A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity

By 1930, almost a quarter of Harlem's Black population claimed Caribbean heritage (p. 139). Caribbean migrants could seek job leads, housing, and emergency funds from New York City's sixty-seven distinct West Indian mutual aid societies and benevolent associations. Leaders such as the Saint Croix–born Elizabeth Hendrickson pulled double duty: presiding over the American West Indian Ladies Aid Society, an organization focused on the fellowship and activism of Caribbean women, and cofounding the Harlem Tenants League, which organized Black renters across Upper Manhattan. Yet despite the scale and significance of their diaspora, the story of Caribbean migrants in New York City has flown largely under the radar in the historiography of migration and urban life in the twentieth-century United States. In A Home Away from Home, the historian Tyesha Maddox recovers a history of transnational West Indian organizing and community building between the 1890s and 1940s. Across five chapters, Maddox offers a vibrant portrait of a diverse immigrant group hailing from a chain of Anglophone islands. She shows that Caribbean mutual aid and benevolent societies were both hyperlocal and immersed in an emerging world of Black internationalism. Supporting a neighbor who had fallen ill and supporting Ethiopian troops in repelling an Italian invasion could be concurrent priorities for the Caribbean organizations that peppered Harlem and New York City. For mutual aid organizers, survival meant more than just a way to pay the bills in a new land—it meant fostering a sense of belonging, shared history, and collective Caribbean identity.