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North to America, 1900–1940 The census of 1870 counted approximately 10,000 foreignborn blacks. Nearly a third were from Canada, no doubt the descendants of those taken there after the American Revolution and those whose slave ancestors had fled to Canada before the Civil War. After that date, black migration to America resumed, although, of course, none of these immigrants entered as slaves. Black immigrants, like both Europeans and Asians, came from a variety of places with diverse languages and cultures. The numbers were not large, and the foreign-born black population was only 54,737 in 1900. It grew more rapidly from 1900 to the 1930s, but the total number immigrating to the United States from the end of the Civil War to 1930 was roughly 200,000. These black immigrants added a new dimension to the nation’s African American population.1 It will be recalled that the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to “free white persons,” and the act of 1870 expanded to include persons of African descent. Congress added the phrase but did not think that it would lead to large-scale African immigration. As one federal judge put it in 1880, “No one seriously believed that ‘the negroes of Africa’ (would emigrate).”2 When the legislators banned Asians by barring those ineligible for citizenship, they did not include black immigrants . In 1914 and 1915, however, several southern congressmen moved to bar “all members of the African or black race.” Senator John Sharp Williams insisted that foreign-born blacks were even less desirable than Asians. He concluded that the United States could not maintain free institutions “except by a homogeneous race.”3 His proposal, though passing the Senate, failed in the House. During the 1920s, however, Congress restricted African immigration by giving Africa quotas (of 100) for only a few areas. British and French mandates each had quotas of 100, as did the Union of South Africa, Liberia, Ethiopia, and several other mandates. Only ethnic groups whose forebears had come to the United States vol3 71 untarily were granted a quota, a device that excluded practically all black Africans, and the small quotas for some African mandates could also be used by whites.4 Not many black immigrants came directly from Africa between 1870 and the 1920s, so the law’s impact was not immediately apparent.5 Moreover , the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 did not give quotas to nations and colonies of the Western Hemisphere. Thus blacks from the Caribbean could still migrate to the United States and become citizens. Many did so, before and after the national origins system went into effect, but during the Great Depression, when economic opportunities were scarce, the number of persons from the Caribbean fell, as it did from all areas of the world.6 The first known immigrant from today’s Sudan was Sati Majid, who arrived in 1904. He came to America to spread the teachings of Islam to those Americans “whose hearts are favorably disposed to receiving it.”7 He aimed his preaching especially at African Americans but converted only a few and eventually returned to Sudan.8 Majid was not a forerunner of a larger wave of migration, for during the next decades few Sudanese followed. During World War II some Sudanese working on merchant ships that stopped in U.S. ports were recruited into the U.S. Navy. One migrant noted about his experience in 1942, “I worked on a Greek steamer that was affiliated with what was called the British War Ministry. After my arrival [in the United States] we were given the option to join the American navy, because the Americans were recruiting people and there was an urgent need for people to work for them.”9 From 1855 to 1930 about 35,000 persons came from the Cape Verde Islands, located several hundred miles off the coast of Africa. Settled by the Portuguese and African slaves, the islands were home to people who were a mixture of both groups. Even before the Civil War, American whaling vessels recruited Cape Verdeans as sailors. The first arrivals appeared in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1860. Migration grew slowly, averaging only 204 annually during the 1890s. When steamships replaced boats with sails, this recruitment stopped. But the contacts that had been made between the islands and Massachusetts set the stage for a larger migration after 1900, which was not curbed until the 1920s.10 Of the thousands of Africans immigrating voluntarily to...

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