In the early/mid 20th century Harlem became the destination for African Americans escaping racial terror in the south, and hoping for a better life in New York City. In addition to southern migrants, other Black, Hispanic, and Asian diasporas found homes in Harlem – frequently after being denied the ability to rent in white neighborhoods.
In addition to these groups, Bengali seafarers moved from Manhattan’s waterfronts to live in the Lower East Side and also in Harlem. These diverse communities provided cover for undocumented immigrants who could blend into communities of color and remain undetected by white authorities.
In his 2013 book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, Vivek Bald explains how Bengali migration to Harlem it had roots in colonialism.
In 19th-century India, British policies gutted the handicraft industry and its local markets—but in America, “Oriental goods” (such as embroidered cotton and silk, perfumes, spices, rugs, and handbags) were symbols of sophistication in middle-class homes. So Bengali men from villages north of Calcutta came to America as traders and peddlers, and some of them settled in New Orleans and across the American South, where they lived in segregated communities and tended to marry Black women while selling their wares in white neighborhoods.
Life aboard British steamships was “worse than working in hell” according to a 1920 news report quoted in Bald’s book—and by the 20th century, Bengali seamen like Habib were deserting their posts and seeking work in the Northeast and industrial Midwest. Between 1910 to the 1940s, Bald estimates, thousands of primarily Bengali Muslim men jumped ship. The majority of them returned to the subcontinent, but “somewhere in the high hundreds ended up settling in the New York/New Jersey area, Detroit, and elsewhere in the East and Midwest,” says Bald, now an associate professor of comparative media studies at MIT. In New York, they opened restaurants or set up small businesses selling herbs and spices.
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