American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [213]
By the late 1960s, officials in Washington, and the public at large, were distracted by more pressing problems at home and abroad, and Philip Johnson’s grand design for restoration was left unfunded. Ellis Island simply sat there, neglected, in New York Harbor amid both the affluence and growing chaos of postwar America.
DURING THE YEARS AFTER the closing of Ellis Island, race, not immigration, came to dominate the national agenda. At the same time that the Wall Street Journal ad appeared regarding the possible sale of Ellis Island, blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, were boycotting that city’s public transportation system to protest the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. A young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. became the public face of the bus boycott and the protest against Jim Crow segregation. The modern civil rights movement had begun.
Race and immigration in America have an intertwined and complex relationship. The nation’s racial history is a tortured field littered with the tragedy of slavery, discrimination, violence, false promises, and missed opportunities. In contrast, the history of immigration is largely painted in optimistic hues, where plucky immigrants overcome poverty and discrimination to live the American Dream, if not immediately, then over a few generations. Too often, the history of African-Americans is contrasted with that of immigrants, and none too favorably.
For some white European immigrants, their first sight of a black person was on Ellis Island. Austrian immigrant Estelle Miller remembers coming to Ellis Island as a thirteen-year-old and upon seeing a black man there for the first time, she grew so scared that she dropped her family’s antique china bowl. But in truth her presence in America was more problematic to the black man. A Norwegian immigrant named Paul Knaplund remembers seeing a “Negro charwoman” during his time at Ellis Island. “Her face expressed utter disdain,” he remembered as she watched the streams of immigrants passing before her.
American blacks have had at best an ambivalent attitude towards immigration. Periods of mass immigration have coincided with low points in African-American history. The Progressive Era of the early 1900s, which pushed liberal reform to the forefront of the nation’s agenda, was driven largely by fears of mass European immigration and the changes that industrialism had wrought. Though reformist in nature, very little of Progressivism dealt with the rights of blacks. If anything, Jim Crow segregation hardened during this period. The great concern of middle-class, northern, urban reformers was not civil rights for southern blacks but the problems they saw in front of them, which had to do with the massive European immigration.
Meanwhile, black leaders such as Booker T. Washington and A. Philip Randolph were immigration restrictionists, seeing the constant demand for cheap immigrant labor as detrimental to the status and wallets of native-born blacks.
It is no surprise, then, that the civil rights movement of the postwar era took place at the point of lowest sustained immigration in American history. Unencumbered with the problems of immigrants, the nation’s attention could focus upon the demands of African-Americans for full political and social rights.
The civil rights movement had some unexpected effects upon Ellis Island immigrants in those postwar years. Despite the rising political power of white ethnic groups, their solid position in the New Deal Democratic coalition, and the rise to power of the first Irish Catholic president, immigration