cept as students staying for a limited period, there was a swelling flow from the West Indies and the entire Caribbean area. The migrants were moved both by forces within the south which pushed them out and by those within the North which pulled them in. On one hand, continuing violence and segregation drove many to leave their homes. When the boll weevil spread across the Southern states like a plague, it wiped out many poor farmers, and it drove them to seek other means of livelihood elsewhere. On the other hand, the war had interrupted the flow of immigrants from Europe into the Northern industrial centers, and at the same time it created the need for even more unskilled labor in the factories.James Weldon Johnson described the West Indian immigrants as being almost totally different from Southern rural Negroes who had moved n to New York City. He said that the West Indians displayed a high intelligence, many having an English common school education, and he noted that there was almost no illiteracy among them. He also said that they were sober minded and had a genius for business enterprise. It has been estimated that one third of the city’s Negro professionals, physicians, dentists, and lawyers, were foreign born. The west Indians had an ethos, which stressed, saving, education, and hard work. The same self-confidence and initiative, which enabled substantial numbers of them to move into professional employment, made others into political radicals. Unaccustomed to the intensity of racial hostility and harassment which they found in America, they reacted with anger. They had not been trained since birth in attitudes of submission and nonresistance. This was the phenomenon, which created Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association. The West Indian community had been gradually merging with the large Afro American society.Question 3Number 1: Minstrel TraditionMinstrelsy the most popular nineteenth-cen...
