After leaving the south, blacks started coming to Queens — parts of which some consider to be stops on the Underground Railroad — as early as they could.  Government records from 1698, according to Irving, noted that there were 199 black people in the borough that year . . .  the number representing an unknown mix of slaves and free blacks.  Blacks have maintained a steady 10 to 12 percent borough-wide population since then, with certain areas — like parts of East Elmhurst and Corona and most of southeast Queens  — maintaining black populations of 70 percent or more.

The contemporary identity of Queens as a major destination for blacks began around the time of the first World’s Fair and the building of the Triborough Bridge in the 1940s.  After the widespread development of northern Queens for the Fair, and the opening up of access to the borough with the bridge, a significant migration of blacks from Harlem started.  Most of those early intra-city migrants lived in the apartment buildings and attached housing of that part of the borough.

Around the same time, another development led to the population of southeast Queens by blacks from Brooklyn. 

Levittown opened up in Long Island, making available hundreds of homes for the people of Queens to move into.  Blacks weren’t allowed in, though. A significant “white flight” began in which many of southeast Queens’ families — many of them soldiers returning from World War II — moved out to the huge suburban housing project.  This emptying of the population led to a lot of housing becoming suddenly available and the more prosperous blacks from nearby Brooklyn stepped in on the heels of the departing whites.

Moving to southeast Queens was how black people in Brooklyn “moved up in the world,” said Irving, himself a Brownsville-turned-Bedford Stuyvesant-turned-Southeast Queens resident.

The Afrikan Poetry Theatre on Jamaica Avenue hosts poetry and politics. Tribune Photo by Ira Cohen West Indians have brought the culture of cricket to Queens. Shown here are the Ace Raiders, a local cricket softball team in Queens with players of Guyanese ancestry including Trib Assistant Art Director Shiek Mohamed (bottom row, far right), who recently became a United States citizen and voted in his first election on Nov. 5, 2002. Tribune Photo by Ira Cohen

Still today, southeast Queens retains that air of upward mobility. 

Though parts of South Jamaica, South Ozone Park and Far Rockaway are occupied by apartment buildings and low-income housing and their corresponding quality of life problems, much of southeast Queens is an area of middle-class prosperity confirmed by neat houses — some of them small mansions — and meticulously manicured landscaping. 

A front-page New York Times article from 1994, based on the 1990 Census, reported that the median income of black families in Queens exceeded that of white families in the borough, mostly with the help of southeast Queens’ black families, many with two working professionals at the head of the household.

Getting Here From There

West Indians — or those mostly from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Grenada, and other Caribbean island-nations, as well as nearby Guyana — have been coming to Queens since the turn of the century, but really exploded as a population after the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act, which opened the doors of America to almost every immigrant group in the country today.

The population of Caribbean nations tripled between 1940 and 1980, and particularly starting in 1965 and until about 1990, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the number of West Indians (or Caribbeans; the terms are interchangeable) leaving their countries for America skyrocketed. 

Most went to Brooklyn, establishing a major base in Crown Heights, but many also came to the black neighborhoods of Queens.

Almost all Caribbean immigrants in Queens, finding themselves subject to the heavy racial segregation of the City’s housing markets, ended up in the borough’s black neighborhoods, especially in the southeast part of the borough.  Many were able to come straight to these nicer parts of the City, which native blacks had worked for generations to arrive at, as many of the Caribbean’s immigrants were recruited from professional ranks of people with higher education.

 Despite their “chosen” status among Queens’ blacks as a college-educated class with charming British accents and pride after being raised in a place where they were not minorities and didn’t face the discrimination America’s native blacks have faced, not all was well for the borough’s Caribbeans.

Early relations with American-born blacks, according to many accounts, were strained, largely because of stereotypes being employed by both sides.  Caribbeans fancied themselves as a hard-working immigrant class that was ready to take advantage of all the opportunities America had to offer, and many of them looked down on American-born blacks, whom they imagined to have become complacent and lazy.  American-born blacks often resented their Caribbean counterparts, whom they envisaged as being snobby and unappreciative of the four hundred years of community building and civil rights advances done here.

Marcia Moxam Comrie, a Jamaican immigrant to this country and wife of City Council Majority Whip Leroy Comrie, embodies the story of Caribbean immigrants coming to Queens.  In some ways she also embodies, through her family, the story of Caribbeans and the subtleties of their relationship with American-born blacks.

Comrie came to the United States to study broadcasting after graduating high school.  When she got here, she immediately experienced a dynamic documented by countless Caribbean immigrants:  She came from a country where she wasn’t a minority and where racial differences are not a major issue to a place that is the most racially diverse place in the world and knows it.

“I wasn’t ‘black’ until I came to New York,” Comrie said.  “When I got on the plane in Montego Bay, I was human — a person.  When I came here, I got off the plane, and I was ‘black.’  I was a race.”

Comrie, like so many blacks coming to New York for the first time, lived in Brooklyn for a while before moving to Queens.  She tried a few neighborhoods, mostly in Southeast Queens, before settling down in St. Albans.

“I liked Queens because it’s the City, but at the same time it appealed to my country-girl sensitivities,” said Comrie, who described her upbringing in Jamaica as “sophisticated rural.”

Comrie married Councilman Leroy, a first-generation American whose parents were born in Jamaica and who, she said, grew up with a very strong Jamaican upbringing.  Their two young children, both born here, are raised not as much as “African Americans” as they are Caribbean Americans.  Comrie’s daughter Liana, for example, used to tell people “I’m Jamaican” when asked where she’s from.  These days, she says “I’m Jamerican,” a term used by Americans born of Jamaican parents.

West Indians have brought the culture of cricket to Queens. Shown here are the Ace Raiders, a local cricket softball team in Queens with players of Guyanese ancestry including Trib Assistant Art Director Shiek Mohamed (bottom row, far right), who recently became a United States citizen and voted in his first election on Nov. 5, 2002. Tribune Photo by Ira Cohen

But while Liana Comrie moved closer to embracing the American side of her background, her mother reminded the Tribune that there are still a lot of “bones of contention” between Caribbeans and American-born blacks.

“If you’re from the Caribbean and have a disagreement with an African American,” Comrie said, “they say ‘Go back where you came from on a boat.’

“But on the other hand, there’s a lot of misunderstanding on the part of Caribbean people, too.  Many don’t understand African Americans and do not make an attempt to.”

She added that “If you’re a man from the Caribbean and you marry a woman of American birth, you’ve done something bad, because you didn’t marry someone from home.  Your sisters and your mother won’t talk to you.”

Strained relations between native blacks and Caribbeans were — and to some extent still are — multiplied by the factor of Caribbeans of South Asian descent.  Thousands of Indians went to the Caribbean as laborers after slavery was abolished there in 1834.  Almost 150,000 Indians migrated to Trinidad between 1845 and 1917; over 35,000 went to Jamaica during that same time; many thousands still went to Guyana.  While today the West Indies are characterized by their unique mix of African and Indian culture, those two groups and native blacks have always had some amount of culture clash when they met in Queens.

Today, amidst a level of tension, Caribbeans and native blacks in Queens have come closer to not only accepting, but embracing each other. 

African American teens listen to reggae and calypso music fervently and adopt the style and language of the West Indies readily, both as a trend and as a way to get closer to African roots.  And Caribbeans have been intermingling with and marrying native blacks ever since they came, and have been increasingly involved in local politics.  Ask any American-born black person in Queens today, and you’ll find that someone in the family is from “the islands.”

With that closeness comes a new kind of harmony, too. 

“I admire African Americans and feel like I owe a debt,” Comrie said.  “As an immigrant, I feel like I’ve come here and stand on the shoulders of those who have fought, bled and died for our rights.”

Work Song

The work lives of native blacks and Caribbeans of Queens have somewhat different roots and have taken somewhat different paths.

The native blacks who came to Queens from Harlem and Brooklyn in the 1940s and beyond were in a much better situation, in terms of work and prosperity, than the old neighbors they left behind. 

Many were merchants and entrepreneurs, while others were entertainers or white-collar professionals.  The Department of City Planning found the 1990 median income of households in Crown Heights to be just over $21,000, while that in Queens Village, Laurelton and Cambria Heights, actually to many native blacks and Caribbeans, to be about $46,000.

A substantial number of the world’s most successful black musicians lived in Queens, including Louis Armstrong in Corona, Count Basie in Addesleigh Park and John Coltrane in St. Albans.  Armstrong reached his professional peak in the 1920s and ‘30s, while Basie was biggest in the ‘40s and Coltrane was big in the late 1950s and ‘60s.  Many of the biggest hip hop stars of the 1980s and ‘90s also came out of Queens, including Run-DMC and LL Cool J, both from the southeast part of the borough.

When Caribbeans started coming to Queens, they enjoyed several distinct advantages over their native counterparts.  They came with college degrees and well after blacks had established themselves as businesspeople and entrepreneurs, as well as an influential force in politics; today, a deputy mayor, the borough president, a U.S. congressman, three City Council members, a State Senate member and five State Assembly members are all blacks from the borough.

While Queens’ blacks — native or not — can be found working in almost any industry and every sector of the government, from the borough’s countless barber shops to transit workers to the State Department (Secretary of State Colin Powell lived in Hollis for some time), the borough’s Caribbeans are a little easier to pin down.

An overwhelming amount of Caribbean immigrants in Queens are women working in the nursing industry and as domestic helpers and caretakers for children and the elderly. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has reported, in fact, that of the 19,000 immigrants to the United States from Jamaica in 1996, about 10,200 were women. Of the 9,500 immigrants from Guyana, 5,100 were women.

Looking to the Future