More than half of Black Caribbean America lives in one city

Just after 1900, West Indian immigrants made up about one percent of the Black population of the United States, and most of them lived in New York City. By 1930 there were 72,000 Afro-Caribbeans in the country and more than half were in New York. The flow then stopped almost completely. A federal immigration law passed in 1924 and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 cut Caribbean arrivals through the 1940s and 1950s. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 removed the quotas that had done the blocking, and the numbers recovered fast enough that by 1980 more than 50,000 West Indians of various origins were entering the United States each year. They came mainly from Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Haiti and Martinique. The concentration of that migration in one city is why Black politics in New York has never been a single constituency, and why coalitions there have to be built rather than assumed.

On 1 March 1930, after prayers and mass at the church of Sacré Coeur in Port au Prince, about ten thousand Haitian women walked into the streets carrying banners against the American occupation. The permit had been granted on condition that no men take part, and the organisers held to it. Foreign newspapers reported that Madame Thoby came out onto the steps and told the crowd the demonstration belonged to women alone. The procession moved down the Champ de Mars and closed around the statue of Henry Christophe. Two children knelt and laid a wreath of flowers at the foot of the statue of Jean Jacques Dessalines, the founder of the state. Men watching from a distance saw the bronze figure vanish inside the crowd while the national anthem came up out of it. Régina Carrié Thoby had spent days assembling that crowd while she negotiated with the occupation for permission to assemble it. The founders of the republic were being claimed by their daughters.

Herbert Macauley founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party and put anticolonial argument on a territorial footing, addressing Nigeria as a country rather than a set of localities. In 1936 younger men who found Macauley too cautious broke away and formed the Nigerian Youth Movement. Their demand was complete autonomy within the British empire, with a united Nigerian nation to follow. They drew wide support for a few years. In 1941 the movement tore itself apart over rivalry between Yoruba and Igbo members, each side convinced the other meant to dominate whatever state emerged. The same problem showed elsewhere. In Uganda much of the protest was aimed at the dominant position of the Ganda rather than at the British, and the standing quarrel over Buganda and its kabaka promised trouble for any future national settlement. What these movements shared was youth. Educated, mobile, often both, young Africans were forging the new political identities, and they carried their fathers' quarrels into them.

In 1936 the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo was renamed Ciudad Trujillo after Rafael Trujillo, who had taken power in 1930 and would hold it until 1961. Trujillo and his supporters used the word dominicanizacion for their effort to mark the line between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, meaning to make a black Haiti and a white Dominican Republic visibly distinct. Along the frontier itself this took a practical form. His government granted peasants large tracts of land to farm and charged them with administrative duties on behalf of the state, in order to fix their loyalty and their Dominican identity in a region where daily life ran on community relationships and crossed the border constantly. The same programme had a second instrument called blanqueamiento, whitening, pursued by encouraging European immigration during the Second World War. In October 1937 Trujillo ordered the killing of dark skinned people living in the border zone, and estimates of the dead reach thirty thousand.