The Black Presence in US Immigration History
The foreign-born of African descent have always been at the periphery of American immigration historiography. General histories of race, ethnicity, and immigration clearly demonstrate this shortcoming. Gradually increasing attention to Asian and Latino immigrants, they focus heavily on European immigrants, while immigrants of African descent are omitted or mentioned briefly. Even studies that set out to rescue “forgotten” immigrants from obscurity give relatively scant attention to communities established by African-descended immigrants.1 By the second decade of the twenty-first century, there seemed to have emerged a plethora of studies focusing specifically on the Black immigrant experience in America. However, the monographs, articles, edited volumes, and life histories belie the shortcomings of an uneven scholarship. Very little of the burgeoning literature is in the discipline of history, as most of the studies have been undertaken by sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of literary and cultural studies.2
The scarcity of research and experts in the historical study of the Black immigrant experience in the United States thus poses a challenge for an anthology like A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: The US in an Age of Restriction, 1924–1965, which seeks to pursue a wide breadth of topics and racial and ethnic groups. Compounding the problem for such a volume, which focuses on the pre-1965 era, is the fact that Black immigrant scholarship, vastly more robust for the post-1965 period, is skewed. With only a few works that study mostly Afro-Caribbean or West Indian immigrants of the early twentieth century,3 US immigration history, as a field, is inarguably deficient in the coverage of the experiences of foreign-born Blacks in the period covered by the anthology. Consequently, where and how could an anthology like this have located the research on Black immigration before 1965 in order to balance its focus and content? This afterword addresses this challenge by offering an overview of African and West Indian immigration.4 Why the paucity in scholarship on pre-1965 Black immigrants from Africa and the West Indies? Are there research materials for that period? Where are they? What would pique interest in this era and prompt students and scholars to study it through historical methodologies, even if also grounded in interdisciplinary approaches?
Devaluation of the Black immigrant presence before 1965 is a casualty of the premium placed on numbers. Immigration statistics and census records consistently revealed that immigrants of African descent arrived in trickles and established very small communities. In fact, because they mostly settled in communities already established as “Black neighborhoods” by American-born Blacks, they disappeared into generalized American Black/African American communities. The enormity of their invisibility is aptly captured by renowned historian of African American history Ira Berlin, who observed that “their [Black immigrants’] percentage of the population was to the right of the decimal point.”5
While the statistics about their representation in the American population were accurate, their experiences as immigrants, erroneously, were seen as so negligible as to be undeserving of scholarly attention. For example, in 1934 the British Ambassador in Washington, DC, sent a circular to all consular officers instructing them to gather information on West Indian communities in their respective jurisdictions. In response, the consul general in Boston reported that there was no need to gather information about the Black British subjects of that city, as they had “not formed a cohesive group worth researching.”6 In reality, by that time, West Indians of Boston had established a church, a newspaper, a mutual benefit association, and sports clubs. There was, indeed, a West Indian community worth researching but which, demographically, was subsumed in a larger Black Bostonian community. New York City had a more established, more visible West Indian community at the same time. Similar, even if smaller, Afro-Caribbean communities had taken root in other parts of the eastern seaboard, in cities like Hartford, Connecticut, and Miami, Florida. Cape Verdeans in New England, especially in New Bedford, confirmed the permanent presence of voluntary immigrants from the African continent.
West African students, mostly from Nigeria and Ghana, were also among the arrivals of foreign Blacks in the first decades of the twentieth century. As early as the 1920s and 1930s, they had started enrolling in historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like Howard University in Washington, DC, Fisk University in Nashville, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Hampton University in Virginia, and Tuskegee University in Alabama. Given this affiliation, it is not surprising that they interacted closely with African Americans, especially African American activists of the Harlem Renaissance. Two famous Lincoln alumni from this cohort are Kwame Nkrumah, first prime minister of Ghana, the first sub-Saharan country to attain independence, and Nnamdi Azikiwe, first president of Nigeria. These iconic figures recounted in their memoirs their experiences in America as students and temporary residents. But while this phase of their lives and its importance in their political maturity is often emphasized in African history, they are hard to find in American immigration history. Like Nkrumah and Azikiwe, during this period the students overwhelmingly returned home to join in nation-building. Still, some remained and formed the nucleus of West African immigrant communities that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the Maryland–Washington, DC– Virginia area, where most of them had studied.
These experiences point to an American immigration story that has not been fully explored. The existence of Black immigrant ethnic institutions, created and sustained in subcultures within a larger Black American milieu, underscores that there is no denying the viable presence of foreign-born Blacks from Africa and the Caribbean in pre-1965 American society. The Boston British consul’s response, when asked to research Black foreigners in his jurisdiction, is the epitome of a trend that, considering that Black foreigners were to the “right of the decimal point,” completely dismissed their relevance to immigration scholarship.
In the period covered by this anthology, because the already small numbers of Blacks entering the United States were curtailed further, their scholarly insignificance would seem to warrant more justification. However, paradoxically, Black foreigners featured in the discourse on immigration reform, including official debates in the legislature, even before 1924. In 1914, US Representative Percy E. Quinn from Mississippi, arguing for the exclusion of all people of African descent, boldly lamented, “Of all the misfortunes that the civilization of this Republic has fastened to the body politic it is the African race which stands as the worst.”7 Some within and outside Congress did not think that Black immigration was worth addressing. The November 9, 1914, editorial of the Boston Post observed: “The exclusion is all the more offensive because it is in no way needed, even if one agrees that the dark peoples ought to be excluded. Only a few Negroes enter the United States each year. They come from the West Indies and they are generally useful types of laborers.”
The perception of “foreign Negroes” of the first half of the twentieth century as small in number and marginalized as simply “useful types of laborers” discounted them as insignificant. This perception has contributed directly to the enduring lacuna in American immigration historiography. Studies like A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered provide the opportunity to revisit a significant period in US immigration and begin to fill this gap. The chapters in this volume offer comparative and gendered perspectives for understanding the history of immigration from Europe, Asia, and Mexico. These are perspectives that can be used to study African and Afro-Caribbean immigration in the same period. As the anthology affirms for other groups, the age of restriction, far from being a lull, saw a lot happen in the history of non-native-born Blacks in America, in spite of their small numbers and inconspicuous immigrant enclaves. The themes, questions, and emphases of the collection can serve as pointers of what to pursue in ferreting out and discussing developments in US Black immigration history in the four decades preceding Hart-Celler, especially as they related to evolving US immigration policies and their repercussions.
Like European, Asian, and Latin American migration flows of the first half of the twentieth century, the arrival and settlement of Black migrants from Africa and the Caribbean were vitally influenced by larger international developments. Therefore, in revisiting the pre-1965 era to illuminate the Black immigrant experience, researchers must address questions like: How did political and social movements of the era influence Black immigration and attitudes toward Black foreigners? What did the decolonization campaigns in Africa and the Caribbean, especially during and after the two world wars, do to shape US debates and discourses on immigrants and immigration? How did political and economic developments in Europe and its former colonies affect migration of Blacks from the Caribbean and other parts of the British and French empires? How did the Cold War shape, subtly and overtly, the evolving history of African immigrants in America?
In the early stages of the Cold War, for example, as the United States and the Soviet Union vied for “clients” in Africa, both stepped up their outreach to African students. Through such initiatives as the Africa-America Institute (AAI), founded in 1953, the Africa Scholarship Program of America Universities (ASPAU), founded in 1960, and the African Graduate Fellowship Program (AFGRAD), founded in 1963, the United States began an aggressive policy of providing opportunities for Africans to pursue advanced studies at US institutions with the objective of preparing them to serve as a vanguard for the development of their newly independent nations. These programs introduced Africans to the many opportunities in America, not just for the scholarship recipients but also for their family and friends. It was thus not a coincidence that during the Cold War and the dawn of the postcolonial era, more Africans looked to the United States than Europe for opportunities. In fact, some of the first beneficiaries of the new US international educational policy did not return to their countries of origin, and many others who returned eventually came back to settle in the United States, thus laying the foundation for the first visible and permanent African immigrant communities. Therefore, studying these “student-to-immigrant” communities within the framework of Cold War and postcolonial politics certainly enriches our understanding of the ways domestic and global developments shaped US immigration policies and immigrant communities.
More work about the Black immigrant experience would further complicate the useful glimpses into the labor experiences of Europeans, Asians, and Latin Americans that the chapters in this volume provide. The experience of Cape Verdeans from West Africa, who have been coming to America since the nineteenth century, and Jamaican migrants represent two examples of the type of contribution more studies in this area would add to migration studies. Though they first worked in the whaling industry, by the 1920s and 1930s, Cape Verdeans had become a reliable labor force in the cranberry bogs of New England, especially in New Bedford, where they established a visible enclave.8 Similarly, tobacco farmers brought Jamaican men to the Connecticut River Valley for seasonal work on their farms under an agreement between the United States and Britain, the colonial power. Jamaicans and other West Indians were among the first beneficiaries of temporary-worker visas.
Studying African migration would also add to the history of migrant-labor agreements beyond the bracero program and Latin America. In 1943, for example, the United States and the colonial government of the Bahamas negotiated a migrant-farm-labor agreement that lasted until 1966. Known in the Bahamas variously as “The Contract” or “The Project,” the program enabled thousands of Bahamian men and women to work on farms in several states across the United States: the workers harvested tobacco in Tennessee, peaches in Georgia, corn in Minnesota, citrus in Florida, and peanuts in North Carolina. During the program’s existence, many of the workers carried on transnational lives that involved their going back and forth between the United States and their Bahamian homes. Some chose to settle permanently in the United States, particularly in Florida. This program, involving numerous families,left indelible marks in Bahamian society. While “The Contract” stands as an exemplar of the prominent place of Black immigrants in labor migration to the United States, especially between 1940 and 1965,9 this and other contemporaneous “Black” labor-migration arrangements have yet to be studied fully.10 More research would reveal crucial dimensions of this history: the debates for and against the program; reception of the Black migrants by the White and Black native-born in the states where they worked temporarily or settled permanently; the Bahamians’ interactions with other migrants, especially other farm workers; and the facilitators of and impediments to the formation of Black Bahamian communities born out of temporary-farm-labor migration.
Like many for the immigrants discussed in this anthology, community building was a significant part of the evolving pre-1965 immigration history for African migrants as well. Future researchers should pay closer attention to how non-White communities of US-born and foreign-born Blacks changed during this critical period in US immigration history. Especially in urban areas of the Eastern sea-board, the confluences of migration streams from the American South, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and other parts of the Caribbean profoundly transformed the demography of Black America. As the various “Black” groups settled in the same neighborhoods, the relationships that emerged were simultaneously collaborative, contentious, and ambivalent. Caribbean immigrants, more commonly known as West Indians, strived to develop and project a distinct successful and exemplary community, even as they, particularly their leaders, fought for civil rights alongside American-born Blacks.11 The complex relationships forged within these non-White communities illuminate crucial aspects of immigration history of the period: how immigrants of African descent were racialized; how they straddled foreign and imposed racial identities; how native-born Blacks perceived these foreigners as occupiers of the same space in the margins of the United States.
Indeed, in explaining the United States as a nation of immigrants, a salient topic has to be the unique positioning of African Americans in immigration policy debates. Since the nineteenth century, Black intellectuals have addressed the impact of immigration on the country’s “major” minority. From Booker T. Washington to Anna Julia Cooper, Robert Lee Vann, Carter G. Woodson, and Kelly Miller, African American leaders have discussed their relationship to immigrant communities. Many journalists and scholars have argued that African Americans oppose immigration because immigrants displace Black workers and adopt, as part of their Americanization, the racist views of White society. This interpretation is simplistic and does not do justice to the role of African Americans in US immigration history. Consideration of African Americans and the immigration question should go beyond a mere examination of Black and immigrant labor competition. Historians Arnold Shankman and Lawrence Fuchs were among the first scholars to point to the complexities of assessing African Americans, race, and immigration.12 And, as sociologist Stephen Steinberg has noted, African Americans and their views and reactions must be central to any discussion of immigration. Historian Paul Spickard makes a similar point. In his book, Almost All Aliens, Spickard denounces the traditional Ellis Island paradigm of US immigration history, urging scholars and students to incorporate the stories from other points of entry and articulate the necessity of grasping African American history to understand the immigrant experience.13
Comparative analyses that establish the links and reveal the nuances between epochs, geographic regions, immigrant groups, and immigration flows would also be very useful. This comparative approach would be eye opening in numerous ways. Imagine comparing the experiences of Chinese sailors on British ships who “deserted” to the New York Chinese American community and that of West Indians, on the vessels of American fruit companies, who “stowed away” to the same American cities during the same period. How would debates over the admission of refugees in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when World War II and Cold War refugees predominated, compare with postcolonial debates over African civil war refugees and post-9/11 refugees, heavily Middle Eastern and Muslim? These are just two of a host of potentially exciting perspectives that could inform and shape a comparative approach.
Immigration archives are important repositories for reconstructing these histories. Some of these archives are waiting to be fully utilized. The National Archives and Records Administration houses important government records, but there are also smaller, more localized repositories, mostly affiliated with institutions of higher learning, like the Immigration History Research Center of the University of Minnesota and the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. They house the letters, photographs, and records of individuals and organizations important to ethnic communities. Local and state historical societies and libraries are also custodians of this history. However, to recover the experiences of Black immigrants and other ethnic/immigrant communities absent in the scholarship, scholars must work directly with the individuals and institutions in said communities: religious and secular organizations, community centers, and professional and labor associations. An ethnic newspaper, minutes of association meetings, sermons, life histories or memoirs, and recreational publicity materials reveal important, missed facts about a community and its history within the American polity. Working with these communities often requires bi- or multilingualism, a skill that many researchers interested in studying African immigrants may not have. This handicap should not deter them. Instead, they should strive to acquire some practical understanding of the pertinent African languages and/or work with volunteers and paid research assistants, who may be members of the immigrant community being studied.
What happens when the written records are insufficient or nonexistent? Oral history is a vital resource in writing immigration history, especially for under-represented groups whose voices may not be reflected in conventional sources like newspapers, diaries, journals, and official correspondences. Oral history has been useful for reconstructing the Black immigrant experience. Many national, local, and international repositories now carry audio, video, and digital recordings of interviews with immigrants and their children across different eras. I benefited from such collections when I studied the major waves of English-speaking Afro-Caribbean immigrants who arrived in Boston in the first half of the twentieth century. Although a legitimate method of collecting information, historians often look dubiously on oral history because of the unreliability of memory. Therefore, in using materials either from structured, institutional oral history collections, or from one’s own ethnographic field work, scholars must seek productive ways to combine oral history/ethnography and written records to produce academically rigorous scholarship.
To write about immigration, scholars must also examine multiple national histories. For example, to fully understand the Bahamian Black immigrant experience in Florida in the 1940s and 1950s, one must understand both US labor and political history and Bahamian colonial history; and one must be able to navigate resources in the United States, the Bahamas, and the United Kingdom. In my own work, documents in the Jamaican National Archives in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and the British Public Records Office in England proved indispensable in reconstructing the British West Indian community of the early twentieth century that was hidden from scholarly view. Historian Donna Gabaccia is one of the foremost proponents of a multinational methodology: US immigration history can only be understood in global contexts.14 As Gabaccia and her students have demonstrated, researchers should cast wide nets beyond the United States for data that help bring a vibrant past to life. Therefore, a meaningful address of pre-1965 Black immigrant history must involve a practical familiarity with the indigenous, colonial, nationalist and early postcolonial histories of the African and the Caribbean (im)migrants.
As the few existing historical studies on Afro-Caribbean immigrants and the untapped sources on African migration demonstrate, there is no question about the viability of pre-1965 Black immigration. The question is how to get historians to go back to this period and conduct much-needed studies on the experiences of Black immigrants and the impact of their presence on the American polity, beyond Black America. The biggest obstacle seems to lie in the comparison of two epochs. Black immigration to the United States since the last quarter of the twentieth century has been substantial. Not only has this development attracted researchers, it has also rendered the preceding era uninteresting. The trends of the “new Black immigration,” as the post-1970s immigration has been labeled, are attention grabbing. The numbers alone pique the interest of the media, policy-makers, and scholars. The foreign-born Black population increased nearly seven times between 1960 and 1980, and more than tripled between 1980 and 2005.15 It moved to the left of the decimal point. While in the pre–Hart-Celler era, Black immigrants, especially Africans, were concentrated in only a few states, especially in the Northeast, the post-1965 immigration, which now comprises of former students, economic migrants, and refugees, saw them dispersed widely across the United States.
More important, this time they did not dissipate into native-born Black America. Instead, in conspicuous ethnic businesses, religious and other cultural institutions, they rapidly developed clearly recognizable enclaves. In fact, in Minneapolis, the number of Somali refugees and their American-born children became so big, outpacing the number of African Americans, that Black foreigners have become the face of Black America in that city. Such an outcome goes to the heart of how foreign Blacks, by 2000, were redefining Black America. This and other spectacular outcomes of the post–Hart-Celler Black immigration continue to attract researchers, eager to explain the many fascinating developments of the new immigration. Ira Berlin’s description of how Black immigrants since the passing of Hart-Celler are changing America captures the vitality and allure of this history:
In New York, the Roman Catholic diocese has added masses in Ashanti and Fante, while black men and women from various Caribbean islands march in the West Indian-American Carnival and the Dominican Day Parade. In Chicago, Cameroonians celebrate their nation’s independence day, while the DuSable Museum of African American History hosts a Nigerian Festival. Black immigrants have joined groups such as the Egbe Omo Yoruba (National Association of Yoruba Descendants in North America), the Association des Sénégalais d’Amérique and the Fédération des Associations Régionales Haïtiennes à l’Étranger rather than the NAACP or the Urban League.16
This kind of unprecedented African and Afro-Caribbean cultural production put the spotlight on foreign-born Blacks more than ever.
The impact of a historical development is always a compelling reason to study that history. Undoubtedly, the impact of post-1965 Black immigration to America is glaring. However, this must not subsume the relevance of an earlier, less overtly dynamic period. Perhaps, the first step to a meaningful revision is a conscious reorientation of how the relevance of the Black immigrant presence in the first half of the twentieth century is perceived. What does the raising of the issue of Black immigration in debates on immigration restriction tell us about the imagined and real impact of Black foreigners in the United States during that period? How did diverse groups of foreign-born African-descended people navigate racial and racist challenges in a pre-civil-rights-movement America? How did they change Black America, however subtly, during that period? Answering these and other such questions, perhaps with the assistance of untapped sources, would demonstrate that far from being irrelevant, the history of Black immigration in the period covered by this anthology can serve as a useful context for understanding the phenomenal “new immigration” that came after 1970. While, as this afterword points out in the opening, Black immigration has been at the periphery of US immigration historiography, it does have something in common with other immigration histories: like the histories of other groups covered in this collection, consequences of the 1965 immigration reform, commonly described as unintended revolutionary outcomes, further blurred the history of pre-1965 Black immigration. With a reorientation in interpretation, a productive search for existing, even if obscure, sources, a stimulation of the interest of students and scholars, who must tackle the antecedents of a new Black immigration, that history can be recovered, researched, and disseminated.
1. See, for example, renowned historian Roger Daniels’s well-received book, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in America (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), where he only glosses over a few aspects of immigration of Blacks from the Caribbean. Another renowned historian of immigration history, David Reimers, did an outstanding job shedding light on “the other immigrants,” as he called them, when he discussed non-Europeans—Mexicans, Central and South Americans, South and East Asians and Middle Easterners. While he made a decent attempt to unearth the Black immigrant experience, he lumped all Black immigrants—from the Caribbean and the vast continent of Africa—into one chapter, “The New Black Immigration.” See David M. Reimers, Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
2. The following are a few notable examples: John Arthur, Invisible Sojourners: African Immigrant Diaspora in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000); Kofi Apraku, African Emigres in the United States: A Missing Link in Africa’s Social and Economic Development (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1991); Festus Obiakor and Patrick Grant, eds., Foreign-Born African Americans: Silenced Voices in the Discourse on Race (New York: Nova, 2002); and Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
3. Notable works by historians in this field are: Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998); Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Violet Showers Johnson, The Other Black Bostonians: West Indians in Boston, 1900–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). The only historical book-length study of African immigrants before 1965, for a long time, was Marilyn Halter’s work, Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860–1965 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
4. A rich literature exists on Black immigrants from Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking countries. Two of the largest sources of Black migration during the 1924–1965 period are Puerto Rico and Cuba. These Black Latino (im)migrants straddled different worlds: Latinidad, Blackness, and foreignness. In the case of Puerto Ricans, they were also US citizens.
5. Ira Berlin, “The Changing Definition of African-American: How the Great Influx of People from Africa and the Caribbean since 1965 is Changing What It Means to be African-American,” Smithsonian Magazine, February, 2010, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-changing-definition-of-african-american-4905887.
6. Report of the British Embassy, Washington, DC, to the Foreign Secretary, March 1934, Public Record Office, Kew (PRO) FO 598/15.
7. US Congress, Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 3rd Sess., vol. 52, pt.1, December 31, 1914, S 1134.
8. For more on Cape Verdean migration, see Halter, Between Race and Ethnicity.
9. Recruiting beyond the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Barbados, eager to offset labor shortage, especially during the war years, the United States formulated a West Indian temporary-labor plan that lasted decades. See J. C. Vialet, “The West Indies (BWI) Temporary Alien Labor Program, 1943–1977: A Study Prepared for the Subcommittee on Immigration of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate,” (Washington, DC: GPO, 1978), http://www.dloc.com//UF00087215/0001.
10. In 1993, Bahamas affirmed the significance of The Contract in its history, when the Oral History Department of the College of the Bahamas kicked off a multiyear oral history project to capture the experiences of surviving contract workers. Bahamian scholars especially have begun to benefit from the outcomes of this project. See, for example, T. L. Thompson, “Remembering ‘The Contract’: Recollections of Bahamians,” International Journal of Bahamian Studies 18 (2012): 6–12, http://journals.sfu.ca/cob/index.php/files/article/view/169/217. Examining gender and sexuality in Miami from its founding in 1896 to 1940, historian Julio Capó offers useful glimpses into immigration from the Bahamas, Cuba, and Haiti. See, Julio Capó, Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
11. See Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations; and Showers Johnson, Other Black Bostonians.
12. Arnold Shankman, Ambivalent Friends: Afro-Americans View the Immigrant (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992); Lawrence H. Fuchs, “The Reactions of Black America to Immigration,” in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (Oxford University Press, 1990), 293–314.
13. See for example, Stephen Steinberg, “Immigration, African Americans, and Race Discourse,” New Politics (Summer 2005), http://newpol.org/content/immigration-african-americans-and-race-discourse. Steinberg succeeded in generating further interest and a discussion on African Americans and immigration, as evidenced in the responses to this piece. See, for example, Adolph Reed, “A Response to ‘Immigration, African Americans, and Race Discourse,’” New Labor Forum 15 (2006): 59–61; Gary Gerstle, “A Response to ‘Immigration, African Americans, and Race Discourse,’” New Labor Forum 15 (2006): 65–68; Paul Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007).
14. Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012).
15. Mary Mederios Kent, “Immigration and America’s Black Population,” Population Bulletin 62 (December 2007), www.prb.org.
16. Berlin, “Changing Definition of African-American.”