Those who came voluntarily during this century came in
spite of their knowledge that racism would confront them. Their
awareness of American racism, however, was an abstraction and was
only partially understood by them. Nevertheless, they saw America
as the land of prosperity and opportunity at a time when, for
many of them, social and economic conditions in their homeland
did not seem promising. While only a few came from Africa itself,
except as students staying for a limited period, there was a
swelling flow from the West Indies and the entire Caribbean area.
At the beginning of the 1920s, the United States imposed a new
quota system on new immigrants and this drastically slowed the
influx of people from South and East Europe. In spite of the
racist and ethnic overtones of this legislation, it failed to
build significant barriers to movement by blacks within the
western hemisphere. During the 1920s large numbers of blacks came
to the United States from other parts of the Americas. By 1930
eighty-six percent of the foreign-born Negroes living in the
United States were born in some other country in this hemisphere.
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