Hubert Henry Harrison, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. These are all names linked to Harlem, New York. But these are also names connected to the U.S. Virgin Islands, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico.
The political and philosophical activism that each of these men embodied in the early-20th century started in their countries of origin and helped form their political outlook.
“They kind of get absorbed into this almost generic Blackness, which becomes a U.S. Blackness, but the important thing is to push back and really insist on the specificity,” noted Dr. Tami Navarro, chair of Drew University’s Africana Studies. “Often, these figures just become read as African American, which is wrong and really does a disservice to the ways that they [thought] and the complexity of their identity.”
Blacks from the Caribbean were pivotal in creating the new Black consciousness that emerged during the Harlem Renaissance. It’s a subject Navarro said she teaches her students about in her course, “Harlem, Anthropology, and the African Diaspora.”
Today, Harrison is well-remembered in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Although he left his native island as a teenager when it was still a Dutch colony (then known as the Danish West Indies), Harrison kept abreast of issues at home. The United States purchased the island in March 1917, and Harrison organized the International Colored Unity League (ICUL) in 1924 so Black people on the island would have an outside organization they could turn to for support.
The ICUL was one of many groups Harrison created to support Black people. He founded the New Negro newspaper in 1919, whose name literally echoed the bold stance of the Harlem Renaissance and signaled that it was a place for a new kind of Black pride. Harrison was also the founder and first president of the Liberty League, a pro-Black group that fought against segregation and believed in armed self-defense.
Navarro said Harrison had an “understanding of the relationship of the Black experience in a kind of European space.”
Born in Puerto Rico, Schomburg left the island in 1891. He stayed in touch with the growing independence movement on the island from New York and was a co-founder of Las Dos Antillas (The Two Islands), a group that promoted political independence for both Puerto Rico and Cuba. In New York, Navarro said, Schomburg was “important in the Harlem Renaissance in documenting the Black experience across space both within the U.S. and outside.”
When Garvey traveled to the U.S. in 1916, he was already the established founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Once he set up a New York branch of the UNIA, Garvey was challenged by other Black and white leaders, and was regularly called out as a foreigner—a Jamaican—by those who wanted to see his movement fail.
Navarro said Garvey had a complicated route after an initial “emergence as…a Jamaican political leader and how that kind of transforms and he gets absorbed––and, I argue, kind of misread––as an African American figure, although he’s ultimately deported back to Jamaica.”
These three major activists were Caribbean-born and helped create the Harlem Renaissance––that famed period in the 1920s and 1930s when Blacks in Harlem carved out a new, vibrant, and independent view of Black life.
The students in Navarro’s class tend to know the names of these pivotal Caribbean-born activists, but they don’t always know their backstories. One of the reasons is that this part of Black history continues to be misread as solely African American.
“I think that their misreading as African American is a production of the moment in which they come to the United States,” explained Navarro. “They’re coming right in this moment of the Harlem Renaissance. African Americans are largely just coming out of this Great Migration northward: out of sharecropping in the American South. These folks I’m talking about are not. They’re coming from all different corners of the world, [including] from the Caribbean. The kind of violence and virulence of racism that [had] a person, just because of their black skin, lynched…I think the kind of physical danger of that moment meant that the complexity of their identity was erased.”
When all Black bodies were equally detested, figuring out who was from which county, state, island, or nation really didn’t matter. All Black bodies were identified as one.
Now, there’s more space for those distinctions, Navarro said. “I think that…now––because of the way racism has definitely not gone away but evolved in this country––…there’s more space for nuance. So, when I think about Harlem now, when I think about New York now, I think there’s a lot more space for nuance and complexity. There’s a deeper embrace and willingness to think through people’s Caribbean identity alongside their diaspora Black identity…I do think it’s different now because I think it’s a different space that we’re occupying now than [where] we were in 1920.”