By Karen Juanita Carrillo
Before it gave rise to the Harlem Renaissance and long before it became the neon-lit epicenter of the Jazz Age, Harlem was a recognized Black Metropolis — a sanctuary for people of African descent at the dawn of the 20th century. But this enclave, seen the world over as a Black historic and cultural capital, is rooted in a diverse merging of Black people of many origins, and research shows a diversity within the diversity. “Southern migrants gained Harlem as a base,” said Dr. Marcus Anthony Hunter, professor of sociology and African American studies at UCLA, and incoming chair of Howard University’s sociology department. He suggests that this influx turned the neighborhood into a foundational site for a new identity, noting that the neighborhood functioned as an urban hub. “Caribbean immigrants gave it its global political imagination. Harlem emerges as a container of the larger African diaspora. You see then why it has such a global impact, because people from across the globe are calling this place home — making it a ‘chocolate city.’”
Initially a predominantly white enclave, Harlem transformed into the world’s leading Black metropolis when landlords like Philip Payton Jr. and his Afro-American Realty Company purchased area buildings and began renting them to Black residents. By the 1920s, Harlem had emerged as the largest Black urban community in the world, with many Black-owned businesses, churches, and social institutions.
The Great Migration, which drove an estimated 1.5 million African Americans from the rural South toward the North, helped spur this change. At the same time, Caribbean migrants from Jamaica, British Guiana, and other British colonies played a key role in Harlem’s intellectual and cultural life. By 1920, about one-third of Harlem’s population was Black; by 1930, over 70%. In the 1920s, nearly a quarter of Harlem’s residents were Caribbean immigrants.
View of Lenox Avenue, Harlem, at 135th Street. Photo credit: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) Credit: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Photo of Industrial Employees from Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States (OGPRUS) records. Photo credit: Center for Puerto Rican Studies Library & Archives, Hunter College, CUNY/OGPRUS Records
Dr. Irma Watkins-Owens, author of “Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930,” notes that by the 1920s, there were 40,000 Caribbean people in Manhattan alongside 200,000 African Americans.
“There’s this great pull, of course, of the war that brings people,” Dr. Watkins-Owens said. “And then there’s a transportation network that brings people from the Caribbean. The United States’ interest in the Caribbean, the development of agriculture, and the Panama Canal around 1904 led to the development of shipping routes. People were able to get to the United States on a regular basis. The pull of the war and the possibility of jobs is what brought people from the South as well as the Caribbean.”
Famous Caribbean-American leaders like St. Croix-born Hubert Henry Harrison immigrated to Harlem in 1900 at the age of 17. The communist political activist Cyril Briggs immigrated from Nevis to Harlem in either 1905 or 1906 and, by 1912, was writing for the New York Amsterdam News. Jamaican activist and journalist W. A. Domingo arrived in Harlem in 1912 and worked from here to liberate his country from British colonialism. And the Pan-Africanist activist Richard B. Moore migrated with his family from Barbados to New York City in 1909.
“They became some of the earliest Blacks to settle in Harlem,” reports the website Blackpast.org. “Harlem introduced Moore to the realities of European colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the injustices of Jim Crow and lynching in the American South. By his 22nd birthday, Moore became a follower of socialist and fellow West Indian émigré Hubert Henry Harrison. He became active in the 21st Assembly District Socialist Club in Harlem in 1915.”
Puerto Rican migration, meanwhile, was being shaped by U.S. colonial policy and the need for labor following the restrictive immigration acts of 1921 and 1924. Carlos Vargas-Ramos, director for public policy at Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO), explained that what drew Puerto Ricans to New York was the same thing that had brought Southern African Americans.
“Because the United States government shut the doors to European migration, they began looking for sources of labor from elsewhere,” Vargas-Ramos said. “It was domestic migration — African Americans from the South — and a ‘colonial migration’ from Puerto Rico. To facilitate that migration was the fact that in 1917, Congress made U.S. citizens out of Puerto Ricans.”
These diverse migration streams converged in Harlem and found a way to layer Afro-diasporic cultures in a period less than a century after the end of chattel slavery. As the neighborhood changed, new coalitions, identities, and movements were created that would impact Black urban life for generations.
Langston Hughes, in his autobiography “The Big Sea,” captured the awe and community spirit Harlem’s new arrivals felt when coming to this new Black Mecca: “I can never put on paper the thrill of that underground ride to Harlem. I had never been in a subway before and it fascinated me –– the noise, the speed, the green lights ahead. At every station I kept watching for the sign: 135TH STREET. When I saw it, I held my breath. I came out onto the platform with two heavy bags and looked around. It was still early morning and people were going to work. Hundreds of colored people! I wanted to shake hands with them, speak to them. I hadn’t seen any colored people for so long –– that is any Negro colored people.”
Community Building
Harlem became a community with the help of legendary figures. Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay celebrated the neighborhood in his non-fiction work, “Harlem: Negro Metropolis,” while documenting local leaders like the Georgia-born Father Divine, Sufi Abdul Hamid from Lowell, Massachusetts, and the Jamaican-bred Marcus Garvey.
Arturo Schomburg was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and came to New York with his mother in 1891 at age 17. A scholar and collector, he was instrumental in documenting and preserving Black and Caribbean history. He lived in apartments throughout the city, including in a building at 63 West 140th Street, a location not far from where his vast archives are now housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Other migrants made contributions in music, activism, and the arts. Rafael Hernández Marín, his brother Jesús, and 16 other Puerto Rican musicians were recruited into the Harlem Hellfighters band (369th Infantry Regiment) during World War I. Hernández later became a notable composer and bandleader, merging Puerto Rican and African American musical traditions. Sylvia del Villard, a Puerto Rican actress and activist, founded a theatre group dedicated to promoting Afro-Boricua works. Pedro Albizu Campos, a prominent figure in the Puerto Rican independence movement, lived under surveillance in a building at Lexington Avenue and 112th Street in East Harlem following his incarceration in federal prison in Atlanta for his political organizing activities.
A. Philip Randolph, labor organizer and co-founder of The Messenger magazine, established the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters at 160 W. 129th St. in Harlem. The magazine published writers like Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay, and the union became the first major Black labor union in the country in 1937
Harlem’s community grew because its mix of migrants led to the formation of mutual aid societies and benevolent associations that supported new arrivals. Tyesha Maddox writes in “A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity,” that “Black West Indian immigrants…formed mutual aid networks that helped them survive the harsh realities and frequent injustices of Jim Crow America.” She adds, “…participation in these organizations empowered immigrants to form a collective ‘Caribbean’ identity and, fighting alongside African Americans, a collective Black American identity.”
“Harlem’s layers of Black ethnics remind us that Black Americans always had internal diversity,” notes Dr. Hunter. “Southern, Caribbean, African, elite, working class, and creatives have always come from that coalition. Even if I’m from Guyana and you’re from Mississippi, and this person is from Senegal, this one category is making it so that we have more in common in terms of how we relate to the status quo. It helps us find a shared political set of values.”
Harlem’s diverse community forged new definitions of Blackness and belonging. “Harlem really is this first Black modern metropolis,” Dr. Hunter added. “And as a result, it becomes a big rehearsal space for all of these different kinds of movements that we know are going to color the 20th century.”