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In 1972 sociologist Roy Bryce Laporte observed that “no place has really been given to black immigrants, and precious little to blacks in that interpretation of American history which describes successive waves of immigrants entering this country in search of new opportunities and contributing by their presence and participation to its cultural richness, its political complexity, its material-technological advance.” This statement encapsulates the research Professor Nemata Blyden undertakes on African immigrants and immigrant experiences in certain periods of American history and how those experiences compare to that of other immigrants. 

Continental Africans have been coming voluntarily to the United States since the post-Civil War era. Arriving for various reasons (study, visitation, etc.), some stayed in the United States, becoming immigrants. Yet American immigration scholars have ignored the small group of Africans in the United States who came to the United States voluntarily in the period between 1890 and 1950. While all of these individuals cannot be rightly defined as immigrants, the processes by which they adapted to life in America warrant an examination under the umbrella of immigration history. This talk attempts to outline this history, contextualizing current African immigration to the United States.

Nemata Blyden (M.Phil., Ph.D. Yale University) is the Armstead Robinson Professor of 19th-Century African American History at the Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia. A scholar specializing in African American, African Diaspora, and African history, Nemata Blyden

is the author of African Americans and Africa: A New History (2019), and West Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: A Diaspora in Reverse (2000). Her principal thematic interests have included nineteenth-century African American history, African and American and Caribbean migrations to Africa and African American engagement with Africa. Professor Blyden was a consultant for In Motion: The African American Migration Experience for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York) and is a CoPI for “To Enter Africa from America”: The United States, Africa, and the New Imperialism, 1847–1919 with Jeannette Eileen Jones (PI), Nadia Nurhussein, and John Cullen Gruesser.