The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, David Levering Lewis. The-meltingpot.com.

This reader as the title implies is a fascinating anthology of the Black Renaissance, with many interesting pieces from poetry to social writing. Here you'll discover some exciting history about West Indian immigration and contribution to this era.

The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader edited by David Levering Lewis draws us into an exciting chronology of Black history: writing and events in the period from 1917 to 1936, referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. In this introduction, 1917 is traditionally cited as the natal year of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Riot on March 19, 1935 marked the end of the renaissance.

The Harlem renaissance was a somewhat forced phenomenon, a cultural nationalism of the parlor, institutionally encouraged and directed by the leaders of the national civil rights establishment for the paramount purpose of improving race relations at a time of extreme national back lash, caused in large part by economic gains won by Afro-Americans during the great war. W.E.B Du Bois labeled this mobilizing elite the "Talented Tenth"...

The term New Negro entered the vocabulary in reaction to the red summer, along with McKay's poetic catechism -- "Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack/Pressed to the walls, dying but fighting back!"

There was a ground swell support for Marcus Garvey's UNIA until his 1924 imprisonment for mail fraud, the Jamaican immigrant's message of African Zionism, anti integrationism, working-class assertiveness, and Bookerite business enterprises increasingly threatened the hegemony of the Talented Tenth and its major organization, the NAACP and NUL.

...although the movement was its own worst enemy. The talented Tenth was pleased to help the justice department speed its demise.

W.A Domingo contribution to this reader entitled "Gift of the Black Tropics" gives us some insightful history about West Indian immigration:

From 1920 to 1923 the foreign-born Negro population of the United States was increased nearly 40percent through the entry of 30,849 African (Blacks)...the largest number came from the British West Indies.

...as early as 1827 a Jamaican, John Brown Russwurm, one of the founders of Liberia was the first colored man to graduate from an American college and to publish a newspaper in his country:

Sixteen years later a fellow country man Peter Ogden, organized in New York City the first Odd-Fellows Lodge for Negro. Prior to the civil war West Indians contribution to American Negro life was so great that Dr. W.E.B Du Bois, in his Soul of Black Folk credit them with main responsibility for the manhood program presented by the race in earlier decades of the last century...