‘WELCOMED’ TO AMERICA
Immigrants overcame xenophobes
It was a stark, stern warning sent down loud and clear from the upper crust of New York City society — the city is becoming a “human sewer,” and the newcomers are to blame. Prominent New Yorker Madison Grant — who in 1916 was chairman of the New York Zoological Society and on the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History — had become alarmed and disgusted by the millions of southern European immigrants entering the U.S., and shared his views with many.
Grant’s views are examples of opinions that led to the hardships that Harlem’s immigrants faced, and the ideas spread to stifle the progress and dash the spirit of newcomers. Overcoming restrictive immigration laws and segregation practices, immigrants and migrants contributed to Harlem, their new home.
“Large cities from the days of Rome, Alexandria and Byzantium have always been gathering points of diverse races, but New York City is becoming a cloaca gentium [human sewer] which will produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel,” warned Grant, who declared his outrage and fears in a 1916 book, “The Passing of the Great Race; Or, The Racial Basis of European History.” Grant, who might be be best described as a proWASP supremacist, divided Europeans into three races — Nordics (“the only true Europeans”), Alpines (“clearly of eastern and Asiatic origin”), and “Mediterraneans.” “Their eyes and hair are very dark or black and their skin is more or less swarthy,” he said of the “Mediterraneans,” which included Italians and Jews, who especially upset Grant and those who aligned themselves with his views. In his book, Grant is equally scornful of Jewish immigrants, saying “the man of old stock is being crowded out of many county districts by foreigners just as he is today being literally driven off the streets of New York City by a swarm of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American; they wear his clothes; they steal his name; and they are beginning to take his woman…”
And his views about African-Americans and blacks from other parts of the world were similarly negative. As for black folks, Grant wrote, “It has taken us 50 years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and church does not transform a Negro into a white man.”
Many of those scorned members of the “Mediterranean” race settled in Harlem — Italians mostly in East Harlem and Jews in Central Harlem — where they were eventually replaced by an influx of black migrants escaping the brutality in the former Confederate States of America, and a smaller number of black immigrants escaping economic oppression inflicted by colonialists in the Caribbean.
Those “inferior” immigrants and children of immigrants contributed to making Harlem the most dynamic neighborhood in Manhattan. Included among those are Jamaica-born PanAfricanist/black nationalist Marcus Mosiah Garvey, whose organization, the United Negro Improvement Association, became the largest and most economically productive black organization ever launched in this country.
Carlos Cooks, a Dominican Republicborn immigrant, was also a Pan-Africanist/Black Nationalist and worked a leader in the UNIA after Garvey was deported from the U.S. And Cook’s organization, the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, sustained and expanded the legacy of Garvey after his death in 1940.
Black immigrants and their descendants branched out into many fields. There was Dr. Muriel Petioni, whose parents were from Trinidad. She was a much-loved and respected family physician in Harlem for more than 60 years. Petioni — whose patients ranged from Harlem’s high society to the neighborhood’s everyday people — railed against junk food and promoted healthy eating habits more than six decades ago. Over the years, she also crusaded against subsequent scourges of heroin, crack and AIDS. Multitalented award-winning star Sammy Davis Jr. had immigrant roots — his mother, Elvera Sanchez, was a Cuba-born woman and her father was from Spain.
Singer, entertainer and activist Harry Belafonte’s mother was born in Jamaica and his father in Martinique. He was a longtime supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the campaign against Jim Crow laws. At age 90, he is still an activist.