Great Migrations: A People on The Move

GATES: Ellis Island, the proverbial golden door to America began welcoming the world's tired, poor, and tempest-tossed in 1892 with the numbers peaking early in the 20th century.

While the vast majority hailed from Europe, a smaller yet surprisingly impactful number came from Africa and the Caribbean.

And the stories of these Black huddled masses yearning to be free, remain largely untold.

In our history books, we would see this room, The Registry Room, 12 billion people were processed as, as immigrants here.

Why is it important for people to understand that Black people came through here too?

WOMAN: It's like affirmation of saying, this is our dream too.

GATES: Mm-hmm.

WOMAN: You don't, you don't see that.

You don't hear about it.

GATES: Tell me about your ancestor who immigrated.

WOMAN: Robert Nero, and that's my grandfather.

GATES: What story did your family tell you about how he came here?

WOMAN: They just said he came from Antigua, never told the story of how he arrived.

GATES: What prompted you to see if your grandfather came to Ellis Island?

WOMAN 2: My daughter was about to go off to college, so what we did is we came here and, you know, just pretended to be tourists and saw our Black people on the walls.

And I said, well, when was that?

And so as a fluke, we just said, let's go down, when we were on our way out to check his names in, in the registry, and sure enough, we found him.

GATES: Did she call you from Ellis Island?

WOMAN 2: Yes.

WOMAN: Yes, it was a celebration to know, this is really where our story begins.

WOMAN 2: It gives, uh, children a sense of pride in, in their lineage.

GATES: Black immigrants have come to this country for the same reasons as all other immigrants, to start over, to make a new home, to build a new life, to achieve prosperity, and to breathe free.

But upon their arrival, African and Caribbean people were forced to navigate the peculiar complexities of racial discrimination and Jim Crow's segregation.

GUILD: If there's a Black American dream, I think it's to have the, the freedom to dream, the freedom to imagine a future for oneself that involves both African-Americans and immigrants.

MADDOX: I think we can't divorce the accomplishments or the significance of African and Caribbean immigrants and the descendants from African-American history and the larger American history.

They're making it a huge impact.

GATES: What most of us don't realize is that since 1900, millions of Black people have migrated to the United States from Africa and the Caribbean while making an array of amazing contributions to American culture, these immigrants have also done something else.

They've redefined what it means to be Black in America.

BELAFONTE: Day-o.

Day-o.

Daylight and we wanna go home GATES: Harry Belafonte, the revered musician, political activists, and son of Jamaican immigrants, released his classic hit "Day-o" in 1956.

"Day-o" is a traditional folk song about the plight of Jamaican dock workers around the turn of the 20th century.

The song gives voice to the suffering of laborers working under harsh conditions throughout the Caribbean during colonial rule.

BELAFONTE: Work all night on a drink of rum.

ALL: Daylight come and me wanna go home.

BELAFONTE: Stack banana 'til de mornin' come.

ALL: Daylight come and me wanna go home.

BELAFONTE: Come mister tally man... JAMES: The Caribbean was this source of cheap labor, very powerful, effective labor, and exploitable because conditions in the islands were so terrible, and the wages were low.

So they were there as tools to be used to enrich Britain and enrich France.

GUILD: For West Indians, labor and movement is such a part of their history because of the transatlantic slave trade, because of the way that labor has structured economies of the Caribbean islands.

MADDOX: There's a period of apprenticeship, um, kind of similar to the sharecropping programs that happen in the U.S., within the Caribbean.

And so many of them choose to move, um, move off of their plantations to different parts of their island where they were being promised better work.

GUILD: People are moving all through the Caribbean islands, searching for, um, opportunity, seasonally then returning back home.

There's a sort of constant movement.

MADDOX: One of the largest movement we see of Black Caribbeans is for the construction of the Panama Canal.

The "Panama Man" who comes back in a white suit.

He's rich, he's able to buy a house for his family.

And so this idea sticks in the imagination of many Caribbean, um, people that in order to, to get success for themselves, they need to move outside of the Caribbean.

And so they set their sights on what's next?

What's the next great frontier for us to go to?

And the United States becomes a shining beacon.

You can find this American dream and so many immigrants who are traveling in transient ways prior decide that the United States is their new focus.

JAMES: The United States was seen as this bustling, enterprising, young nation, and many of them want to be a part of that excitement.

GATES: Most Caribbean immigrants headed to the very same destination as many of the migrants from the Jim Crow South did.

Harlem, USA.

MATHIEU: Harlem as a result of push and pull factors, global and local was a place where, yes, there was a North Carolina accent... RESIDENT: Hey, y'all, MATHIEU: And a Chicago accent... RESIDENT: Good day.

MATHIEU: But there was also a French accent and a Jamaican accent all coming together.

People from all over the world who were of African descent, who thought, "I'm going to replant my roots in a different place."

That's what Black life really looked like.

MADDOX: By 1925, about 25% of the population of Harlem are from the Caribbean.

BALDWIN: When we talk about something like the New Negro movement and its small version known as the Harlem Renaissance, we can't talk about that without talking about the influence of Black people of Caribbean descent.

Whether we're talking about from Jamaica, from Puerto Rico, from Haiti, Martinique.

MADDOX: People like Nella Larsen, one of the famous female writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Her father was from the Danish West Indies.

James Weldon Johnson, his mother had Caribbean heritage from the Bahamas, Arturo Schomberg, who is of Puerto Rican and Danish West Indian heritage, who becomes a super radical thinker and collector of African American history and art and literature.

Claude McKay, who was a poet and writer famously of Jamaica.

GATES: Harlem wasn't just a cross-cultural melting pot, it was also a place of congregation for Black political activists, both foreign and native-born.

BALDWIN: It was Caribbean with the trade networks that brought forward the stepladder culture.

It's where you have these stepladders, literally on streets where people are engaging in dynamic debate amongst Black people.

Just a, a, a dynamic and powerful range of, of, uh, Black experience and ideas on Harlem Street corners.

JAMES: They brought a deeper internationalist consciousness among the Black population partly because they were from different places and developed a global consciousness, uh, about the why, the suffering of Black people.

BALDWIN: If you talk about one of the most powerful figures in the period of the New Negro, you have to talk about Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant from St. Anne's Bay.

JAMES: Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica, but he went to Costa Rica and worked as a timekeeper on banana plantation.

While he was in Costa Rica, he went to Panama and saw the condition of the workers on the Panama Canal.

MADDOX: In his travels, he notices that no matter where he is, Black people are always relegated to the lowest rung of society.

JAMES: He says, "Where is the Black man's king?

Where is his leader?

Where, where is his men of great affairs?

I couldn't find them, and I sought to help create them."

GATES: Garvey created the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

And starting in the late teens, both he and his UNIA took Harlem by storm.

MADDOX: Marcus Garvey goes to Harlem because of what he sees happening in Harlem.

He understands that it's a really important place for the Black diaspora.

BALDWIN: Garvey appealed to the masses of this period of mass culture.

It's a powerful parade where you have a Model T Ford, an automobile that is not readily available for African Americans, being driven by a Black man at a Black parade with a placard in the back.

The New Negro has no fear.

All of this, the uniforms, the upright posture, the music, the defiance.

GARVEY: You can shackle the feet of men, you can imprison the bodies of men, but you cannot shackle or imprison the minds of men.

(cheering).

BALDWIN: But he takes up the mantle of Black self-determination, Black autonomy, uh, uh, Black power, if you will, first amongst the growing community of Caribbean immigrants, but then he captured the imagination of the Black world.

GATES: As the appeal of Garvey's ideas of Black nationalism spread.

So too did the federal government scrutiny.

Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and served two years in prison before being deported back to Jamaica.

Precisely when the United States was turning inward and slamming the door on mass immigration.

It was an era that saw a sharp rise in anti-immigrant sentiments tied as they usually are to anxieties stirred by dizzying social and economic change.

In 1924, the government enacted one of the most restrictive immigration laws in American history.

The law established a quota system based on a country's previous immigration numbers.

And you know what that meant?

Northern and Western Europeans were favored.

GOODMAN: All of a sudden, new British subjects who lived in the West Indies, places like Jamaica had to face restrictions on their travel that hadn't existed before.

People can be refused without any kind of explanation.

GUILD: Caribbean immigrants have been coming to this country since the turn of the 20th century, um, and coming in numbers of several thousand, 5,000, 10,000 per year, um, and then after 1924, those numbers sort of fall off a cliff.

GATES: Like most people from the Caribbean, the majority of Africans were subject to the quotas assigned to the European countries that had colonized them.

Despite the limits on Black immigration, there was an exception for students to attend American universities as long as they promised to return home when their education was over.

And many African students took advantage of that.

BLYDEN: Africans were resisting colonialism, and part of that was a, a resistance to, to, to British education or French education.

So America becomes attractive, um, for that reason.

And I think Black life in the United States, I would argue that that was a draw for many of those students.

They could interact with African-American populations, and the HBCUs reinforce that.

Howard, Lincoln, Tuskegee, Hampton.

GATES: In 1935, Kwame Nkrumah, raised in a fishing village in the Gold Coast, received a scholarship to attend historically Black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

Few could have predicted the impact that Nkrumah would have on the Black African Independence Movement.

MATHIEU: African migrants come from backgrounds or communities who can support them to do advanced education in the United States.

WILLIAMS: Kwame Nkrumah is a product of Christian mission schools.

His first ambition was actually to become a Catholic priest, but by the time you insert him into the Jim Crow United States at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, he's doing things like reading Marx and Engles, he's reading Marcus Garvey.

BLYDEN: You see in some of their writings, right, um, discussions of how impacted and how influenced they were by African Americans.

By the 1940s, the African students learning about, uh, uh, African American experiences and their, uh, politicization in terms of, of civil rights issues and vice versa, African Americans learning about African colonies.

We see these influences that they had on each other.

That's, uh, at the heart of Pan-Africanism.

Nkrumah also worked in a factory in Pennsylvania alongside working-class African Americans and that had to have had an influence on his political outlook.

He goes back radicalized.

GATES: Impressed by rising Black civil rights activism.

Nkrumah returned home, determined to push for his country's independence from Great Britain.

NKRUMAH: There is a new African in the world!

That new African is ready to find his own battles!

and show that after all, the Black man is capable of managing his own affairs.

(crowd cheering).

GATES: In 1957, Kwame Nkrumah became the first prime minister of the Independent Republic of Ghana.

WILLIAMS: Nkrumah's ascendancy to making Ghana the first Sub-Saharan African country to become independent is huge because he takes that Pan-African consciousness and uses Ghana's status as the first country to achieve independence as a platform for the country.

GATES: The rise in the political consciousness of African college students was an unintended consequence of their studies at American universities.

A number of these students emerged as leaders of independence movements in their respective countries, including Nnamdi Azikiwe, who would become the first president of Nigeria.

BLYDEN: The further that we see in returning African students, we can pick lots of examples who went back and got very active in the nationalist movements in their countries.

They could no longer live under colonial oppression.

These nationalist movements where Africans were starting nationalist parties, it meant political protests, it meant petitions.

African Americans were also influenced by seeing these newly independent African countries, these countries being led by Black men.

That would've influenced, I think, their understanding of where they were in their political movements.

MALCOM X: Just 10 years ago on the African continent, our people were colonized.

They were suffering all forms of colonization, oppression, exploitation, degradation, humiliation, discrimination, and every other kind of "ation."

And in, uh, a short time, they have gained more independence, more recognition, more respect as human beings than you and I have.

You and I could study what they had done and perhaps gain from that study.

GATES: The ethnic bias inherent in America's immigration policy was obvious to everybody, particularly at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

KING JR: But it doesn't take this long to realize that America has been the home of its White exiles from Europe, but it has not evinced the same kind of maternal care and concern for its Black exiles.

GUILD: The long struggle over civil rights puts on the table the question of the connection between race and citizenship in the United States, which is to say, to open up Americanness to all of, regardless of color, regardless of background.

GOODMAN: The language of civil rights, the imperative to show the world that the United States could eliminate discrimination was really, really important in growing support for an overhaul of the nation's restrictionist immigration laws.

GATES: The year 1965 marked one of the most important legislative victories of the entire Civil Rights Movement, President Johnson's signing of the Voting Rights Act, but Johnson also signed another weighty law that year, one less celebrated, but every bit as consequential, the Immigration and Nationality Act.

JOHNSON: This bill says simply that from this day forth, those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationships to those already here.

GOODMAN: So it's a very important change symbolically, uh, but a kind of an open question as to whether it's going to really change things on the ground or really affect the immigration makeup of the United States of America, demographically.

JOHNSON: This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill, it does not affect the lives of millions.

GOODMAN: So the law really prioritizes family unity, people who have family members who wanna reunify with them, but a lot of the framers of this law and LBJ himself expect that things won't actually change that much.

They thought, "Well, people who have family members who wanna reunify with them, that's mostly gonna be Europeans."

As it turns out, uh, that really wasn't the case.

GATES: After 1965, the demographics of immigration shifted dramatically.

Migrants from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean began to surpass those from Europe.

A new and more diverse generation of Caribbean immigrants would arrive here in exponentially larger numbers than ever before.

And naturally, they headed to cities where they had family ties.

GUILD: Caribbean immigrants who come to this country in the late 1960s into the '70s, build upon the legacy of those who came before them.

Most Caribbean immigrants, uh, were concentrated in New York City, it was the highest concentration of Caribbean, uh, uh, residency in the United States, but they also kind of forge new paths and move into new areas.

MADDOX: We see this influx of Caribbean immigrants creating Pan-Caribbean enclaves in Brooklyn.

You have Caribbean-specific stores, so you have a Trinidadian Roti shop, or you have a Jamaican jerk, uh, pits on the sidewalk so you even can smell the smells of the Caribbean through the food, right?

Many people are meeting for the first time in the diaspora.

Someone from Jamaica had probably never met someone from Trinidad, the islands are very far apart from each other.

Being part of U.S. American culture, they're living right next door to each other, and they're recognizing the similarities that they have.

GUILD: The 1970s are a time in which the kind of Caribbean identity merges in the context of a kind of larger upsurge in ethnic pride and ethnic identity.

The daughter of Barbadian immigrants to New York City, Shirley Chisholm seeks the democratic, uh, nomination for the presidency, which becomes a kind of symbolic also of, of people affirming their identities rather than trying to subsume them under a kind of generic American identity.

The West Indian Day Parade becomes a symbol of that pride.

GATES: The West Indian Day Parade was created in Harlem in the 1920s by Trinidadian immigrants who transplanted the tradition from back home.

Starting in the late 1960s, the expanding Caribbean population in Brooklyn would take the ritual to a whole new level.

GUILD: Early Carnival in New York City is really dominated by two forms of music, steel pan music, and Calypso.

As the Caribbean community in the United States and in New York City diversifies and grows over the course of the '60s and '70s into the '80s, and Jamaicans in particular become the dominant immigrant group.

New forms of music also enter into the Carnival sound system based culture, and sound system based music that comes from Jamaica.

The organizers of the carnivals come to see these musics as being representative of the community as a whole.

All these things create, you know, something that doesn't remain the same, but it's something that's in motion.

What the West Indian Day Parade comes to represent is affirmation.

Affirmation, both of one's roots, but it's also I think, an affirmation of one's place in this city and in this country.

GATES: August 11th, 1973, a young Jamaican-born DJ named Kool Herc held a party in the Bronx with large speakers, a pair of turntables, a stack of records Kool Herc pioneered a completely new style of DJing that would become the basis of a music revolution.

They called it Hip Hop.

OGBAR: DJ Kool Herc spent his childhood in Jamaica and saw parties that were held outside with big sound systems, big speakers.

GUILD: And the kind of particular, uh, cultural contours of Jamaica, technology of the sound system is huge blocks of speakers that are set up in one place and people dance and perform around and in that space.

OGBAR: And so he was inspired.

He was using music that he discovered in the United States.

He's using, uh, Funk, he's using, uh, Disco, he uses R&B, and so this is a music that sonic backdrop with the manipulation of the, uh, turntable... (record scratching).

(muffled vocals).

That would characterize Hip Hop in the years to come.

GUILD: The Building of Hip Hop culture in New York City is deeply tied to the story of migration from the Caribbean.

OGBAR: They become part of what we think of as African American culture.

Every culture is a consequence of a long, intimate exchange with other cultures.

GATES: During the '70s and '80s, immigration from across the Caribbean exploded but the harrowing journey of migrants fleeing Haiti, especially captured the nation's attention while also revealing the hypocrisy inherent in our immigration system.

The nation of Haiti made history by freeing itself from French colonial rule, and in 1804, becoming the world's first independent Black republic.

A century and a half of systemic racial discrimination and imposed economic instability followed.

And by the middle of the 20th century, the people of Haiti found themselves living in the most desperate circumstances.

GREEN: In 1964, Francois Duvalier declares himself, "president for life," Papa Doc.

This is a full-on dictatorship, and it is violent.

Anyone who was perceived to be against Duvalier were met with torture or imprisoned.

And soon we see the wave of people leaving that really ballooned in the 1970s.

GATES: Starting in 1972 and continuing into the 1980s, fragile rafts and small boats and packed with Haitian asylum seekers wash the shore on the beaches of South Florida.

GREEN: And it was dubbed the "Haitian Boat Crisis" because people were coming in whatever raft, in whatever boat, in whatever thing that could take to the water, and hopefully make it here.

They were taken to the waters to get here.

So many people were coming with stories and quite literally scars where they had been beaten and wanting to get here so that they can send back for their family, hopefully still alive.

(yelling in native language) GREEN: People died on the way here.

Hundreds of people died, children, mothers, fathers.

I remember watching my mom watching TV, um, and just crying.

(screaming).

This is the context under which Haitians are coming, and they are met with a giant stop sign.

The U.S. policy essentially was to detain and deport Haitians.

GATES: In 1980, unauthorized Cuban migrants also began landing on Florida's shores.

But while many Cuban exiles were granted a full path to citizenship, that fate was often denied to Haitians.

GOODMAN: Basically, the United States resettled Cuban refugees, in part because it really served this Cold War goal.

The United States had a, a longstanding practice of really welcoming people fleeing communist countries.

The Haitians were fleeing a U.S. ally, someone that they saw as an anti-communist.

JEAN-JUSTE: One group is overprotected and giving all the benefits and the other group, we have no protection as innocent people.

GREEN: The federal government decided to label Haitians as economic refugees, not political refugees.

They could be sent back, some 90% of the people who were coming from Cuba self-identified as White and the other was Black, and so underlying all of this was racism.

That is part of the migration story for Haitians in Miami, that it was a discriminatory practice to detain and deport Haitians without hearing their claims for asylum.

GATES: But the boats kept coming.

Tens of thousands of Haitians seeking asylum had arrived here by the early 1980s.

GOODMAN: The number of people arriving creates logistical problems.

And one of the ways that they answer the problem of people arriving is to use immigration detention.

Now, immigration detention isn't brand new in this era, but it takes on this new power and this new scale, and it's very focused on the arrivals of the Haitians, the Carter administration and then the Reagan administration really doubled down on the use of detention.

GATES: In 1981, President Ronald Reagan ordered the Coast Guard to intercept and repatriate Haitian migrants spotted in U.S. waters.

Those who managed to land were arrested and held in a Cold War missile base building that became known as Chrome Detention Center, where they were confined in inhumane jail-like conditions while awaiting processing.

GREEN: The expansion of detaining immigrants in mass, which we know today, which we've seen at the border, was practiced and perfected on Haitians and some Black Cubans.

GOODMAN: The simultaneous use of incarceration to criminalize African American communities in the United States is a really, really important piece of this in understanding how these systems sort of intersect with each other and grew up alongside each other.

GATES: Despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Miami's Haitian community managed to thrive over the next several decades, in large part because of the strong support of a dedicated activist community.

GREEN: If you ever visit South Florida, you can see a lot of the Haitian influence because Haitians resisted because that resistance was African Americans all coming together to fight this system and winning in some cases that called out the U.S. around its discriminatory policies.

JACKSON: Let America be America and make room for the suffering Haitian people.

There must be no more death at sea.

Let there be life!

Let there be liberty!

Let there be care!

Let there be love!

GATES: Despite the horrible treatment that Haitian refugees received in Florida, the 1980s would see an overall expansion in U.S. immigration policy.

Why?

Because offering safe harbor to politically repressed people from around the world became a key part of the nation's Cold War strategy.

CARTER: We will support in cooperation with international agencies, broadened programs for aiding political refugees.

I urge this organization and all its member states to take a more active role in the care, protection, and the resettlement of political refugees.

GATES: Africans escaping the horrors of war, were able to take advantage of new refugee resettlement opportunities.

After the heyday of independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many of the new African countries found themselves struggling to gain their footing.

CLARK: There was kind of this domino effect after independence, you had conflicts in places like Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, that were kind of stoked under colonialism.

WILLIAMS: Certain economies go into full collapse, there is just a post-colonial population boom in Africa, that's gonna mean that African economies were not going to be able to educate and employ the sheer numbers of people.

GOODMAN: Their lives are getting worse, but these ideas of migration become really powerful.

People start to imagine that the good life is somewhere else.

BLYDEN: We talk a lot about the push factors, but we don't talk about the draw of this land that's been represented, uh, um, as the land of milk and honey, right as the land of opportunity, right?

If you were growing up in any African, uh, country in the 1970s or the '80s, you were watching American television, you were watching shows, um, that represented America as a place where you could succeed no matter who you were.

JEFFERSON: She was right the first time, Mr. Jefferson.

(audience laughter) GATES: In 1990, the door opened a little wider for Africans hoping to immigrate to the United States.

That year, in response to lobbying pressures to open U.S. immigration even further, Congress established the groundbreaking Diversity Visa Lottery to encourage immigration from underrepresented countries.

MORRISON: This bill represents, uh, the first truly comprehensive reform of U.S. immigration law that has ever occurred.

And the, the first, uh, major reform of legal immigration that has occurred since 1965.

SCHUMER: There are certain countries that have been left out it's wrong that countries like Ireland or Poland or Nigeria can't get almost any immigrants into this country.

GOODMAN: The lottery introduces a whole new possibility for people, if a person is interested in immigrating to the United States, they will simply sign up, uh, put their name into the hat, um, and wait to see if they're selected in this lottery process.

And it doesn't make a huge number of visas available, but it really can be very life-changing for the people who play and if their names are selected.

SHOWERS: I remember as a child growing up at that time in Sierra Leone, just knowing the term DV lottery.

What you win is this golden ticket, if you will.

If you won this lottery, you had won the opportunity to live and work, um, and start your life over in the, the United States, which was pretty exciting.

GATES: Here's an amazing fact, the number of Sub-Saharan Africans who willingly migrated to the United States in the decade between 1990 and 2000 was larger than the total number of Africans shipped directly to the United States over the course of the entire transatlantic slave trade.

This dramatic wave of new Black migrants ushered in by these immigration reforms, hailed from a wide spectrum of Sub-Saharan African countries, settling in cities and suburbs across the country, they entered the American workforce at every level, becoming taxi drivers, small business owners, and doctors, dentists, and lawyers.

These often well-educated, hardworking, middle and upper-middle-class immigrants defied portrayals of Africans in the media.

SADER: There's a child out there who needs you now.

Please, let's someday be today.

(children chanting and clapping).

WILLIAMS: Stereotyping about Africa and Africans it takes sort of two different ways.

One is the infomercial sort of disaster, you know, disease, no adults, sort of children just sort of sitting alone, right?

No consideration of like social class, right?

And then you kind of have utopian visions of Africanness, uh, like I'd say "Coming to America" would be a great example of that.

SEMMI: But those things belong to us.

AKEEM: Yeah, we're well rid of those material things, let them wear our princely robes.

ROBINSON: "Coming to America" is a such a feat for a lot of different reasons, because it is a migration story that's about coming here voluntarily, and coming here rich, and then sort of meeting the descendants, right, of folks who were brought here before, figuring out how they can become royalty.

And that's just the same thing that's happening with, with the "Black Panther" discourse, especially with the, the Killmonger versus, um, T'Challa.

T'CHALLA: It is not our way to be judged jury and execution are for people who are not our own.

KILLMONGER: Not your own, but didn't life start right here on this continent?

So ain't all people, your people?

T'CHALLA: I am not king of old people, I am King of Wakanda.

ROBINSON: These popular culture texts are a result of growing Black American interests in Africa, as well as a growing African immigrant population.

CLARK: When the African populations are significant enough, it forces conversations to be had.

Africa was over there, and so now all of a sudden Africa's here.

SHOWERS: This is the space where the old African diaspora and the new African diaspora meet.

GATES: The city of Houston, Texas, has become a favored destination for many African immigrants looking for a home in their adopted country.

In fact, Houston hosts one of the largest Nigerian populations outside of the African continent.

Rasak Odewale came here in 1998 from Lagos, Nigeria, and opened several restaurants featuring his national cuisine.

He runs them with his wife Tiffaney, who hails from Missouri.

You come here as a migrant.

ODEWALE: Yes.

GATES: And you own three restaurants, tell me the story.

ODEWALE: Well, I didn't do everything by myself, my wife played a very, very important role.

GATES: You better say that I saw her pinching you under the table.

(laughs).

ODEWALE: I just love it in America.

GATES: Mm-hmm.

ODEWALE: I really do.

This is the best country for a Black person to live and be successful.

Everybody wants to come here.

There's opportunity.

As long as you work so hard.

GATES: Uh-huh.

ODEWALE: You know, like with me, I drove taxi, I drove limo for a long time.

We saved up money and the opportunity came.

We saw this place and I say, you know what, we gotta make a break for it.

GATES: The difference is social mobility.

ODEWALE: Yes.

GATES: There's less social mobility you're saying in Nigeria than here.

ODEWALE: Exactly.

You know why it is in Nigeria, you gonna know people, I don't have anybody in the government.

GATES: Uh-huh.

ODEWALE: I don't have anybody in the military.

I don't come from a rich family.

GATES: Right.

ODEWALE: If you're born in a rich family, there is more likely that you continue that.

But if you're not, it's difficult to get to that level.

GATES: When did you meet this, uh, beautiful princess?

(laughter).

TIFFANEY: It was like right around, like after the towers fell, I wasn't looking to be married, but, uh, I always tell people we met the old fashioned way... GATES: Uh-huh.

TIFFANEY: In our apartment complex, in the laundry room, you know, just in passing.

GATES: So he hit on you in, in the laundry room?

TIFFANEY: Yeah.

GATES: Wow, that's shameless.

(laughter).

Did you ever think that you would marry a non-American?

TIFFANEY: I kinda wanted to marry an African, honestly.

GATES: You did?

TIFFANEY: Mm-hmm, I really did.

GATES: So you were looking for an African.

TIFFANEY: Yeah, I didn't know what country, but I wanted my kids to kind of like, have ties to Africa.

I felt like honored, you know, you kind of wanna identify what's a, a culture that you look like and you kinda share the same... GATES: Yeah.

TIFFANEY: Skin tone or whatever.

GATES: Mm-hmm.

TIFFANEY: So I, that's, that was my reasoning, you know, because I just wanted to feel a part of something, not that I don't feel a part of, of America, but it's good to know that he has a history, a rich culture that can go back centuries.

GATES: What did your family say when you were marrying an African American?

ODEWALE: The, uh, well, I mean the, you know, some of them was skeptical.

GATES: Mm-hmm.

ODEWALE: They, they, they learned to accept her.

GATES: Oh yeah.

ODEWALE: Eventually they did.

GATES: So Black Americans, African Americans have a bad reputation among Africans as spouses?

ODEWALE: The ones that don't know what they're talking about.

GATES: Right.

ODEWALE: Yeah, you, you've, you know, if it's not about the, it is the, the, the type of people that they meet.

GATES: Right.

ODEWALE: It is not really, you know, they don't meet decent, you know, uh, African Americans who they're stigmatize.

GATES: Mm-hmm.

ODEWALE: You know, everybody else.

GATES: Or stereotype.

ODEWALE: Yeah, stereotype, yeah.

BLYDEN: We hear many stories in which African immigrants try to make themselves distinct, right?

To, to show that they're different from native-born, but to the larger population, if you're walking down a street or the wrong street, let's put it that way, uh, it really doesn't matter.

WILLIAMS: For African immigrants, there's an ethnic identity, there's a religious identity, there's a national identity.

And then coming in the context of the United States, you have our sort of racial identities are kind of imprinted onto those people.

GATES: In New York City, a senseless act of police brutality set shockwaves throughout the nation's Black community.

Amadou Diallo, an unarmed 23-year-old student and street vendor from Guinea was shot and killed by four undercover police officers.

REPORTER: They fired 41 shots, the question is why?

His friends say he was an innocent man.

FRIEND: But we know Mr. Diallo as very hardworking, distinguished gentleman.

He has no trouble with the law.

We don't know for what reason this has happened, actually.

BLYDEN: When those policemen shot Amadou Diallo, he was not an African, he was a Black man, and they shot a Black man, they didn't shoot an African immigrant, right?

And I think that was a turning point, I think in, um, an African immigrant understanding, uh, of their position in this society.

GUILD: The killing of Amadou Diallo becomes, uh, something that galvanizes the entire diasporic Black community in New York City.

SHARPTON: What do we want?

PROTESTORS: Justice!

SHARPTON: When do we want it?

GATES: Working alongside the Reverend Al Sharpton, Amadou's mother, Kadiatou Diallo, quickly became a leading figure in the campaign against police brutality.

DIALLO: Nothing can replace Amadou, nothing can bring him back.

CROWD: No.

Justice!

DIALLO: But if his cause can help clarify this situation and help to satisfy the future generation so that the people can live in peace, I think that will be a great honor for us.

ROBINSON: What Amadou Diallo's mother says that we share a common bond and a common loss, that bond is really kind of speaking to the historic bond.

A lot of historical traumas are shared traumas, and so when we look at the loss of Amadou Diallo's life, historically, there has been a need for both communities to recognize that common bond.

GATES: You were reading about America.

ODEWALE: Yes.

GATES: You're in school, you're learning about the civil rights struggle.

ODEWALE: Yes.

GATES: You're learning about the Ku Klux Klan, the history of racism.

ODEWALE: Yes.

GATES: Right?

When you came, did you worry that racism would keep you from filling your ambitions?

That didn't slow you down?

ODEWALE: No.

GATES: Why?

ODEWALE: No.

GATES: Didn't you read the news?

ODELWALE: Well... GATES: Don't you know there racism in America?

ODEWALE: Lemme tell you something, you experienced racism everywhere.

In Nigeria or most African countries, White people are treated like royalty.

GATES: Mm-hmm.

ODEWALE: You know, sometimes in Nigeria, you can't get a business unless you have a White person beside you.

GATES: Mm-hmm.

ODEWALE: The bank is not gonna loan you no money.

TIFFANEY: You know, coming from Missouri, it was very socially segregated, you know?

GATES: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

TIFFANEY: And no matter how I straighten my hair, no matter how I tried to sound, sound, articulate, you're Black.

If you have more money than me, you're still Black.

GATES: Black, right?

TIFFANEY: And sometimes Africans didn't see that, they just thought, well, how can you people be like this when you got all this, you know?

But they, it was just different.

GATES: Yeah, ask the police who... TIFFANEY: Right.

GATES: You know?

TIFFANEY: Yeah.

GATES: What they gonna do?

Not beat you over the head because you say, "Oh, I'm, I'm not like them, I'm a Nigerian."

Yeah, yeah.

ODEWALE: You are the same.

(laughs).

GATES: Are the differences between African immigrants and native African Americans such that our people will never come together as a community?

Or do you think we are a community already?

Abigail and Lydia, what do you think?

LYDIA: We're no longer looking at, you know, the, the typical stereotypes that have been said, and we're more so focused on becoming a community as one.

ABIGAIL: I think that we should all get along, obviously, but I also think that we should have, um, something of our own.

Just don't forget about your history and your culture.

GATES: Mm-hmm.

ABIGAIL: That's what I think.

GATES: As their communities take root and grow, Black immigrants are reshaping what it means to be Black in America.

Through their cultural practices, their belief systems, and their global perspectives, they're helping to forge a truly cosmopolitan, Pan-African, Black American identity.

They're strengthening our society as only diversity can.

BELAFONTE: And my activism really started the day of my birth born from, im, immigrant parents in New York City.

OMAR: When people say, you know that, um, because I, I, I am a Muslim, I'm an immigrant, I'm a refugee that I can't have any loyalty to our country, I took an oath.

I took an oath to uphold the Constitution.

I am as American as everyone else, is.

(audience applause).

EDEBIRI: Probably not like a dream to immigrate to this country and have your child be like, I wanna do improv, but, um, your real ones.

ODEWALE: There's no way you go to Nigeria and you, you not eat yellow rice.

GATES: Oh, I love this.

TIFFANEY: Yeah.

GATES: Pepper sauce is really good.

Man, this is a feast.

Every iteration of Black migration, whether movement within this country or movement to this country, has had a profound effect in shaping our collective American identity.

From the sharecropper in the deep South boarding a train to the North in 1910, to the Haitian refugee risking life and limb in a wooden raft in 1980, those who dare to risk everything by transplanting themselves into a new and unfamiliar place, share a common bond.

They have courage, they share a belief in the promise of America, but most importantly, they possess a deep and abiding faith in themselves.

(music plays through credits) NARRATOR: For more information about "Great Migrations: A People on the Move" visit pbs.org/greatmigrations.

The DVD version of this program is available online and in stores.

Also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video (music continues through credits)