Confronting the Deportation State: Black American Responses to Immigrant Expulsion in the Interwar Period

Abstract

This article explores responses in the Black press to the rapidly expanding U.S. deportation regime during the interwar period. While their perspectives have been largely absent from scholarship on deportation, Black journalists, editorialists, and commentators have historically been highly engaged with the issue. Black periodicals provided extensive coverage of the expulsion of Black immigrants, as well as of non-Black immigrants who violated the racial structures of American society (either through antiracist political advocacy or through interracial relationships). In doing so, the Black press insisted that deportation was a Black issue, and that antiblackness was central to the functioning of the early-twentieth-century immigration control system. By surveying roughly 1,100 articles on deportation in the Black press, I highlight how Black writers construed deportation as a powerful tool of white supremacy and a threat to Black immigrants and African Americans alike.

In 1932, William Pickens, a well-known National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organizer and columnist for the Associated Negro Press (ANP), wrote about his recent trip to France for the Baltimore Afro-American. Pickens described the various classes traveling aboard his ship, explaining that the “real third class” was housing roughly two hundred deportees. He mused:

These are “foreigners,” being sent back to their own countries because they have become undesirable aliens in the U.S.A. But do you know what the truth is? Many of them have contrived to get themselves sent back to save the cost of fare.… How can you blame them? We have decided to deport people for almost any little irregularity, so when they want to go home, free, they proceed to get deported. That's easy if you are an “alien.” All you have to do is get up on a soap box on a street corner and make a sensible speech, too sensible for Mr. Hoover and Mr. Doak to understand it, and out you go—all expenses paid.¹

The following year, William Gillett of the Chicago Defender described a similar experience on his transatlantic sailing, writing about his encounter with the “other Colored men” onboard—two “penniless and ragged” “Arabian” deportees.² These stories suggest that a small number of Black Americans in the interwar period, like Pickens and Gillett, gained familiarity with the expanding deportation state through first-hand contact with deportees. Many more Black Americans, however, likely developed their understanding of deportation through the hundreds of articles on the subject in the Black press during the same period.

Too often, however, scholarship on reactions to immigrants and immigration policy has tended to code the “native-born” observer as white and, in the process, effectively erase Black Americans perspectives on the topic. But, as the pages of early-twentieth-century Black newspapers reveal, Black Americans had a great deal to say about deportation. While far from unified in their perspectives on deportation, Black journalists, editorialists, and commentators were deeply engaged with the topic. Indeed, I argue, in many instances these authors maintained that deportation was, fundamentally, a Black issue. Perhaps unsurprisingly, coverage of the deportation of Black immigrants dominated these publications. But even when covering non-Black deportees, many articles focused on white and other non-Black immigrants who were removed for transgressions of the color line, and depicted deportation as an effective tool for policing antiracist advocacy or interracial relationships. In short, authors across various Black newspapers insisted that deportation was, in both explicit and more subtle ways, deeply intertwined with anti-Black racism.

The interwar period was marked by the consolidation of drastic immigration restrictions and a rapidly expanding deportation system. Simultaneously, these decades represented a crucial moment of transformation for the Black press, which widened in circulation and became, in many instances, more politically assertive.³ Furthermore, as a result of their own “Great Migration” to urban centers in the North and Midwest, African Americans experienced increased contact with and awareness of foreign-born populations (including Black immigrants) who settled in many of the same areas.⁴ I suggest, therefore, that this era provides a particularly revealing window into how the Black American public grappled with deportation's growing power and its meaning for their communities. A close examination of the Black press reveals that while Black nativism and interminority conflict—which have often dominated the scholarship on African Americans and immigration—were indeed central features of writings on deportation, these strains of thought did not dominate the Black press. Instead, I argue that much of the coverage in the Black press presented deportation as a dangerous tool of state racism and, indeed, as a threat to Black migrants and even African Americans.

After a brief overview of the history of Black responses to immigration restriction, the article is composed of two main sections. The first explores how writers in the Black press emphasized the deportation of Black immigrants and analyzes the particularly frequent coverage of Black celebrity deportees. At the same time, however, I note that by supporting the removal of individuals seen as detrimental to the race, Black commentators also monitored the boundaries of foreign-born Black acceptability in order to press for greater inclusion and respect. But the emphasis on Black deportees was only the most obvious way that Black Americans came to understand deportation as one strand of the flexible anti-Black strategies of the state. The second section illuminates how the Black press also depicted deportation as a tool for punishing white or other non-Black immigrants who violated the color line, particularly through antiracist activism or interracial familial ties. Together, these sections show that Black newspaper coverage of deportation in the interwar period offered a multidimensional critique of white supremacy and state repression. The depiction of deportation that emerges over hundreds of articles was of a system that prominently featured anti-Black racism and profoundly impacted Black communities.

In order to trace a range of Black perspectives on deportation, this research is based on articles drawn from twenty-six African American newspapers during the interwar period. The majority of these articles were found in widely circulated papers, including the five largest Black newspapers of the era: the Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and Pittsburgh Courier.⁵ But I also examine articles from a number of what Fred Carroll calls “dominant regional [Black] news sources,” including the Cleveland Call and Post, Michigan Chronicle, and Los Angeles Sentinel.⁶ Additionally, I analyze stories from smaller local papers (some of which, like the Plaindealer of Kansas, covered deportation frequently) or less popular papers in major cities (such as the Chicago Broad Ax).⁷ From these varied sources, I have assembled just under 1,100 individual pieces on deportation between 1914 and 1939, including news stories, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor. Of those, roughly nine hundred pertain to official deportations (immigrant removal from one nation to another), while the remaining articles discuss either internal “deportations” of African Americans and others over county or state lines, or colonization proposals to “deport” Black Americans to Africa. Although it is not the main emphasis of this article, it is important to note that the Black press’ presentation of deportation as a mechanism for maintaining the color line was not merely domestic. The Black press provided extensive coverage of deportations of American citizens to the United States and of global deportation practices, focusing on the expulsion of oppressed and colonized populations around the world.

The Black press of the interwar period was, of course, far from monolithic. The articles explored reflect significant variation in opinion, tone, and focus across publications (and often across articles in the same publication). These differences were likely influenced by distinct editorial structures, political leanings, and by the immigrant composition and socioeconomic dynamics of the cities in which they were published.⁸ While I examine newspapers from across the nation, the most concentrated coverage of deportation emerges in cities with rapidly expanding African American and immigrant populations, such as New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Additionally, papers known for their progressive political leanings, such as the Baltimore Afro-American, published extensively on deportation and were often quite critical of the U.S. deportation agenda.⁹ Coverage also varied based on authorship. While most of the articles examined were published without author attribution, there are significant differences between pieces from newspapers’ staff and contributions from readers, which often demonstrated a deep wariness about economic competition. And yet, despite the diversity of viewpoints, certain trends do emerge across these publications.

Across most of these newspapers, but particularly in papers from the Northeast, Black deportees are covered extensively, in contrast to their relatively scarce presence in the mainstream press of the era and in scholarship looking at deportations during the period. Indeed, Black migrants are the subjects of more than one-third of all articles examined, with about half of those articles pertaining to the 1927 deportation of Marcus Garvey. Numerous articles condemned the impact of the deportation regime on Black sailors, students, and others, frequently noting the discrimination they faced from immigration officials. Other articles focused on how deportations of famous Black individuals reflected a desire to suppress Black success. But in a smaller number of cases, Black commentators tacitly or explicitly supported the removal of Black migrants who they saw as damaging to the race. The Black press also covered a large number of non-Black deportations, often integrating them into an analysis of American race relations and repression.¹⁰ Articles that focused on individual white deportees most frequently centered on their subjects’ political or intimate involvement with Black Americans, with a particular focus on the racial advocacy work of white radicals.¹¹ Further, a number of articles considered the deportations of non-Black immigrants of color, sometimes stressing competition over jobs, while at other times drawing correlations between their treatment and that of African Americans.

While it may seem self-evident that Black Americans would have an interest and a stake in the complex debates around migration and national belonging in the early twentieth century, those perspectives have rarely been explored.¹² In recent years, political scientists and sociologists have increasingly studied contemporary African American perspectives on immigration, but few have centered their work on earlier periods.¹³ The limited scholarship on African American perceptions of immigration (both contemporary and historical) often stresses the development of a form of uniquely Black nativism based primarily around competition with immigrants for jobs and marked by a distinctive ambivalence. Political scientist Niambi Michele Carter, for instance, asserts that “Blacks have been … highly ambivalent regarding immigrants. In the main, blacks believe deeply in the right of all groups to self-determination; yet, they are wary that another group's self determination will come at their expense.”¹⁴ Certainly, as scholars have demonstrated, there have been deep and pervasive anxieties around immigration, underpinned by the reality that structural racism in America has often facilitated the advancement of various groups of newcomers (both white and nonwhite) over that of Black Americans. But scholars have also begun to explore the broader implications of immigration control for Black Americans, particularly for their understandings of citizenship and inclusion. Legal scholar Kevin Johnson introduces a framing for how African Americans have perceived immigration control in more recent decades, explaining that “rather than just a peculiar feature of U.S. public law, the differential treatments of citizens and noncitizens serves as a ‘magic mirror’ revealing how dominant society might treat domestic minorities if legal constraints were abrogated. Indeed, the harsh treatment of noncitizens of color reveals terrifying lessons about how society views citizens of color.”¹⁵ An examination of the Black press in the interwar period reveals that its commentators were astute students of such lessons.

Furthermore, while a small body of historical scholarship has increasingly considered how Black immigrants were targeted through the immigration bureaucracy, it has largely focused on political radicalism. Llana Barber's recent study of antiblackness and immigration control suggests that the “US government did not hesitate to use the nativist state to undermine Black activism and protect white supremacy,” but her discussion of deportation focuses primarily on Black political activists like Garvey, Claudia Jones, and C. L. R. James.¹⁶ Black American observers of the time, however, identified the state's project of “protect[ing] white supremacy” through deportation as a broader and more insidious endeavor. Indeed, as marginalized citizens, Black American commentators regularly commented on the targeting of noncitizens as part of an intertwined state assault on blackness and foreignness, which extended well beyond the small (but significant) number of Black political deportees. As Michael Hanchard reminds us, “the monitoring, surveillance, and restriction of movement by the state” were “common to African Americans and many immigrant populations,” and Black observers highlighted these commonalities in their coverage of deportation.¹⁷ Charisse Burden-Stelly argues even more forcefully that the “conjuncture of antiforeignness, antiradicalism, and antiblackness has been constitutive of and endemic in U.S. governmentality.” She points out, however, that understanding this nexus requires taking a broader view of antiforeignness, which accounts for the ways in which Black Americans “irrespective of citizenship” have been construed as “outsider[s] that must be contained and circumscribed.”¹⁸

Drawing on this work, I demonstrate therefore that while the common narrative of Black “nativism” tells a vital part of the story, it has been incomplete. First, scholars who have explored responses to immigration restriction have often overlooked reactions to deportation as a related, but distinct, exercise of state power. Post-entry deportation (as opposed to restrictive legislation), I show, often generated a more varied and nuanced contemplation in the Black press. Unlike potential future entrants, Black observers more frequently depicted immigrants already living and working within their midst as victims of an unjust state, and as more directly connected to their own lives and political struggles. Furthermore, while scholars have generally presented Black resistance to anti-immigrant policies as the result of either abstract solidarity with other immigrants of color or consternation over civil liberties, I find that these concerns often took a far more personal tone—arguing that deportations targeted individuals who were intertwined with Black Americans, either politically or intimately. Finally, I argue, too much of the scholarship has treated the categories of “immigrant” and “Black” as mutually exclusive, while in early-twentieth-century Black writings on deportation, the categories of “immigrant” and “Black” were often one and the same.

In the years following World War I, Black observers encountered an expanded immigration control regime, featuring both major legislative changes and a growing enforcement infrastructure.¹⁹ Much of the new federal immigration legislation that had developed in the aftermath of the Civil War was explicitly race-based, beginning with the Page Act in 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Bolstered by rising waves of nativism, pseudoscientific racial research, morality scares, and antiradicalism, a series of restrictive laws followed, culminating in the quota regime of the early 1920s. Just as new restrictions excluded large numbers of new immigrants, expanded deportation efforts led to unprecedented numbers of post-entry removals.²⁰ As Mae Ngai argues, the 1920s represented “an extraordinary time when immigration policy realigned and hardened racial categories in the law.”²¹

Black journalists and commentators of the interwar period watched these developments closely and responded with a complex and multifaceted discourse on immigrant expulsion. That discourse represented a continuation of decades of African American debate on immigration.²² In the post–Civil War period, leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington were split on whether supporting nativist movements was an effective way to protect the economic position of Black workers.²³ Most Black leaders, scholars have concluded, welcomed the immigration restrictions of the early twentieth century (if at times grudgingly), hoping they would bring economic opportunities for African Americans.²⁴ But as David Hellwig explains, as “fellow sufferers of intolerance,” even supporters of restriction generally declined to support race-based legislation.²⁵ And many were alarmed by the impact of the 1924 Immigration Act, which slashed Black migration from the Caribbean.²⁶

Coverage of deportation in the Black press evolved significantly over the course of the interwar period. Hellwig asserts that “black interest in immigration declined by the late 1920s.”²⁷ However, while this may have been true for immigration restriction, coverage of post-entry deportations, I demonstrate, actually increased and grew ever more complicated by the 1930s. After the onset of the Great Depression, some writers did, as might be expected, pivot toward more overt support for deportation. Some Black periodicals, most prominently the Chicago Defender (which scholars have noted was perhaps the most protectionist African American newspaper on immigration) published regularly on the alleged threat posed by foreign-born laborers.²⁸ For example, in a 1932 weekly reader write-in feature, the Defender queried “… should the United States deport all foreigners not qualified as citizens who are now employed in America, or who are subjects of charity?” The answers printed the following week were uniformly affirmative, many expressing hostility toward America's allegedly lenient immigration policy. “The United States has been fooled by foreign interests into believing that it is the great melting pot …,” wrote Walter Felton of North Carolina, “but we will dish out our jobs to foreigners while good Americans go to the breadlines.…” Earle Motley of St. Louis put his response more bluntly: “Give America back to Americans.… Deport as many as you can find.”²⁹

But while some articles and letters staunchly supported deportation during the Depression, those stories represented only one strain of thought about immigrant removal, and they were significantly outnumbered by contrasting coverage. Throughout the interwar period, as I explore in the pages that follow, Black newspapers published an array of stories that critiqued the state's use of deportation for racially oppressive agendas. These critiques, I argue, represented more than expressions of solidarity with other populations. Instead, they reflected a belief that deportation was being used to carry out specifically anti-Black agendas.

Black Deportees in the Black Press

Across the Black press, there was a clear focus on Black immigrants, who often received less attention in mainstream white periodicals.³⁰ Approximately three-quarters of the articles on individual deportation cases focused on Black immigrants, as did many of the articles on wider deportation politics. While inflated by the dozens of articles about Marcus Garvey's removal—a momentous event that garnered extensive if less nuanced attention in the white press, these numbers demonstrate African Americans’ keen awareness of the heavy impact of immigration control on Black migrants. While Black immigrants comprised only a small percentage of early-twentieth-century deportees, they were expelled at disproportionately high rates. In 1920, for instance, Black immigrants composed only 0.53 percent of the total foreign-born population of the United States, but represented 1.5 percent of all deportations that year. By 1930, Black immigrants made up 0.69 percent of the foreign-born population, but 1.1 percent of deportations that year.³¹ An examination of the Black press, therefore, both highlights the need for further research on Black deportations and provides scholars with an important source base for doing so.

Even newspapers that sometimes urged higher deportations often differentiated between Black immigrants and others. Throughout the period, despite ongoing and well-documented tensions between African Americans and Black immigrants, many authors argued the need to stand with Black immigrants against deportation.³² Deportation coverage, therefore, adds an important dimension to our understanding of intraracial relations by demonstrating the range of responses to the targeting of Black immigrants.³³ One representative 1935 editorial in the Pittsburgh Courier insisted that the “most ridiculous of all is the group which is pointing a finger of accusation at the West Indian.” Caribbean immigrants, the author continued, could not be blamed for the lack of voting rights in the South, housing conditions in Harlem, or any number of social ills. Indeed, he queried, what real solutions would be created, even if “we deport all the West Indians in the world to the Land of Kingdom Come?”³⁴ As the stories throughout this article reveal, Black commentators most often critiqued the removal of Black immigrants, although they did, at times, evaluate their deportations as advantageous for the race.

While much of the coverage centered on high-profile individuals, everyday Black immigrants also found their way into the pages of the Black press when they were apprehended by deportation authorities. Many stories tracked the experiences of stowaways (primarily West Indian men) who were apprehended after illegal entry. Others focused on individuals charged with crimes ranging from burglary to vagrancy. Still others centered on migrants afflicted with physical or mental disabilities or diseases, such as James Waite, who was apprehended for deportation from the Hudson State Asylum for the Insane or Boynouh Wher of Liberia, who was referred for deportation by the Union County Anti-Tuberculosis League in New Jersey.³⁵

The targeting of Black immigrant university students also featured in a number of stories. In 1932, for instance, the Afro-American reported on the potentially devastating impact of a new deportation ruling on foreign-born students at Howard University, as well as on a number of “colored” students at Columbia. While there is no indication the ruling led to actual deportations at these institutions, the attention in the Black press shows a protective concern for non-native Black students.³⁶ In a more concrete 1930 case, the Courier reported on the forthcoming deportation of James Karoh of Nigeria, who had entered unlawfully before enrolling at Tuskegee. The author noted that he had been detained at Ellis Island “still wearing his Tuskegee uniform,” and declared Karoh was merely “praying that this government” would allow him to finish his studies. In other cases, however, students who violated the boundaries of respectable behavior received less sympathetic coverage. In 1928, for example, multiple papers followed the deportation of Milton Ebimber, a medical student at Columbia University, to the Dominican Republic after he had been charged with bigamy.³⁷

The Black press also reported on the racism of immigration officials, including the discrimination faced by individual Black immigrants. Phyllis Edmeade of the West Indies, one paper reported in 1928, had the rare luck of eluding deportation after a judge determined that stealing ninety-two cents did not, as originally charged, constitute a crime of “moral turpitude.” But, the author explained, her attorney filed a complaint alleging that, while detained awaiting deportation, “Miss Edmeade was called vile names and mistreated.”³⁸ In 1936, the New York Amsterdam News published a letter to the editor providing an even more direct indictment of racist immigration enforcement. The author, who identified as “Just An Alien,” wrote to the paper, “We, the colored aliens at Ellis Island, wish” to bring to your attention “the conditions practiced here.” One of the primary challenges, the missive explained, was that while other immigrant groups had national representatives to provide advice, translation, and supplies, no one provided such care for Black detainees (including the white representative charged with caring for “English-speaking people,” who reportedly ignored Black immigrants altogether). Furthermore, the letter claimed, Black deportees were frequently kept in the dark about their legal cases and were forced into segregated seating in the detention center's dining facilities.³⁹

And in a dramatic 1930 case, the Defender, highlighting the precarity of Black citizenship, charged that discrimination had led to the deportation of a native-born U.S. citizen, John Thomas Whitfield. Whitfield, a Texas native, had been deported to Brazil after “immigration authorities refused to consider the evidence” of his citizenship. Only the intervention of the NAACP and the Brazilian government, the article explained, eventually forced U.S. officials to permit Whitfield's return.⁴⁰ In other cases, the racial targeting was depicted as more personal, with racist white individuals using the immigration state to enact their own agendas. The Defender, for instance, wrote about the attempted deportation of Elma Street as an effort to punish the young woman for “passing.” Street had met the white “scion of a wealthy family” in Jamaica and followed him to New York after he promised to marry her. Upon her arrival, after discovering that “notwithstanding her fair skin she was not white,” the Defender claimed, he not only refused to marry her (despite having “lived as man and wife”), but actually attempted (unsuccessfully) to have her deported.⁴¹

Beyond individual cases, the targeting of Black immigrants was portrayed as broad and indiscriminate. African American writers, especially in New York, where the highest proportion of Black immigrants resided, often closely intertwined with the large African American population in Harlem, regularly reminded their readers that Black immigrants were uniquely vulnerable to deportation. A 1934 article in the New York Amsterdam News responded to calls from local politicians for the deportation of noncitizens in Harlem by charging that “the resolution was directed at Negro foreign-born residents.” After quoting an organizer who declared that “when they get ready to lynch a Negro they never ask where he was born,” the article's author noted: “We may add that white people (who run this country and most others) are seldom interested in a Negro's national origin unless they are able to use the information as a wedge to pry black men apart.”⁴² In 1939, the Amsterdam News again warned that “the mills of the legislative gods are grinding exceedingly well,” and that the “thousands of Negro aliens in Harlem and other communities” were “on the spot more than any other group of aliens.”⁴³

By the early 1930s, Black papers also focused on the large and growing population of Black immigrants in the Southeast, covering efforts to expel Bahamian laborers who had been recruited for farm work. The Afro-American reported in 1932 that there was a crusade being waged to “rid the [E]verglades of unnaturalized Bahaman Islanders” and that “the first move will be … to make a roundup of all Negroes who have entered the country illegally from the British possessions and deport them.”⁴⁴ By 1935, articles stressed that these efforts were extending beyond immigrants and were in fact serving, as one headline put it, to “Terrorize Race Folk in Florida.” “Wholesale arrests of residents are a daily occurrence,” the paper explained, and many Black Miamians had been “grilled mercilessly.”⁴⁵ Similarly, the Atlanta Daily World accused local authorities of using trumped-up claims to justify mass raids and of unnecessarily harassing “thousands of thrifty law abiding people … who have lived here all of their lives and who have helped to develop this country.”⁴⁶

Black Celebrity Deportations

Within coverage on Black deportees, Black newspapers were especially attentive to well-known cultural icons, including athletes, musicians, and actors. Carrie Teresa argues that “by the mid-1920s, discussions of celebrity culture,” in the Black press “shifted from discussions about race representation to more sensational coverage of celebrities’ personal lives.”⁴⁷ But while Black celebrity deportation stories undoubtedly reached for the sensational, they retained a clear focus on racial politics, as Black commentators often contended that these celebrities were facing removal precisely because they threatened the racial order. At the same time, however, Black observers did not uniformly defend famous individuals. Instead, in cases ranging from misbehaving athletes to cult leaders, Black authors frequently upheld a politics of respectability by supporting the expulsion of individuals who they felt had threatened the image of the race.

Of course, no Black deportee neared the fame of Marcus Garvey, the contentious head of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), whose removal encapsulated these diverging forms of coverage. The UNIA, which promoted a militant and controversial form of Pan-African, diasporic politics, peaked from the 1910s through the early 1920s, when it attracted tens of thousands of members across multiple continents. Garvey, the Jamaican-born leader of this massively popular Black nationalist movement, was indicted in 1922 and deported in 1927.⁴⁸ As Judith Stein explains, his prosecutors hoped to eliminate the “leading black alien agitator in the United States” and settled on mail fraud “after a long search for a deportable offense.”⁴⁹ Charisse Burden-Stelly further insists that while Garvey was not a communist, we must understand his removal as intertwined with the anticommunist crusade. “The disciplining of Marcus Garvey,” she explains, “conveys how the West Indian's race consciousness, mass appeal, internationalism, and demand for Black economic self-determination sutured the Black Scare and Red Scare and positioned them as vectors of communism, irrespective of ideology .”⁵⁰

As scholars have argued, Garvey's case both revealed and provoked deep fissures among Black activists in the United States An organized “Garvey Must Go” campaign emerged by the early 1920s, led by a number of native and foreign-born Black leaders.⁵¹ While there had been pre-existing agitation against Garvey, after his widely publicized meeting with a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, public sentiment turned against him more widely.⁵² Indeed, Winston James argues that the “Garvey Must Go” campaign might be considered the “nadir” in the “strained relationship between Afro-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans.”⁵³ Irma Watkins-Owens points out that Robert Abbott was particularly antagonistic, and suggests that “such attacks were often motivated by rivalries … the [UNIA's newspaper] Negro World was widely read in Chicago, posing direct competition to the editor's Chicago Defender.”⁵⁴ Throughout the early and mid-1920s, many of the most widely circulated organs of the Black press featured support for Garvey's deportation.⁵⁵ “We believe the peace and safety of this country demand that Garvey serve his sentence as an alien and when his time is up, he should be deported,” wrote William Byrd in the Cleveland Gazette.⁵⁶ Another author declared “American citizens … need the advice of no alien Britisher…. Public sentiment backs the Federal courts which are showing Mr. Garvey to the door.”⁵⁷ Some supported removal more reluctantly, like Floyd Calvin, who explained in the Courier that while Garvey had “instilled pride on a national scale,” his deportation was the “only sensible thing” due to the controversy he had generated.⁵⁸

This should not suggest, however, that contributors to the Black press were universally supportive of Garvey's deportation. For many, Garvey's deportation showed that the immigration bureaucracy could and would be used to suppress Black activism. As one 1928 article in the Wichita Negro Star argued (while still characterizing his political opinions as “regrettable”), that Garvey's treatment contrasted starkly to that of other politically active immigrants. “It seems that as a rule,” the author wrote, “the Negro is the first always to get the benefit of severe and testing measures.”⁵⁹ And by the time Garvey was released for deportation in 1927, much of the antagonism in the Black press had mellowed, and some seemed to have reconsidered the political implications of his deportation. As one commentator observed, “much of the vehemence against him by Negroes had subsided…. In marked contrast with the days when Garvey was in his heyday, there is very little or no, sentiment among Negroes now supporting his deportation.”⁶⁰

In a study of Black responses to deportation, the significance of the Garvey case can hardly be ignored. But, I insist, it is critical to consider his removal not merely as an exceptional case, but also within the wider context of Black deportations. As D'Weston Haywood reminds us, Garvey's deportation was part of a broader repressive agenda, explaining that the Bureau of Investigation “deemed many black leaders in Harlem a threat to national interests.”⁶¹ Despite the prominent role of Black Caribbean radicals during the period and their accompanying targeting by the state, however, coverage of deportations on the basis of political ideology most often (except in the case of Garvey) focused on non-Black immigrants.⁶² Although the Black press frequently covered the political activities of foreign-born Black radicals, it only occasionally presented them as the targets of deportation efforts. One exception was the case of Charles Romney, a Harlem orator who was deported to Trinidad in 1938 and was declared by some Black journalists to be the target of a frame-up for his political activism. One paper claimed Romney was deported because of his “reputation for militancy,” while another published Romney's claim that “he was sent out of the country because of his strength as a mob raiser.”⁶³ The Amsterdam News printed even more damning assertions, explaining that Romney had charged Ellis Island authorities with “making false passports to deport West Indians.”⁶⁴

Well-known athletes, in contrast, figured regularly in coverage of Black deportees. One of the biggest celebrity deportation cases of the interwar period was the multiyear saga of Eligio Sardinas, or “Kid Chocolate,” the Black Cuban boxer and world featherweight champion. As Enver Casimir explains, “the African American press paid close attention to Chocolate, claiming him as one of their own.”⁶⁵ Dozens of articles in Black newspapers described Kid Chocolate's initial removal (which some described as an extradition) from the United States in 1931 after Cuban authorities demanded his return to face charges of abducting his underaged “sweetheart.”⁶⁶ Kid Chocolate resolved the issue by marrying the young woman, but again found himself in the clutches of immigration officials a year later. After he was deported for entering the United States for a fight without the required permits, many Black commentators insisted this was a “plot” designed to keep him from trouncing his white opponent.⁶⁷ “The Buy American movement spread to the cauliflower industry, combined with something of the stench of race prejudice,” wrote one author, who claimed immigration officials “were acting under specific instructions from Washington.”⁶⁸ The Journal and Guide reported that the NAACP had offered its support, since he had been barred “based on color.”⁶⁹ Although Chocolate was readmitted a few months later for his delayed bout, the Black press critiqued his deportation as just another tactic to keep a Black athlete from being able to demonstrate his prowess (Figure 1).⁷⁰

Figure 1. A Belt, A Wife, But No Permit.

Source: Norfolk Journal and Guide, January 28, 1933, A13.

Kid Chocolate's multiple removals made the greatest splash, but numerous other Black immigrant athletes became subjects of deportation stories, including boxer Kenneth Herbert (aka Jackie Moore), champion bantamweight boxer “Panama Al” Brown, and professional golfer Louis Rafael Corbin.⁷¹ Performers of various sorts also appeared in Black newspapers when they faced deportation. Evelyn Dove, for instance, a Black British singer, made the news when she was deported in August 1936.⁷² One of the more unusual (and flippantly covered) cases was that of the so-called “Mardi Gras King” or “Zulu King” of New Orleans, Panamanian performer Allen Leon, who, the Courier declared, “finds himself about to go back in person to his jungle.”⁷³ In more somber coverage, the Amsterdam News reported that actor Frank Watson had been detained at Ellis Island for fourteen weeks before being deported to British West Africa. Notably, the article highlighted the fact that while Watson was formally deported for illegal entry, he was a member of the International Labor Defense and Project Workers’ Union in New York.⁷⁴

Perhaps even more sensational were the cases of two alleged “African Prince[s]” targeted for deportation, whose cases were written about in dramatic (and often exoticizing) language in the Black press. The first, Farger Comara, reported to be the “son of the Chief of the Timni Tribe in Sierra Leone,” had been attending the Detroit Institute of Technology.⁷⁵ After his arrest for illegal entry in 1928, the Courier reported, he was held as a “non-paying guest of Uncle Sam at the Gloucester Detention House” near Philadelphia.⁷⁶ Notably, Comara claimed that “difficulties between his father's tribesmen and American missionaries” in Sierra Leone might “be behind sending him home.”⁷⁷ Several years later, John Williams, “aka Jimmy Green, stowaway, traveler, deportee, and self-styled prince of a central African tribe,” was likewise deported on the basis of illegal entry.⁷⁸ “Green claimed to be the son of the chief of the Udinga Tribe of Central Africa” and “while confined in the local jail, he … very often could be heard telling of the customs and traditions of his tribe,” reported the Journal and Guide. The article also reflected awareness of the discriminatory immigration restrictions in place, noting Green might find it impossible to re-enter, due to the extremely low quotas for African nations.⁷⁹

While many high-profile Black deportations were treated as evidence of governmental racism, occasionally the narrative took a different form, and deportation was depicted as a beneficial opportunity to eliminate an infamous Black immigrant who was proving to be a “discredit” to the race. Some Black commentators exhibited a form of respectability politics by supporting the removal of individuals who had defied the boundaries of normative behavior. Such stories often reveled in the sensational, fitting with Kim Gallon's claims that sexual coverage regularly coexisted with “news that exemplified the uplift and racial advocacy mission of the black press.”⁸⁰ Perhaps surprisingly, despite Cuban officials’ accusations of impropriety, Kid Chocolate's actions were not generally criticized in the Black press. Instead, authors noted he had displayed “excellent” behavior while in the United States and dismissed his troubles as merely “a bad year in love.”⁸¹

In marked contrast however, Black journalists writing about the planned deportation of Louis Fall (a Senegalese boxer known as “Battling Siki”) often supported his removal.⁸² After reports in 1924 that Siki was facing deportation for alleged bigamy, numerous articles in the Black press openly advocated for his deportation (despite the fact that the charges were never sustained in court).⁸³ As Peter Benson describes it, the federal immigration commissioner was “back[ing] up the boxing board” by threatening deportation, although Siki was ultimately allowed to leave voluntarily.⁸⁴ “Universal opinion seems to be favorable toward the deportation of Battling Siki,” the Journal and Guide explained, as “his actions have simply hurt other boxers of the race and cast a reflection not pleasant to contemplate.”⁸⁵ However, as Theresa Runstedtler notes, Siki had also, at earlier moments, “sparked public conversations about the transnational reach of the color line,” including when he was banned from Britain in 1923.⁸⁶ But even the hostile coverage of Siki made it clear that his case was an outlier. “Here is one instance,” the Courier declared, “in which no charge has been made of race persecution or race prejudice. Some of the harshest in their criticism of the Senegalese were race people.”⁸⁷

Coverage of notorious figures took on other surprising dimensions. In two different highly covered 1930s cases, Black men who had been posing as immigrants were exposed as native-born African Americans after being investigated for deportation. Sufi Abdul Hamid, a political organizer described by one paper as “Harlem's chief agitator,” was held at Ellis Island in 1935.⁸⁸ Hamid, the Black press reported, had claimed to be a native of (depending on which paper you followed) Turkey, Egypt, or Sudan. But his deportation proceedings fell apart after it was revealed that he was in fact (again depending on the paper) a native of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or Georgia. A strange tale to be sure, but not an isolated one. In 1939, Herfe Tashara, an alleged cult leader in Los Angeles, was investigated by immigration authorities after a Mann Act indictment for bringing three female followers into California.⁸⁹ Tashara, who had variously claimed to be from Egypt or Abyssinia, was revealed to be William Jackson, originally of Georgia.⁹⁰ Although he was additionally charged with “conspiracy to defraud the government of free passage to Abyssinia” by lying in order to be deported, he was acquitted on that count.⁹¹ These cases bring to mind the scholarship of Robert A. Hill and Brandon Byrd on the “figure of the imposter” whose foreign performance (generally of Ethiopianness) was part of a particular political positioning.⁹² As with Siki, the Black press expressed little sympathy for Hamid's or Tashara's encounters with the immigration bureaucracy.

Sometimes distasteful political identifications (rather than disgraceful personal behavior) led Black journalists to support the removal of certain Black immigrants. Press coverage of the “astounding saga of Col. Hubert Julian” was even more complex.⁹³ “Colonel” Julian, a Trinidadian-born aviator known as the “Black Eagle of Harlem,” featured in two sets of deportation stories—first about his expulsion from Ethiopia in 1930 and then about his rumored deportation from the United States in 1936.⁹⁴ Various authors across the Black press reported that African Americans had in fact instigated the 1936 proceedings against Julian because of the harm caused by his public support for Mussolini. “Hubert Julian,” wrote the publisher of the Wichita, Kansas, Negro Star in 1936, “… is a menace and should be deported from the U.S. is the contention of certain organizations of Negroes in Harlem who are now circulating a petition to have the State Department take such action.”⁹⁵ Numerous other papers reported on efforts to prevent Julian's planned pro-Italian lecture tour by securing his deportation.⁹⁶ “Julian, having renounced his British allegiance in favor of Ethiopian citizenship,” another columnist wrote, “may be deported from Ellis Island to Ethiopia… I hope they do send him back. He will make a nice meal for the Emperor's lions—that is, if they like dark meat (Figure 2).”⁹⁷ Despite widespread reports of his upcoming deportation, Julian, the Afro-American eventually explained, never actually faced removal proceedings.⁹⁸ But the Black press continued to insist that his voluntary departure was “undoubtedly hastened,” as Frank Marshall Davis explained, by having “won for himself the unenviable title of the nation's most hated black man.”⁹⁹

Figure 2. Julian Quits U.S.

Source: Baltimore Afro-American, Jan. 11, 1936, 6.

Non-Black Immigrants and Deportation as Punishment for Racial Transgression

Alongside stories of Black deportees, the Black press also regularly critiqued deportations of non-Black immigrants as evidence of anti-Black agendas. Deportation officials were often depicted as targeting groups or individuals who allied themselves with African Americans or otherwise flouted the racial boundaries of their adopted country. Black authors most frequently demonstrated this through coverage of non-Black deportees’ support for racial justice efforts, but also featured stories of immigrants who were connected to African Americans through interracial romantic relationships. When discussing other immigrants of color, Black commentators also repeatedly noted that they were being targeted in ways that resembled the treatment of African Americans and being punished due to their perceived proximity to Blackness.

Notably, the Black press contained relatively little coverage of deportation efforts during the so-called “First Red Scare” in 1919–1920. However, by the 1930s, Black authors covered antiradical deportations extensively, perhaps because of the expanded participation of African Americans and Black immigrants in a range of radical organizations and the Communist Party's increased emphasis on racial equality. During the Depression era, radical organizations, and the Communist Party (CP) in particular, devoted considerable effort to attracting Black members and made racial justice an explicit component of their agenda.¹⁰⁰ These efforts drew the (often-divided) attention of a broader array of Black observers, including in stories about deportation. As Robin D. G. Kelley explains, “For most African Americans … the [Communist] Party was best known for its defense of the Scottsboro Nine and the International Labor Defense's (ILD) unremitting challenge to a racist criminal justice system.”¹⁰¹ Fred Carroll argues that the Afro-American “offered readers friendly coverage of the Community Party,” while the Amsterdam News “employed a radicalized editorial staff,” and even papers with more conservative editors, such as the Defender, regularly featured leftist voices.¹⁰² Throughout the decade, much of the Black press’ coverage of white deportees focused on radical activists, and commentators repeatedly argued that it was their organizing on behalf of African American rights that made these activists vulnerable to removal.¹⁰³

One such case involved Stephen Graham, a CP member who took a job at a manufacturing plant in Virginia with the goal of organizing its mostly Black female workforce. After holding an interracial meeting of roughly 150 workers in 1929, Graham was arrested and charged with “conspiracy to incite the colored population to insurrection against the white population.” Though acquitted, he was ordered deported to his native Yugoslavia in 1930.¹⁰⁴ His case attracted coverage in several Black newspapers, which focused on Graham's racial solidarity as the underlying cause of his persecution. The Afro-American argued he had been targeted because he addressed a “a race group in the so-called Black Belt,” while the Courier asserted that he had posed a threat to the “position of privilege” of the local white elite.¹⁰⁵

In 1932, multiple Black newspapers provided conflicting but sympathetic reports on the case of George Stalker, a white Communist organizer who was detained in Omaha for deportation to Scotland. While agreeing he had been targeted in connection to racial advocacy, the Defender claimed he had been part of a round up by police at “an open air Scottsboro-Mooney demonstration,” while the Journal and Guide reported that Stalker had been apprehended for defending a Black worker at an interracial dance held by the League of Struggle for Negro Rights.¹⁰⁶ Related coverage continued throughout the 1930s, with stories of deportation being used to castigate racial solidarity in the cases of an ILD attorney in Tampa, Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organizers in New Orleans, and others.¹⁰⁷ In some of these cases, Black authors also noted the international dimensions of deportation. According to the Defender, Carl Ohm was ordered deported to Germany because he “dared participate in the fight for Race rights.” Ohm's situation was particularly precarious, organizers claimed, because if deported, he would “undoubtedly face persecution and death at the hands of the Hitler storm troops.”¹⁰⁸

In the well-known deportation case of Finnish immigrant August Yokinen, the racial politics were murkier. Yokinen first attracted the national spotlight when he was expelled by the CP in a highly publicized show trial after barring Black workers from the Finnish Workers’ Club where he worked as a janitor. The initial incident would hardly suggest Yokinen as a “race sympathizer,” but in the aftermath, Yokinen publicly pledged to make amends by organizing for racial justice. Yokinen's dramatic trial and subsequent deportation case, scholars have argued, became a major inflection point for the CP's positioning on race. Mark Naison asserts that the Yokinen case “impressed upon white Communists … that it was their duty as Communists ‘to march at the head of the struggle for Negro rights.’”¹⁰⁹

It was precisely Yokinen's about-face on racial discrimination, many commentators in the Black press argued, that made him a target of the state. One author in the Negro Star contended that Yokinen was being deported because he had pledged himself to the “struggle for Negro rights.”¹¹⁰ Other papers joined in this assessment, arguing that Yokinen had been ordered deported “on the basis of this retraction” of “race prejudice.”¹¹¹ Indeed, Mark Solomon argues, after Yokinen's arrest for deportation, even papers like the Chicago Defender argued the need to stand up for some “reds.” While it did not attract masses of new members, Solomon states “the antichauvinism campaign did impress many people, black and white.”¹¹² Thus a case that had originally been a story of prejudice was recrafted in the Black press as a tale in which the U.S. government used deportation to stamp out the development of racial solidarity.

While stories about deportations of foreign-born white Communists were the most common, the Black press commented on other non-Black activists involved in the struggle for Black freedom. Few cases drew more attention than that of Satohata Takahashi, who was deported twice to Japan over the course of the 1930s.¹¹³ Takahashi, often described in the Black press as an “agitator,” had moved to Detroit in the early 1930s and organized the Society for the Development of Our Own to promote the “doctrine of good will and uplift of the dark race.”¹¹⁴ As Keisha Blain explains, Takahashi collaborated with local Black activists as part of a wider wave of “Afro-Asian solidarity.”¹¹⁵ Black journalists reported that, before being branded by police as a racketeer and deported in 1934, Takahashi had been known as a charismatic speaker whose organization had reputedly reached 10,000 members.¹¹⁶ In 1939, after returning from Japan to Canada and then Detroit, Takahashi was apprehended, incarcerated, and deported from the country a second time.¹¹⁷

As with Black deportees seen as threats to racial respectability, some Black Americans cheered on (or even actively assisted in) Takahashi's removal. Takashi, a polarizing figure accused of living “off the money he collected from large groups of colored people,” was, the Black press noted, turned in to the authorities by Black leaders not once, but twice.¹¹⁸ In 1933, the Kansas City Plaindealer reported that Takahashi had been “arrested on the complaint of several Negro leaders who do not believe that his program is best for the community.”¹¹⁹ In the case of his second deportation in 1939, as Ernest Allen explains, it was Takahashi's own estranged wife, African American activist Pearl Sherrod, who reported him to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). By Takahashi’s second deportation, it appeared that little sympathy remained among Black observers.¹²⁰ But, while Takahashi was condemned by many in the Black press (and his organization dismissed as a “cult”), some continued to suggest his deportation was a government plot to get rid of activists who aligned themselves against white supremacy. Joseph Ward of Connecticut, in a letter to the Afro-American, proclaimed his “disgust” that Takahashi was to be deported for “preaching a doctrine of uplift to the darker races,” and compared his treatment to that of Garvey.¹²¹

But it was not always political activism that brought non-Black immigrants to the forefront of Black coverage as victims of racist targeting. Another common trope was non-Black immigrants who were scrutinized by government officials because of their involvement in interracial marriages or sexual relationships. In a number of cases, the interracial relationships prompting deportations were depicted as tawdry affairs that scandalized authorities. This was true in the 1923 case of Margaret McAvoy, a white British woman who was said to be “the paramour of one Gray Evens, Colored, an alleged dope peddler.” When Pittsburgh authorities failed to prove McAvoy was caught up in a “white slave ring,” they deported her instead.¹²² The case of Helen Boyer of Germany was depicted similarly in 1929. Boyer, one paper noted, “may be sent back to Europe as the result of the green-eyed monster jealousy getting the best of her when she saw her dark skinned boyfriend in company with another girl.”¹²³ In the 1939 deportation of Toney Piazza, a “handsome Sicilian,” the Defender noted that the judge in his case was particularly horrified by how many of the “witnesses of both races admitted on cross-examination that they were married to or living with persons of the opposite race.”¹²⁴

But the critique of governmental racism came through even more clearly in the more tender representations of loving interracial families who faced the heartbreak of separation due to deportation. In 1939, the Black press reported on multiple stories in which, as one headline explained, “Deportation Hits Mixed Families.” One report from Bristol, Rhode Island, explained that two different local mixed-race families were facing deportations. Both cases involved Black fathers (one a Portuguese man married to a white Portuguese-American woman, Mrs. Pereira, and the other an African American married to a white French-Canadian woman, Mrs. Silva) with young children.¹²⁵ Both families argued that race was at the heart of their persecution. As the Afro-American reported, “Mrs. Pereira expressed the view that the inter-racial angle inspired the deportation proceedings,” while “Mrs. Silva said that she was given notice to leave the country while she was in a hospital maternity ward. She said officers voiced surprise when they saw her husband.”¹²⁶

And in a number of articles crafted to tug at the heartstrings, the Black press sympathetically presented the story of “Little Earl Hing,” the son of an African American mother and a Chinese father who faced deportation.¹²⁷ Hing, the six-year-old protagonist of what one article called a “strange story of American life,” had reportedly appealed in vain to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to stop his father's deportation. As one story put it, in essentializing language, “with the stoicism of an Asiatic, [Henry] Hing has accepted his fate.” However, Earl's mother, “a woman, deeply in love with the father of her two children, and two tots, unable to understand the intricacies of the law,” was reportedly “continuing the fight to save the man who has made their lives worth living.”¹²⁸ Unlike the deportation of white political activists, which were regularly represented as a method of undermining the struggle for Black political rights, deportations of interracial families were seen as more intimate assaults on the rights of Black citizens to conduct their private lives without the intervention of the state.

More broadly, deportation was also presented in the Black press as a way to punish immigrants of color for their general (rather than personal and intimate) proximity to blackness. While newspapers featured extensive coverage of immigrants and public aid during the Great Depression, the Black press was less vocal about the subject of mass Mexican and Mexican American “repatriation” during the 1930s, in which communities of Mexican descent were the targets of a racist crusade to restrict Depression-era welfare to “true Americans.” Scholars have demonstrated that at least a half a million Mexicans and Mexican Americans (and possibly many more) left during the decade under varied levels of pressure or coercion.¹²⁹ The lack of greater coverage of these expulsions may have reflected, in part, the fact that they took place largely in California and throughout the southwest, where Black Americans resided in smaller numbers (and where the Black press had less of a foothold).

While not frequent, however, the occasional articles on these removals often connected their treatment to that of African Americans. Although there is no evidence of widespread African American protest against Mexican “repatriation,” Arnold Shankman's assertation that “there is no evidence that Blacks voiced any objections to this brutal treatment” seems to be an oversimplification.¹³⁰ A 1929 article in the Courier, for instance, entitled “Jumping on the Mexicans,” combined both negative stereotyping of the “low standards of living” of Mexican laborers and a clear critique of the shared economic exploitation they faced. Furthermore, the author claimed, in addition to trying to deport Mexican laborers en masse, white people began “classing them along with the Negroes.”¹³¹ This author was not alone in observing that Mexicans were often targeted in tandem with or on the basis of their contact with African Americans. As a letter writer from Pontiac, Michigan, explained in the Defender in 1932, during recent a roundup of Mexican immigrants, one of the first questions detainees were asked was “if they have been associating with Negroes.”¹³²

The Black press also featured discussion of efforts to repatriate Filipinos during the early 1930s, sometimes drawing similar connections to the plight of African Americans.¹³³ Some in the Black press argued that Filipino removal drives would benefit Black workers. In fact, the Afro-American noted in 1933 that it was the “lone colored member of the state legislature” in California who introduced a resolution to deport 35,000 Filipinos on public support, blaming them for “inroads upon colored domestic labor.”¹³⁴ Two years later, the Defender featured the headline “Deportation of Filipinos Will Aid Race Workers,” reflecting similar sentiments. In contrast, however, other authors argued empathy for Filipinos, who, they suggested, faced all-too familiar racial targeting. After 1932 roundups in Florida, one Journal and Guide article argued that “Filipinos … were penalized for accomplishing too much, just as so many Negroes have had their houses bombed, or their little businesses threatened because they happen to do too well.” Furthermore, the author noted, although they were treated as an “alien race,” “the American flag also flies” over their homeland.¹³⁵ Such observations bring to mind Burden-Stelly's assertation that “the historical repression of the Black because of his embodied threat to the racialized socioeconomic order was deployed against ‘foreigners’ and radicals that likewise threatened the system of capitalist accumulation organized around the U.S. imperialist and hegemonic state,” and suggest that at least some Black commentators were drawing these connections by the interwar era.¹³⁶ In these and other articles, Black authors argued that immigrants of color were made vulnerable to the deportation regime precisely because of either their perceived connections or similarities to African Americans.

Conclusion

In 1927, William N. Jones penned a poignant reflection on the increasingly powerful deportation regime in his Baltimore Afro-American column. Commenting on a recent editorial in The Opportunity magazine on the twisted state of religion in the modern United States, Jones paraphrased its message: “Christmas of this year 1927 finds Christianity in one of the most civilized countries on the globe in a mess of hypocrisy and wide of the mark which Jesus of Nazareth set.” Notably, he closed the column by concluding in bolded text, “The fact is if the real Jesus Christ should come back to earth this Christmas with his philosophy; his idealism and his burning earnestness, he would not only find surprises, but he would be deported along with Garvey and some of the Russian ‘reds.’”¹³⁷ Like many other authors in the interwar Black press, Jones provided a scathing depiction of a deportation system marked by racial and political repression.

The Black press's sophisticated critique of racist state repression and antiblackness in particular, however, has been largely absent from scholarship on this formative era of American deportation policy and practice. Not only do these publications provide a useful window into underexamined Black discourses on immigration in the early twentieth century, they also offer an opportunity for rethinking the racial politics of the early deportation regime. While historical scholarship has offered increasingly nuanced analysis of the racial dimensions of the targeting of Asian, Latin American, and European immigrants, we have yet to fully understand the imbrication of anti-Black racism and immigration control during the period. Studying the voices of Black commentators and journalists of the time begins to correct for these missing perspectives.