Abstract During the interwar period, Black American newspapers featured hundreds of articles about deportation, many of which took a profoundly global approach to the subject. This article explores the forms of Black internationalism that featured in stories on the relationship between immigration control, racism (and anti-Blackness specifically), and imperial violence. In particular, I demonstrate how the Black press frequently presented migrant expulsions (broadly construed) as a common tactic of imperial control. In doing so, they condemned European colonial regimes in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, but also highlighted the role of deportations across sites of American empire, both formal and informal. Additionally, the Black press was highly attentive to how deportation and other forms of forcible expulsion operated to build and maintain the global color line in nations around the world. Black American travelers and migrants, they noted, were the victims of an expanding global migration control regime, not only in Europe and white settler nations, but across the world. Across articles, editorials, and letters, Black commentators argued, through a transnational and—importantly—bi-directional focus, that deportation was more than an American phenomenon. Instead, it was yet another mechanism for the maintenance of the global color line and imperial control. This article explores these discourses, arguing that they not only reveal often-overlooked Black perspectives on migration, but also offer a productive opportunity to expand our understanding of the global nature of the early twentieth-century deportation regime.
Emily Pope-Obeda (Thu,) studied this question.