By Wayne Dawkins | Trice Edney Wire
(TriceEdneyWire.com) – For 200 years – the 17th and 18th centuries – Africans came to America involuntarily and enslaved. Then fast forward to the 21st century. The news is Sub Saharan Africans are coming to America willingly, in search of opportunity and freedom.
The trend was driven by the 1965 Hart-Celler immigration law that ended 40 years of racially discriminatory U.S. policy that preferred Northern European immigrants but rejected Southern and Eastern Europeans, plus other peoples from Asia and Africa.
By 1980, 15 years after Hart-Celler, reported the Migration Policy Institute, 130,000 African immigrants had arrived in the United States. In subsequent decades the numbers climbed to:
* 265,000 in 1990,
* 691,000 in 2000,
* 1,327,000 in 2010, and
* 2,094,000 in 2019.
Furthermore, the new Americans were distinct in where they choose to live. In 1993, when the NBC “Today” morning show spent a week telling stories on the African continent, the National Association of Black Journalists held its annual convention in Houston. A local journalist announced with pride that greater Houston housed the third-largest Nigerian community outside of that originating nation (London UK was No. 2.)
Why those people came to Texas? Because of Houston’s oil industry that related to Nigeria’s and because the hot, humid climate was familiar. NBA and collegiate champion Akeem Olajuwon came to Houston for school and athletic glory (and years later, another 7-footer Dikembe Mutombo of the Congo was a student-athlete at Georgetown who blossomed as probably the NBA’s most feared shot blocker.)
Another geographical USA hotspot was the state of Maryland, especially affluent Prince George’s and Harford counties in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. megalopolis.
During my seven-year span as a professor at Morgan State University-Baltimore I relished teaching the grandchildren of African exchange students who had been coming to the USA since the 1950s The grandkids enriched my African Diaspora and Communication class as we collaborated on four cultural mileposts: fashion, food, music, and religion/spirituality.
For example, enslaved Africans brought rice to the New World and mass produced it in the Carolinas. A student informed me that African women sewed rice grains into their braided hair to smuggle and then plant something familiar in the New World.
The kalimba, a thumb piano had a distinct sound in the hands of Maurice White of Kennedy Center-honored, multi-Grammy winning band Earth, Wind and Fire.
The banjo too is a distinctively African instrument, memorialized in late 19th century painter Henry Ossawa Tanner’s “The Banjo Lesson.”
As for religion and spirituality, Africans in America include Christians, Muslims, and Hebrews. Egyptians and East Africans people who were Christians before many Europeans.
A third regional concentration of 21st century Africans is in Twin Cities Minneapolis-St. Paul. Many were former refugees who escaped drought, famine, and regional wars and were hosted by humanitarian organizations.
U.S. Representative IIhan Omar was one of them. She now navigates the halls of Congress, distinct in her head wraps. Famously feisty, Omar was in the news this month because U.S. Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina tried to smear Omar and possibly have her stripped of key committee assignments. Mace’s stunt failed because Omar’s Democratic caucus plus some Republicans by a one-vote margin spared Omar from sanctions.
There are martyred African immigrants. In the 1999, Amadou Diallo, 23, of Guinea was a New York merchant who police mistakenly thought had brandished a handgun. The object was the wallet he pulled from his pocket. Multiple cops fired their guns, and their ricocheting bullets made may have made some of them believe Diallo was shooting at them.
He wasn’t, but 41 shots hit him 19 times, the name of a Bruce Springsteen song that angered many cops, but memorialized a tragedy.
Diallo was a victim, but Dr. Bennet Omalu was a sports hero. Based in NFL-loving Pittsburgh Steeler country, Omalu researched the connection between helmet-to-helmet collisions and traumatic brain injuries that shortened player’s lives and made some suicidal.
Initially, Omalu was ridiculed and dismissed by the NFL establishment but in time the science compelled the leaders of America’s most popular sport to embrace a concussion protocol to protect player’s health. Omalu may have saved NFL, collegiate, and high school football before enough parents reconsidered having their sons play the game.
The 21st century African immigrants in America experience have enriched this nation just as immigrants from every continent improved America, whether it is savory jollof rice, or Afro Beat music (recently made a Grammy Award category), or NFL and power five college stars with distinctive African surnames on the back of their jerseys.
(Never mind Donald J. Trump’s vulgar tirade about “shithole” African countries, nor his recent executive order to ban immigrants from a dozen Sub Saharan and Western Hemisphere nations.)
On TV, consider “Bob Loves Abisola,” the CBS romantic sitcom (2019-2024) where Bob, a white sock salesman from Detroit falls in love with Abisola, a nurse from Nigeria, who also works in the Motor City.
Abisola’s African co-star is also a standup comic. Gina Yashere has a bit in which she says striving Nigerian families in America expect their children to become one of three things: “Doctor, lawyer, or embarrassment to the family.”