Haitian Immigrants In Black America

Written by a member of the Black Haitian community, this book brings to life the mechanisms that shape Haitian immigrant identity and underscores the complexity of such an identity. Zéphir explains why Haitians define themselves as a distinct ethnic group and examines the various parameters of Haitian ethnicity. Through hundreds of interviews, the author gathered the voices of Haitians as they speak, as they feel, and most importantly, how they experience America and its system of racial classification. This work is a description of the diversity of the Black population in America and an effort to dispel the myth of a monolithic minority or sidestream culture.

This book describes the struggle of Haitians in the United States, the strain between pride in their Haitian roots and prejudice against Haitians, and its causes and consequences for approximately 500,000 Haitians in the U.S. The book examines the problems of prejudice, economics and immigration Haitians confront, along with their pride and resources of family, community and culture. Haitians reflect continuing difficulties in America concerning race, ethnicity and nationality. Part of the New Immigrants Series, edited by Nancy Foner. Focusing on the massive wave of immigration currently sweeping across America, this ground breaking series includes coverage of five new immigrant groups for 1998, the Hmong in Wisconsin, Brazilians and Koreans in New York City, Haitians in Miami, and Chinese in San Francisco. This series fills the gap in knowledge relating to today's immigrants, how these groups are attempting to redefine their cultures while here, and their contribution to a new and changing America.

Shortly after winning its independence in 1804, Haiti’s leaders realized that if their nation was to survive, it needed to build strong diplomatic bonds with other nations. Haiti’s first leaders looked especially hard at the United States, which had a sizeable free black population that included vocal champions of black emigration and colonization. In the 1820s, President Jean-Pierre Boyer helped facilitate a migration of thousands of black Americans to Haiti with promises of ample land, rich commercial prospects, and most importantly, a black state. His ideas struck a chord with both blacks and whites in America. Journalists and black community leaders advertised emigration to Haiti as a way for African Americans to resist discrimination and show the world that the black race could be an equal on the world stage, while antislavery whites sought to support a nation founded by liberated slaves. Black and white businessmen were excited by trade potential, and racist whites viewed Haiti has a way to export the race problem that plagued America. By the end of the decade, black Americans migration to Haiti began to ebb as emigrants realized that the Caribbean republic wasn’t the black Eden they’d anticipated. Caribbean Crossing documents the rise and fall of the campaign for black emigration to Haiti, drawing on a variety of archival sources to share the rich voices of the emigrants themselves. Using letters, diary accounts, travelers’ reports, newspaper articles, and American, British, and French consulate records, Sara Fanning profiles the emigrants and analyzes the diverse motivations that fueled this unique early moment in both American and Haitian history.

In The Black Republic, Brandon R. Byrd explores the ambivalent attitudes that African American leaders in the post-Civil War era held toward Haiti, the first and only black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Following emancipation, African American leaders of all kinds—politicians, journalists, ministers, writers, educators, artists, and diplomats—identified new and urgent connections with Haiti, a nation long understood as an example of black self-determination. They celebrated not only its diplomatic recognition by the United States but also the renewed relevance of the Haitian Revolution. While a number of African American leaders defended the sovereignty of a black republic whose fate they saw as intertwined with their own, others expressed concern over Haiti's fitness as a model black republic, scrutinizing whether the nation truly reflected the "civilized" progress of the black race. Influenced by the imperialist rhetoric of their day, many African Americans across the political spectrum espoused a politics of racial uplift, taking responsibility for the "improvement" of Haitian education, politics, culture, and society. They considered Haiti an uncertain experiment in black self-governance: it might succeed and vindicate the capabilities of African Americans demanding their own right to self-determination or it might fail and condemn the black diasporic population to second-class status for the foreseeable future. When the United States military occupied Haiti in 1915, it created a crisis for W. E. B. Du Bois and other black activists and intellectuals who had long grappled with the meaning of Haitian independence. The resulting demand for and idea of a liberated Haiti became a cornerstone of the anticapitalist, anticolonial, and antiracist radical black internationalism that flourished between World War I and World War II. Spanning the Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, and Jim Crow eras, The Black Republic recovers a crucial and overlooked chapter of African American internationalism and political thought.

Despite their growing presence, research on Caribbean and, especially, African immigrants has been scant. The scarcity of writings on these "other" African Americans contributes to the invisibility of these groups. The objective of this project is to broaden our understanding of these other African Americans. A focus on intra-racial dynamics among African Americans is important because of the ever-growing diversity of America's black population. The Other African Americans is an edited volume of original research that provides historical and contemporary information on African and Caribbean individuals and families. Each chapter addresses a particular topical area covering the most salient issues facing these immigrants to the U.S. today.

This cutting-edge piece of scholarship studies the invisibility of the black migrants in popular consciousness and intellectual discourse in the United States through the interrogation of actual members of this community.

All immigrants to America have a story with the American Dream, a story sometimes intimately intertwined with personal dreams. My story might be a surprising, if not maybe an unexpected one diverging from the usual account of pitiful existence in Haitis slums or that of struggle for adaptation to Americas way of life by one of Haitis boat people who landed on South Floridas coast. It is a story that starts from the lower plains of the Artibonite Valley in Haiti with a dream from my great grandfather, Joizil Estim, and continues in the United States, ultimately in Powell, Ohio. It is the story of a Haitian immigrant born in the small coastal town of Saint-Marc, Haiti. It evolves with my experiences growing up in my native country where my formative years were influenced by a connection to a diverse sociocultural environment. It progresses with my interaction with other societal enclaves in foreign lands like Germany and ultimately in the United States. It is an account of dreams fulfilled or unfulfilled, due not only to factors such as the convergence of different motivational agents (dreambuilders), the winds blowing on corporate America, whether in Haiti or the United States, but also to different conditions such as country of origin, globalization, social class, and Afro-ethnicity in America (dreamkillers). It is the story of coping with life changes, of integration into the American mainstream, of successes and disappointments of an immigrant from Haiti. But it is more than the story of an immigrant; it also reflects in a way the struggle of all immigrants coping with the pursuit of the American Dream and the quest for adaptation and continuous learning. It relates to all those who have wrestled with their dreams, those who have learned to make the best out of lifes circumstances and keep a positive outlook in the era we live in. Dreambuilders, dreamkillers are in all walks of life.