Fears of Jim Crow: British Sovereignty and American Expansionism in the Early 20th-Century Caribbean

At 3:30 PM on January 14, 1907, a 6.5 magnitude earthquake ripped through Jamaica and shattered the capital city of Kingston, killing approximately one thousand people. At the same time that survivors were taking stock of the scale of the devastation, the governor of Jamaica rejected the medical aid and military manpower offered by the United States Navy. Debates over the governor's actions centered on his assertion of British sovereignty at a moment when Britain increasingly relied on the US to protect its Caribbean colonies. For some, US protection threatened the possibility that Jamaica might be annexed to the US and, with it, the imposition of a Jim Crow-like race regime. For virtually all commentators, white or black, imperial officer or colonial subject, the segregationist ideologies of the US posed a threat to Jamaican society, although they did not agree about the precise nature of that threat. In this paper, I examine the ways that Jamaicans imagined American racism and the threat it posed to Jamaican society. The experiences that Caribbean migrants and workers had in the United States and in the Panama Canal Zone were critical in creating a common set of images and understandings of US racism. Furthermore, these conceptions of US racism promoted the belief that British imperialism was the only system that could manage the unique racial climate, thus identifying Britain as the best protector of all colonial subjects.