“She Wiggled Her Body in the Most Suggestive and Obscene Manner”: Sexuality and Respectability in the West Indian Labor Day Parade
By Marlene H. Gaynair
What is Carnival? It comes from the Latin word carnivale, meaning “farewell to the flesh.” Better described by Keith Nurse, “a period of celebration of the body, of physical abandon, where licentiousness, hedonism, and sexual excess are expressed in music, dancing, masquerading, and feasting.”[1] The origins of carnival in Trinidad and Tobago came from the 17th century when enslaved West Africans were permitted a “break” during the Christmas/New Year season. West Africans and their descendants integrated their cultural traditions with the French and English planters to create a carnivalesque experience of drumming, dancing, singing, and masquerade. After British Emancipation in 1834, carnival became the domain of the Black subaltern, which was condemned and discarded by the white ruling class. In this form, creolized Trinidadians used carnival to keep African traditions alive, criticize and satirize the social order, and engage in ritualized resistance.[2]
During the long 20th century, Caribbean carnival traditions and celebrations dispersed throughout the Atlantic World as West Indians migrated and settled in new locales. Carnival was not just limited to the Lenten period like in Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil, and New Orleans, but also took place around August 1st in the British Caribbean diaspora as a celebration for harvest and Emancipation. In New York City, the significant Caribbean community would recreate carnival celebrations in Trinidad and Tobago as the world-famous West Indian Labor Day Parade.
Harlem West-Indian Day Parade, New York Public Library Digital Collections
In 1947, Jessie Waddell and fellow Trinidadian Rufus Goring decided to recreate the carnival as a street parade for the growing community of expatriates from the Caribbean. Instead of the masquerade balls held in February during the same time as the carnival in Port-au-Spain, Waddell and Goring settled on Labor Day weekend, which would have warm temperatures similar to the climate in the Caribbean. They applied and received a permit from the city to close Lenox Avenue in Harlem for floats, dancers, and masquerade bands and later formed the West Indies Day Association with Waddell as President. Parades marching up Seventh Avenue were familiar in Harlem, welcoming home the 369th Infantry or the Harlem Hellfighters after World War I[3] and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and their parades and other public demonstrations.[4] However, the West Indian Parade would be unlike anything New Yorkers had seen outside of the Caribbean.
Harlem was the perfect location for this nascent parade because it was home to the most prominent African American community in the United States. According to Mary Waters, over 85,000 West Indians settled in Harlem during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, preferring to live amongst African Americans by choice and due to restrictions through housing covenants and possible racial violence if they lived anywhere else.[5] This Harlem parade, born out of a need for something warm and familiar to West Indians, was part of the adjustment experience for both West Indians and Americans of any race or ethnicity. The commonality with both West Indians and African Americans was more than the color of their skin; but “by virtue of a black consciousness embedded in the materiality of the social, political, and cultural geography produced out of the universality of hegemonic ruling ideas of supremacy.”[6]
According to theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, Carnival as a social institution is “not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.”[7] West Indians used carnival in New York City as a site of cultural transmission to create positive representations of their culture and to build a collective public identity distinct from other ethnic groups.[8] The exciting and consumable function of carnival as part of West Indian culture was seen as a straightforward way to demonstrate goodwill and build connections with everyone involved in the parade and those who watched as spectators.
This Caribbean carnivalesque that was reborn in Harlem and later in Brooklyn was ideal for this specific diasporic community. The public presentation of the West Indian Labor Day Parade allowed West Indian revelers in the early 20th century a sense of freedom, eccentricity, acceptance, and agency, defying the confines of American cultural hegemony. By examining the coverage of the West Indian Parade by The New York Times and the New York Amsterdam News, we can see how the parade and its participants reflected the perception of West Indians from within their community and NYC society at large, and how female masqueraders contested what was deemed to be moral behavior through public performance of their sexuality.
In the August 23, 1949 issue of The New York Times, Jesse Waddell announced that “there is a serious purpose behind its gaiety – that of good-will between the West Indian people and the people of the United States.”[9] Next year on August 26, 1950, in the Amsterdam News article “Expect Big Crowds at 4th W.I. Parade,” Waddell was quoted saying that the fourth annual parade “is designed as a builder of good-will between West Indians and Americans.”[10] Through The New York Times and Amsterdam News, these messages from Waddell wanted African American and white readership to know that West Indians intended to be a part of American society and wanted to be recognized as a significant ethnic group in New York City. It was crucial to gather the support of the African American community since the West Indian Labor Day Parade would be marching down Seventh Avenue through the heart of Harlem and its residents. The Parade allowed West Indian revelers to celebrate their cultural traditions, share their culture with others in Harlem, and conform to American society’s norms as respectable Black citizens. Also, it was a way to bring West Indians from Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, and other islands together as a collective. Events sponsored by the West Indies Day Association included a charity breakfast to raise money for scholarships, a dance, and other events outside the parade to give back to the Harlem community.
In an editorial published on September 3, 1950, a few days before the annual parade, the editor of the Amsterdam News defended the right of West Indians to organize a march in Harlem. He wrote that “if this is a demagogic way of saying that West Indians and so-called Negro Americans living in Harlem are in need of a good will program, we are for setting the record straight.” The editor continued, “regardless of anyone’s opinion, West Indians who live here are Americans. They are all integral and highly important parts of this city’s population.”[11] The Amsterdam News, co-owned by Dr. Clilan B. Powell and Dr. Philip M. H. Savory, an African American and Guyanese doctors and entrepreneurs who purchased the newspaper in 1935, appealed to their majority African American readership for unity and support for the West Indian Labor Day Parade and the people it represented. Not only was this parade representing West Indians, but the placement of the parade in Harlem would impact African Americans as well due to the proximity of their Caribbean neighbors. Ultimately to the majority-white American society, ignorance and bigoted indifference would only see West Indians as part of the Black race and would be criminalized and racialized similar to their African American neighbors.
West Indian Day Parade, 1948. New York Public Library.
While the Amsterdam News editor publicly appealed to the African American community, a letter to the newspaper in October 1950 rejected any notion of the parade positively representing West Indians and the rest of the African diaspora. Signed, “West Indian,” this letter rebuked the organizers and the participants of the parade. The masqueraders, in his opinion, were “vulgar and horrifying” because he observed a “shameless” woman wearing “nothing more than a G-string.” She wore nothing more than “a gauze-like material over her shoulder” while “she wiggled her body in the most suggestive and obscene manner.”[12] This “West Indian” critic presumed to speak on behalf of the West Indians in New York City when he suggested that this parade was the antithesis of the “behaviors and concepts of those West Indians who, for weal or woe, have been subject to English culture and that only.”[13] By invoking “English culture,” this anonymous critic made a distinction between participants in the parade and West Indians like himself who behaved respectably in public. This British colonial influence kept respectable West Indians out of the public spectacle, and those who were in the streets represented the failure of British and American civilizing efforts.
Many editorial letters in the Amsterdam News, mostly from males in the African American and Black Caribbean communities, commented on a need for racial uplift and positive representations of Blackness, particularly in this carnival parade. Rarely though, do we see the voices of Black women, even though they made up a significant number of participants. Men who commented on the slackness or impropriety of these women expressing their sensuality as they wanted in public deflected attention from themselves as willing spectators. How would these letter writers know what the female masqueraders were doing if they were not on Seventh Avenue watching the parade? Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers refers to this behavior as “pornotroping” to describe the process in which Black women’s bodies are ungendered and reduced to Black flesh by the commodification and violence that is titillating to the white male colonial gaze.[14] Concerned citizens such as “West Indian,” who insisted that other West Indians were upright and respectable citizens through British colonialism, did so by partaking in that white male colonial gaze because they could not conceive Black women as self-possessed sexual beings enjoying their sensuality through the Labor Day Parade.
In Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham created the term “politics of respectability” to describe the labor of African American women in the Women’s Convention of the Black Baptist Church during the Progressive Era. Higginbotham argued that “the politics of respectability emphasized reform of individual behavior and attitudes both as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform of the entire structural system of American race relations.”[15] Thus, the self-policing of individual and collective behavior of West Indians participation in the carnival was deemed necessary to protect and uplift the image of West Indians and African Americans living in New York City. When “West Indian” worried about what Americans thought about him, other West Indians, and the parade, he actively separated himself from the “othered” marching down Seventh Avenue. For many like “West Indian,” the carnival needed to be an orderly public performance of Caribbean culture to represent Black civility and respectability for an American audience.
With the spectacle of carnival during the fifties and sixties, newspaper articles did not focus on the respectability of the female masqueraders but viewed the young girls and women as sexualized objects through headlines, articles, and photographs. One caption underneath a picture said, “Colorfully costumed young ladies were a part of the parade, a most interesting part.”[16] In another caption underneath a photograph of a young woman facing away from the camera said, “Harem Girl: This parader was an eyecatcher dressed as an Arabian harem girl, although she suggested the modern interpretive dancer. She came complete with wiggles, gyrations, contortions and other unique movements.”[17] There were no articles or condemnation about how Black women should portray themselves in the parade, just compliments and descriptions of how the journalist and photographer sexualized and commodified these revelers. The editors knew what would please or create controversy with their significantly large circulation through titillating pictures and captions. However, there is no space or attention to how these women thought, felt, or believed about presenting their sensuality and their participation in carnival through dance and costume. It was as though female masqueraders were in the Harlem Parade for the sole purpose of the male gaze and consumption.
When the West Indian Parade and its participants became “disorderly” in the early sixties, it led to the end of the Harlem parade. In the September 9, 1961 Amsterdam News article “West Indian Parade Becomes A Brawl Go! Go! Go!” it noted that “a total of $45,000 bail is holding ten men on charges of disorderly conduct, felonious assault and inciting to riot, following the West Indian Day parade, Monday, and one was held without bail.”[18] What happened during this parade? According to an eyewitness, “a spectator grabbed one of the drums. The drummer and spectator tugged back and forth. The drummer succeeded in freeing the drum from the spectator and crashed it over his head.” Steel bands often competed for attention with the loudspeakers from floats in the parade, which caused sore feelings and tensions during carnival season both in New York and the Caribbean. The fight between the drummer and spectator ignited a “riot” amongst others in the crowd.
Spectators and masqueraders were caught in the disturbance, and none escaped injury when “police tried to stop the fight, but bottles and bricks came from all directions and reinforcements were called.” With the publicizing of the arrests and the new reputation of disorderly conduct at the parade, it was only a matter of time that the city officials would step in and end a legacy of West Indian culture and traditions in Harlem. When more stone-throwing and disorderly conduct happened in 1964, the original West Indian Labor Day Parade was no more. The West Indies Day Association could not receive any more permits for the parade in Harlem or Brooklyn, where a growing Caribbean population resided. The celebrations were reduced to summer block parties and spontaneous moments of West Indians dancing in the streets in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights.
It took almost twenty-five years for the West Indian community to grow, social practices to change, and a general acceptance of West Indian culture before this parade could fully transform into a carnival in the traditional sense. By the sixties, many spectators did not patiently observe marching bands as they passed but became participants when they hopped over barriers joining the calypso revelers and sounds. The West Indian Labor Day Parade could be a space where Black women challenged and contested notions of sexuality, public performance, and respectability within their communities and for non-Black audiences. As a valve in a pressure cooker, West Indian carnival in Harlem provided space for immigrants to release their fears, tension, anger, joy through music and dance; as a cultural demonstration of a significant ethnic group, and provided a diverse notion of Black West Indian womanhood in New York City during the 20th century.
Marlene H. Gaynair is an editor for Gotham, and a doctoral candidate at Rutgers, specializing in social, cultural, and digital histories of the modern Black Atlantic, particularly North America and the Caribbean. Her dissertation is entitled Islands in the North: (Re)Creating Jamaican Identities & Cultures in Toronto and New York City in the Twentieth Century.
[1] Keith Nurse. “Globalization and Trinidad Carnival: Diaspora, Hybridity and Identity in Global Culture.” Cultural Studies 13.4 (1999): 664.
[2] Philip Kasinitz and Judith Freidenberg‐Herbstein, "The Puerto Rican Parade and West Indian Carnival: Public Celebrations in New York City." Center for Migration Studies special issues 7.1 (1989): 314.
[3] See Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Who Were the Harlem Hellfighters?” pbs.org. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/who-were-the-harlem-hellfighters/.
[4] See “American Experience: Marcus Garvey.” September 2000. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/peopleevents/e_convention.html
[5] Mary Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 34-35.
[6] Percy Hintzen and Jean Rahier, “Introduction: Theorizing the African Diaspora: Metaphor, Miscognition, and Self-Recognition.” In Global Circuits of Blackness: Interrogating the African Diaspora, edited by Jean Rahier et al. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), xix.
[7] Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 7.
[8] Frank Manning, "Carnival and the West Indian Diaspora." The Round Table (1983): 187.
[9] West Indies Day Parade Set.” New York Times, Aug. 23, 1949.
[10] Expect Big Crowds at 4th W.I. Parade.” New York Amsterdam News (New York), Aug. 26, 1950.
[11] “Saturday’s Big Event.” New York Amsterdam News (New York), Sept. 3, 1950, 6.
[12] West Indies Day Parade Rapped for Vulgarity,” New York Amsterdam News (New York), Oct. 7, 1950.
[13] Ibid.
[14] See Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17:2 (1987), 64-81.
[15] Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 202.
[16] “West Indies Day Parade Replete With Fun, Girls; Best Ever.” New York Amsterdam News (New York), Sep. 9, 1950.
[17] “Harlem Turns Out For Annual West Indies Day.” New York Amsterdam News (New York), Sep. 8, 1951.
[18] “West Indian Parade Becomes A Brawl Go! Go! Go!” New York Amsterdam News (New York), Sep. 9, 1961.