In the 1880s and the 1910s, a small number of men from Hooghly and Calcutta settled in southern U.S. cities and married local African American and Afro-Creole women. This was the case with Bardu Ali’s father. Moksad Ali was one of the earliest Bengali traders to settle in New Orleans in the 1880s. There, he married a young woman named Ella Blackman. Ella Blackman Ali and her five children traveled northward along with thousands of African Americans from the southern states to New York City and eventually settled in Harlem.
In turn, Bardu Ali—one of the earliest second-generation South Asian Americans—spent a lifetime in Black show business. Bardu quickly made a name for himself in theatrical and musical circles as a suave and crowd-pleasing emcee, and in the 1930s was recruited by the swing jazz bandleader Chick Webb. -pp. 280-281 of Our Stories
Read more about Bardu Ali in the essay "From Hooghly to Mississippi to Harlem" in Our Stories.
