"You should be grateful that you're here."
"You're only here because Black people fought for you to be here."
I've heard several Black Americans make statements like this over the last several decades. I even once had a (non-Black) friend who studied immigration say the same thing to me. I was shocked! I told her absolutely not. She looked at me like I was crazy.
These days, some immigrants of color earn brownie points by telling some Black Americans what they want to hear: "Thank you so much for having the Civil Rights Movement so that me and my people could come here." I even used to talk like that as the daughter of immigrants from Nigeria. I earned my brownie points! But when I said things like that to my parents, they looked at me with dead, tired eyes.
"I'd rather be at home," they seemed to be saying with their eyes. "Nevertheless....
...here we are."
I used to find their incredulous looks annoying. But now that I've studied race and immigration, both locally and globally, for over two decades, I have to change my tune.
Black people worked very hard before the Civil Rights Movement, during the movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and since then to fight for and ensure the civil rights and dignity of Black Americans and, by extension, all Americans. This is undeniable, verifiable, and verified.
However, Martin Luther King, Jr. did not march on Washington so immigrants could come here.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett forced this country to examine how Americans were lynching Black men and women in extra-judicial killings for having a successful business, consensual sex with a white women, or simply dignity. The NAACP worked to undo legal segregation. Under the guidance of Thurgood Marshall, its Legal Defense Fund represented plaintiffs to fight school segregation in several court cases against the Board of Education of Delaware (yes, Delaware!), Virginia, South Carolina, and good ole Topeka, Kansas. White American parents, both northern and southern, did not want little White girls sitting next to little Black boys. They did not want Black children to learn just as much, if not more than, their White children. Racial equality was dangerous to them.
(Note: Years dismantling school segregation should silence any immigrant or white person who claims Black Americans do not value education.)
Fannie Lou Hamer organized Freedom Summer, which brought hundreds of college students across color to register African-Americans to vote in the south. She also created economic programs to provide low income housing as well as business opportunities for Black Southerners.
Whether thinking about the goals of the Black church, Southern Leadership Christian Conference, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, or the many other organization and leaders...
[Deep breath]
... the Civil Rights Movement was about Black Americans' liberation. They were rightfully concerned with freeing themselves so they could live as true citizens and so that the United States could become a real democracy. Immigration policy was not a priority for them. It didn't need to be. Black Americans had enough on their plate trying to survive and be treated as citizens. Whether or not people from Asia or Africa could migrate to the United States was not their concern.
Even broadening the concept of "Civil Rights Movement" to include Marcus Garvey, his concern was not people coming into the United States. If anything, the Black Star Line was about people going back to Africa, not Africans coming to the United States!
Throughout the 20th century, US Black activists were very plugged into global politics. They found inspiration in nonviolent resistance and decolonization in Asia and Africa as inspiration towards US Black freedom. Whether meeting in New York City, Badung, Indonesia, Paris, or Accra, Ghana, Africans and Afro-descendants (yes, including Americans) discussed different strategies of liberation that could work given their particular circumstances, colonial histories, and current events. This did not mean that bringing migrants to the United States was a concern of Black liberation activists.
Have the fruits of the civil rights movement benefited people "of the darker races" who later migrated to the United States? Absolutely! (It even benefited White women, but that's a story for another day and another author!)
But before the civil rights movement, many Black foreigners migrated to the United States. West Indians have been in Harlem for over a century and many people we consider Black American have immigrant roots a few generations back. Also, during the height of Jim Crow, several Africans studied at HBCUs like Howard and Lincoln University. Many of these Black foreigners were coming from European colonies and were thus European nationals, preventing them from being excluded due to immigration policies. Kwame Nkrumah and Nnamdi Azikiwe, as well as many other future African leaders, studied at HBCUs to receive a non-British colonial education.
The reality is that Mexican immigrants had always come and left the United States, depending on the labor needs of the country. Unfortunately, this led to mass expulsions and dehumanizing treatment of Mexican migrants at the whims of the United States and it's capitalists. Fun fact: in a lot of ways, immigration became more, not less, strict after the 1960s for people from Mexico, the Caribbean, and all of the Western hemisphere. Before then, migration from Latin America and the Caribbean often had a circular pattern that precedes (comes before) the civil rights movement. thinking about Mexican migrant laborers specifically, the United States and it's capitalist created institutions and bureaucracies to recruit, register, monitor, and yes, expel Mexicans from the country.
Since United States began its empire-building in the late 19th century, it acquired many nations, including the Philippines, Hawaii (which later became a state) and Puerto Rico. This resulted in a significant number of migrants from those colonies to the US mainland, long after immigration exclusion policies. This is why there are long histories of Filipino and Puerto Rican communities in the United States. (I'm from Chicago and many Filipinos moved there to study since the early 20th century. California has a long history of Filipino laborers that date to about the same time.) While the Chinese Exclusion Act and other policies prevented people who were not northern or western Europeans from migrating, there were still a significant number of people of color coming here.
Black community leaders and intellectuals of the 20th century had thoughts and opinions about immigrants (largely from Europe) entering the United States, even sometimes seeing it as a threat to the lives of native Blacks. Some, like WEB Du Bois, even spoke out against colonization as a new tool in the white supremacist handbook. But their concern was really about bettering the lives of Black people in the United States.
So if it's not the civil rights movement, why are there so many immigrants in the United States since then?
I will explain that in my forthcoming blog post on immigration and the Civil Rights Movement.