, Alabama, to Cincinnati. My paternal grandmother moved with her mother from Cannonsburg by way of Jackson, Mississippi to Cincinnati. My family, like most black Cincinnatians, is American-born black through and through. More than a half century later, this demographic made up most of the congregation of the church that my father founded in 1981 and still pastors, Abundant Life Faith Fellowship. The congregation is 99 percent black, and all but one of its members are American-born, with both parents and grandparents born in the US. The binary of American-born blacks and American-born whites that I encountered from the 1980s through the 1990s resembled that experienced by many Americans in the Midwest and the South at the time.

My first-hand knowledge of black immigrants in America began as an undergraduate at Harvard University in the mid-1990s. Moving from my hometown of Cincinnati to Cambridge, Massachusetts, brought an intellectual and social transition very much tied to the major theme of this book—diversity within blackness. At Harvard, one of my classmates would occasionally look around the room and declare, We’re the only JBs here! When she noticed my quizzical expression, she explained, JB means just black, born here.⁶ She was right. Her words made me realize that not only was I the only JB in my small group of friends, I was also the only non-Nigerian. My experience was representative—I discovered later that the majority of black undergraduates at Harvard in the late 1990s were first- or second-generation immigrants from the Caribbean and Western Africa; Ivy League schools aggressively recruited students from preparatory high schools in the Northeastern United States, the region with the highest concentration of black immigrants in the country.

During my time at Harvard, one Nigerian student’s stereotyping of American-born blacks as shiftless and unwilling to take advantage of opportunities deepened my understanding of the cultural divisions between black immigrants and American-born blacks. Several years later, as a graduate student at Princeton University, my study of Caribbean immigration to the United States revealed that such cultural clashes were not new, but dated back to the early twentieth century when the first wave of African Caribbean immigrants, mainly from Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados, arrived at Ellis Island and other American coastal outposts, hoping to follow their own unique American dreams by hard work and good luck. Even as African Caribbean new immigrants found common ground with American-born blacks in their allied fight against northern-style Jim Crow, Caribbean political leaders such as Unitarian minister Ethelred Brown seized every opportunity to criticize American-born black leaders, especially New Negro Christian ministers who supposedly led their congregations astray by promising prosperity in the by-and-by instead of social justice in the here-and-now. Brown’s criticism of American-born black religious leaders was very much rooted in negative stereotypes of black American culture and his own striving for upper-middle class social status.

As in Ethelred Brown’s time, competitive striving to reach upper-middle class status still fuels cultural clashes between black immigrants and American-born blacks. At the turn of the twenty-first century, these conflicts centered on competition for admission into America’s top-tier institutions of higher learning. Because black immigrants and children of immigrants outnumber American-born black students at Ivy League universities by 2:1, scholars and admission officers have debated whether the self-selecting group of middle-upper class black immigrants should disproportionately benefit from Affirmative Action policies that American-born blacks (along with civil rights allies from various cultural backgrounds) worked so hard to achieve. This question of black inter-ethnic equality is so controversial that when Harvard African American Studies scholar Henry Louis Gates and esteemed law professor Lani Guinier broached the topic at a Harvard black alumni reunion in June 2004, heated debates ensued. A New York Times article titled Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?, contextualized Gates’s and Guinier’s concerns: In the high-stakes world of admissions to the most selective colleges—and with it, entry into the country’s inner circles of power, wealth and influence—African-American students whose families have been in America for generations [are] being left behind.⁷ I agree; this is cause for concern.

Although, over the past decade, the practice of Affirmative Action has been phased out of the admissions process at numerous high-ranking universities (based on the argument that it’s no longer needed), I still contend that cross-cultural diversity and black intraracial diversity are politically necessary values in the college admissions process. Unfortunately, many black immigrants and children of immigrants have interpreted this argument as a threat to their own success. My disagreement with a Trinidadian-born Harvard Business School student underscores this point. In spring 2005, I joined a party at an upscale restaurant in midtown Manhattan to celebrate the graduation of a mutual friend and Ghanaian immigrant. After the introduction of guests and standard exchange of pleasantries, an intense debate began over the New York Times article published one year prior. The newly minted Harvard MBA graduate from Trinidad argued that Gates’s and Guinier’s promotion of black intraracial diversity in the college admissions process hinders the progress of black immigrants in America, claiming that Caribbean immigrants, like himself, simply outperformed American-born blacks and that the system should remain strictly merit-based. As the conversation became increasingly antagonistic, I noticed that, once again, I was the only JB at the table. I pointed out that the civil rights activism of American-born blacks was central to the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act that allowed immigrants, like himself, to enter the country and that American-born blacks paved the way for access to quality education and jobs irrespective of race. I concluded that black intraracial diversity in university settings is not only politically necessary, but it is also historically expedient.

The youthful Afrocentric black-consciousness that had inspired me to keep my hair natural, wear dashikis, and travel to St. Croix⁸ and South Africa⁹ to learn and write about these African diasporic cultures enabled me to see commonalities among black folk; but by the turn of the twenty-first century, my personal biography reflected a shift from Songs of Innocence to Songs of Experience.¹⁰ During my undergraduate and graduate-school days, I began to see, like never before, the deep-rooted animosity between foreign-born and American-born blacks. My exchange with the Trinidadian business school graduate is one example in the long history and ongoing antagonism between Caribbean immigrants and American-born blacks, which I historicize through the life stories that follow.

Academic studies of Caribbean New York, especially in the discipline of sociology, provide quantitative and qualitative evidence that supports my own observations of cultural clashes between black immigrants and American-born blacks. A number of scholars have suggested that black immigrants’ negative stereotypes of American-born blacks come from the media and from the poor black neighborhoods in which the immigrants often settle.¹¹ In a study by sociologist Mary Waters, with whom I took a course as an undergraduate at Harvard, a Guyanese schoolteacher observed in an interview, They [West Indians] think black Americans are lazy, they don’t want to work, and they want to be on welfare. This forty-eight-year-old Caribbean teacher attributed such negative stereotypes to Caribbean immigrants’ settlement in poor, urban environments in which they meet the worst people. . . . [They] see these people just sitting around, drinking, hanging out on the street, and from there [they] build [their] stereotypes.¹² In contrast, sociologist Milton Vickerman has observed a decrease in negative stereotypes held by second-generation Caribbean Americans. Vickerman suggests that second-generation Jamaicans feel a closer identification with African Americans than their immigrant parents because they are American by birth and because they have assimilated into the African American community. Still, This assimilation is not tension free, since Jamaican immigrants, seeking to counter anti-black stereotypes, try to transmit their own emphasis on achievement and pride in their ethnic identity to their American-born children.¹³ These black immigrants show us that black identity is neither uniform nor static. Or as I often tell my students at Miami University of Ohio, All black people are not alike!

All of this considered, the intellectual path between my personal experience and the publication of this book is not direct. I did not set out to historicize current-day cultural clashes between American-born blacks and Caribbean immigrants by writing a series of biographical accounts of Caribbean intellectuals who contributed to the battle for racial equality in America. Much broader questions about black racial identity motivated my initial research.

My research began with my fascination with the historically determined but ever-shifting racial categories of black and white. As a graduate student, while preparing for the comprehensive exams in my masters program, I was drawn to the growing body of literature in the field of whiteness studies. I immersed myself in books such as David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness, Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White, and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color.¹⁴ (I had already met one of these authors, David Roediger, because we co-organized a labor history conference at the Minnesota Historical Society, where I worked in the education department between my undergraduate and graduate studies.) These books by whiteness studies scholars fascinated me because they were my first encounter with thoroughly researched, historical accounts of how Irish, Jewish, Italian, Polish, and other immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were not considered white when they arrived in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. I learned about the elaborate ways in which white racial identity was constructed, using alleged black inferiority as its foil, over the course of the early twentieth century. After reading these books, I began to wonder how black immigrants, who also arrived in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, understood their own racial and cultural identities. Did they privilege their immigrant identity over their racial identity? Did they become black American? How did they reconcile their hopes for a better life in a new land with the brutal reality of American racism?

While I was asking these broad questions about race, ethnicity, and identity, my sources led me to the specific life stories that make up this book. Based on conversations with scholars in the fields of African diasporic and American studies, and with archivists at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, I discovered the personal papers and sermons of Jamaican-born Unitarian minister Ethelred Brown; the letters, speeches, and poetry of communist and anti-colonial activist Richard B. Moore, born in Barbados; the performance art, scholarly writing, and diary of Trinidadian-born choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus; the brilliant oratory and teacherly personal style of Barbadian-American politician Shirley Chisholm; and the rich novels and short stories of Barbadian-American writer Paule Marshall. While the majority of these source materials are housed at the Schomburg, I also relied on source materials at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Brooklyn College, the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Emory University, Rutgers University, and the American Dance Festival archives at Duke University.

For me, these primary sources provided details of real lived experience that made the abstract categories of race and culture come alive. These letters, sermons, speeches, poems, short stories, novels, diaries, and choreography became the focus of my intellectual inquiry, and I progressed from broad questions about how Caribbean immigrants contributed to black racial identity in America to detailed studies of these individuals, of how their family histories, personalities, and cultural upbringing shaped their resistance to racism in New York from the 1920s to the present.

All of this said, taking into account my own intellectual and artistic personality, family history, and diverse cultural biography, I recognize my own intellectual and creative biases. After living with these subjects for nearly a decade, I have developed a profound respect and admiration for each person’s courage and proactive resistance to racism, class oppression, sexism, and the myriad psychological and emotional challenges that conspired to hamper the very life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness they had traveled so many miles to obtain. Still, I have tried my best to avoid hagiography. In my conversation with these historical actors, I offer explanations and criticisms of their actions that are intended to deepen our understanding of the historical context and the political concerns of Caribbean intellectuals in twentieth-century America. Still, even as I write this, I understand that my own rendering of these life stories is both personal and political.

City of Islands

The Personal Is Political: An Introduction

I use lives as windows to a period and its issues.¹

—DAVID LEVERING LEWIS

The story of an individual life, no matter how famous or obscure, is both intensely personal and political. No one stands in isolation, but everyone is, instead, embedded in local, regional, national and even global communities. Careful attention to personal biographies reveals tensions between the individual’s definitions of self and societal forces that conspire to limit her freedom—racism, sexism, and classism—to name a few. For the Caribbean intellectuals in this book, their personal biographies determined their chosen mode of resistance in the long battle for racial equality in modern America; their political engagement also impacted their private lives. Even the manner in which they talked, dressed, and ran their households may be read as a political statement. I am not the first to make this argument. Feminists such as Carol Hanisch, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Steinem popularized the concept that the personal is political and the political is personal during the late 1960s and early 1970s—a time when private interactions between men and women were scrutinized as instances of sexist oppression. Contemporary Black Power activists also embraced the power of personal politics as they picked out their Afros and donned dashikis to express their Black Pride. In turn, I contend that the lived experiences of Caribbean intellectuals prove that the political meanings of personal lives were relevant long before the feminist and Black Power identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s and are still relevant today.

Personal lives serve as windows into the broader political landscape of any given time and place. The best biographers not only recognize this truth, they embrace it. The power of this approach lies in the movement beyond that which is overtly political into the murkier realm of personal politics. Equally important, in my opinion, is that writing about the idiosyncrasies of a personality transforms otherwise stodgy historical actors into exquisitely flawed human beings. By using individual lives as windows to a [historical] period and its issues,² and through this process of humanizing life stories, skilled biographers accomplish a feat elusive for many scholars: the production of well-researched and informative prose that also captivates a public audience.³

The individuals in this book are no exception—in the lives of the Caribbean intellectuals that I’ve selected, the personal was political, and the political was personal. Ethelred Brown, Richard B. Moore, Pearl Primus, Shirley Chisholm, and Paule Marshall, replete with personal foibles and idiosyncrasies, all drew on their own cultural upbringing and individual personalities to advance the cause of racial equality. Consider how Ethelred Brown’s precociously religious youth in Jamaica paved the way for his use decades later of Unitarianism as a liberation theology to counter British colonialism and as a vehicle for racial uplift in Harlem. Richard B. Moore’s witness of his father’s communal, socialist politics in Barbados, combined with his own interest in black history, informed his communist fair-housing campaigns on behalf of black residents in Harlem, as well as his activism for the end of European colonial rule throughout the English-speaking Caribbean. Pearl Primus’s family folklore, centering on her native Trinidad and her West African lineage, provided the source material for her artistic activism, especially her efforts to defy negative stereotypes of blackness during the height of the civil rights movement. Shirley Chisholm made history as the first black woman to win a seat in Congress and the first to seriously run for president—accomplishments that she attributed to her rigorous primary education under the tutelage of teachers in Barbados and to the influence of her politically astute father, a staunch follower of Marcus Garvey. And Marshall’s coming-of-age in Brooklyn, watching the beautiful struggle of Barbadian immigrant women, inspired her to record their experiences in novels and short stories. All of these intellectuals found political power and moral authority in their own life stories.

While the trajectories of the lives of these intellectuals might appear straightforward, this is not a story about straight lines. This book is about intersecting spheres. All of the historical actors in this book transformed and were transformed by major political movements and contributed to institutions, including those of Unitarianism, socialism, communism, the civil rights movement, and third-wave feminism. These intellectuals were writers, agitators, creative thinkers, and above all else, they were human. At times their stories are idiosyncratic, because their lives were idiosyncratic. Still, the common denominator in each chapter is that studying the biographies of Caribbean intellectuals shows how the story of America is as dynamic and varied as its inhabitants.

To understand the recursive nature of the personal and political lives of the subjects at hand, we must begin by recognizing their commonalities and differences. What do these historical actors have in common? They are all black, and they are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean, who lived in New York and produced intellectual work in the cause of racial equality in the twentieth century. Two are men, Ethelred Brown and Richard B. Moore, who were born in Jamaica and Barbados respectively and immigrated to Harlem during early to mid-adulthood. Moore started his political career in Harlem at the young age of sixteen after his arrival in the black metropolis in 1909. Brown was forty-four years old when he arrived in Harlem, his wife and two children in tow, in 1920, more than a decade after Moore’s arrival. Three are women, of whom one, Pearl Primus, emigrated from Trinidad to New York in early childhood at the start of the Harlem Renaissance. Because of her young age, Primus did not participate in that classic arts movement, but she was a beneficiary of its radical ideals and New Negro aesthetic when she was mentored by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes and encouraged by other black American luminaries such as Paul Robeson and Billie Holiday. Primus took the world of modern dance by storm at the age of twenty-one. The other two women, Shirley Chisholm and Paule Marshall, were born in Brooklyn to parents from Barbados. Brooklyn was a fertile ground for the cultural and intellectual development of both Chisholm and Marshall. Marshall was thirty years old upon her entrance into the literary world with the publication of her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, at the height of the civil rights movement, while Chisholm was forty-four when she became the first black woman to serve in Congress in 1968—a model of progress for both black Americans and women of all races at the dawn of third-wave Feminism. Marshall was born at the start of the Great Depression, and she drew on her personal experience in writing Brown Girl, Brownstones, which also takes place during the Great Depression. Like Selina, the main character of her novel, Marshall resisted the safe vocational paths that her mother had urged her to pursue—to work with the telephone company or as a nurse—and forged her own selfhood through the more unconventional path of becoming a writer. For Chisholm, her work in American politics was a second career; she had already made a name for herself as a teacher and daycare center supervisor. She used her educational and organizational background as well as her personal and professional networks in Brooklyn to launch her political career. All of these historical actors drew on their individual personal and professional experiences as they used the written, spoken, and performed word in the battle for racial equality.

Why are these details important? They are important because each life story shows us how myriad factors beyond the scholarly trinity of race, class, and gender shaped black immigrant experiences throughout the twentieth century in America. Birthplace, age at the time of immigration, family history, education, chosen vocation, stage of career, personality, and historical context are all factors that shaped each individual’s experience. By comparing and contrasting how the life stories of these intellectuals influenced their cultural production, I will show that their work in the cause of social justice was both personal and political, historical and situational, public and private; and that their diverse modes of civic engagement reflect the life witness of each.

The value of my multi-biographical approach is in the synergy of comparison, which makes this book not only a useful teaching resource but also a dynamic story. Although recent scholarship has shown a newfound interest in some of my historical actors—mainly Ethelred Brown, Pearl Primus, and Shirley Chisholm⁴—City of Islands is unique in content and format, as it compares and contrasts the personal and political meanings of multiple life stories. I put these intellectuals in conversation with contemporary thinkers as well as in conversation with myself to show how Caribbean intellectuals used their cultural production, their sermons, speeches, literature, and even dance, to engage national and international audiences in a conversation about the need for racial equality in America and throughout the African diaspora. These life stories reveal the complex historical, social, psychological, and emotional forces behind the public face of Caribbean intellectualism.

Biography as Methodology

What is the value of biography? What sort of analytical work does this category of analysis accomplish in the context of Caribbean immigrants in New York, or any other historical study for that matter? There is a major body of literature in the disciplines of history and the social sciences on the usefulness of biography as a methodological approach. The literature is so vast that it is not possible to engage each theorist in this text, so I reference the scholarship and popular debates that resonate most with my work.

Surveying the life stories in the chapters that follow requires a meta-discussion about the process of analyzing autobiographical sources and the self-reflective nature of writing biography, or any historical account for that matter, which inevitably turns into an intellectual debate about subjectivity and truth. Even at the young age of twelve, I was drawn to the question of how the worldview of a storyteller shapes the narrative that she renders, when a classmate gave me a cassette tape of reggae music, and I played and replayed, again and again, the lyrics, "There are