Tammy L. Brown uses the life stories of West Indian intellectuals to
investigate the dynamic history of immigration to New York and the long
battle for racial equality in modern America. The majority of the 40,000
black immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island 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 West Indian 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.
