West Indian Carnival and the Challenge of Black Ethnic Identity in Brooklyn

In the late 1960s, the annual Trinidadian-style Carnival celebrated in New York City over Labor Day weekend moved from Harlem, where it originated just after World War II, to the streets of Brooklyn, home to a diverse and rapidly growing Caribbean immigrant community. Over the next two decades, the event grew to become a cultural focal point of that community and a platform through which it made claims to civic belonging in the American metropolis. Unlike the other most prominent public displays of ethnic identity in the city that utilized Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, including the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, the Columbus Day Parade, and the Puerto Rican Day Parade, Carnival remained tied to Brooklyn and its emergent Caribbean neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Flatbush.

During the 1970s, the Carnival became a critical staging ground for the emergence of a “West Indian” ethnic identity in Brooklyn, drawing in both those groups with robust traditions of such celebrations – Trinidadians and Barbadians, for example – with those lacking such customs, most notably Jamaicans. This process coincided with the significant post-1965 influx of Caribbean migrants to New York, as well as the civil rights-era consolidation of black political power in the borough. Carnival thus became a contested site in the making of a new black ethnic identity in Brooklyn, one which simultaneously built upon and challenged more long-standing racial and ethnic formations.