We Were American All Along: US Virgin Island Migrants’ Claims to Citizenship in the 1920s and 1930s

In 1917, the United States assumed possession of the Danish West Indies (renamed the U.S. Virgin Islands) and, in doing so, acquired an overwhelmingly black foreign population. Migrants from the territory flocked to New York City, and in the 1920s and 1930s they negotiated with U.S.-born blacks, other Caribbean migrants, and the U.S. state to construct a nascent Virgin Island identity. During that time, these migrants began to rely on tropes of having been always American (using, in particular, Alexander Hamilton and Denmark Vesey as evidence) in attempts to bolster both their own tenuous citizenship status and the even more tenuous status of islanders who remained in the territory. 

This paper explores the ways that empire and race mediated this process of identity-making. Because the Virgin Islands was the only unincorporated territory that the U.S. government racialized as almost entirely black, U.S. officials expected—and in some cases received—cooperation from mainland blacks and Virgin Island migrants in attempts to assimilate Virgin Islanders into “African Americanness.” However, any efforts toward racial solidarity were complicated by different understandings of color and race, geography, and citizenship status. The U.S. government afforded Virgin Islanders on the mainland rights withheld from those in the islands but bypassed migrants in favor of U.S-born blacks as diplomatic liaisons in island policy. Furthermore, unlike other “foreign-born” blacks from the Caribbean—who made up a quarter of the black population in Harlem in 1920—Virgin Islanders were not adversely affected by the 1924 Immigration Act, and in fact increased their movement to the area. The Virgin Islands provide an apt case study for theorizing the understudied racial formation of blackness and illuminates the varied claims to and stratification of citizenship within Harlem’s black communities.