West Indian Negroes in their worship. While large sections
of the former are inclined to indulge in displays of emotionalism that border on hysteria, the latter, in their Wesleyan
Methodist and Baptist churches maintain in the face of the
assumption that people from the tropics are necessarily emotional, all the punctilious emotional restraint characteristic of
their English background. In religious radicalism the foreign-born are again pioneers and propagandists. The only modernist
church among the thousands of Negroes in New York (and
perhaps the country) is led by a West Indian, Rev. E. Ethelred
Brown, an ordained Unitarian minister, and is largely supported by his fellow islanders.
In facing the problem of race prejudice, foreign-born Negroes, and West Indians in particular, are forced to undergo considerable adjustment. Forming a racial majority in their own countries and not being accustomed to discrimination expressly felt as racial, they rebel against the "color line” as they find it in America. For while color and caste lines tend to converge in the islands, it is nevertheless true that because of the ratio of population, historical background and traditions of rebellions before and since their emancipation, West Indians of color do not have their activities, social, occupational and otherwise, determined by their race. Color plays a part but it is not the prime determinant of advancement; hence, the deep feeling of resentment when the color line," legal or customary, is met and found to be a barrier to individual progress. For this reason the West Indian has thrown himself whole-heartedly into the fight against lynching, discrimination and the other disabilities from which Negroes in America suffer.
It must be remembered that the foreign-born black men and women, more so even than other groups of immigrants, are the hardiest and most venturesome of their folk. They were dissatisfied at home, and it is to be expected that they would not be altogether satisfied with limitation of opportunity here when they have staked so much to gain enlargement of opportunity. They do not suffer from the local anesthesia of custom
