In 1862 a group of what were then called “colored” residents of Queens met in Elmhurst (then called Newtown) to respond to President Abraham Lincoln’s request for African American views about their resettlement someplace outside the United States. They opposed any such move, affirming: “This is our country by birth—we have as strong an attachment to our native hills, valleys, plains, forests, streams, river and mountains as any other people. We love this land and have contributed our share to its prosperity and wealth by cutting down forests, subduing the soil, cultivating fields, constructing roads, building cities and villages, [and] supporting our churches and schools.”

Black people, by then in Queens for more than two centuries, indeed helped build the major roads connecting the early Dutch and English farm settlements where they labored unfree and unrewarded for their work. When we travel those pathways now--Queens Boulevard (which connected Newtown to Jamaica), Kissena Boulevard (connecting Flushing to Jamaica), Grand Avenue (Newtown to the Brooklyn ferry to Manhattan), and Broadway (Newtown to the upper Manhattan ferry)--we might recall that it was black as well as white labor that created the landscape we still live upon and travel over today.

Those first black Queens pioneers were of many West African, Angolan, and Malagasy ethnic and linguistic roots, now largely lost to history. The earliest white Queens settlers were mainly British Puritans arriving from New England, but also Dutch, Swedish, French, and German. And so the people of Queens remained for their first two hundred years, with only a few new ethnic strains from Europe, or from Africa via the Caribbean, and with its Native American Munsee inhabitants essentially gone by the 1720s.

Freedom came to Queens gradually between 1799 and 1827, and during these years most black residents decided to leave for new lives and opportunities in Manhattan. But an expanded labor force was soon needed as Queens began to enjoy an economic boom by supplying farm and garden produce to the burgeoning city across the East River. From the 1840s to the 1890s new workers arrived, first from Germany, then Ireland, then Poland. These immigrants, largely Catholics, built churches, started newspapers, and worked on farms, in the massive cemeteries created after 1850, and in the new factories and oil refineries along the LIRR line of rail, Newtown Creek, and in Long Island City.

The older, settled whites looked askance at the religion, languages, and entertainments of these newcomers--including their love of beer and baseball—but the face of Queens was changing. And now joining the second and third generation offspring of the 19^th century immigrants were newer, turn-of-the-20^th century Italian and Jewish arrivals in Queens, frequently after spending some time in Manhattan or Brooklyn neighborhoods. Then, yet again, yesterday’s newcomers became today’s oldtimers. And so this process continued until rabid anti-immigrant feelings toward southern and eastern Europeans culminated in Congressional legislation in 1924 that effectively shut down immigration to United States for the next forty years. But even that did not satisfy some established whites. In the 1920s a two hundred-member Ku Klux Klan chapter flourished in Richmond Hill and Jamaica. Hoods and robes appeared in marches, and cross-burnings occurred, with Irish and German Catholics, Greeks, and Italians as well as Jews, Negroes, Chinese, and Mexicans the identified targets of hatred. Though the Klan was out of business in Queens by 1930 the animosities that fed it did not disappear overnight. Even in the 1950s the first Italian residents arriving in some Queens neighborhoods experienced verbal reminders that they were not welcomed.

During the 1880s the first Chinese arrived in Queens—men living in their laundry businesses. By the 1890s several Chinese men were also operating five-to-six acre farms in Astoria where they grew bok choy, bitter melon, and other Chinese vegetables sold to customers in the laundries as well as Manhattan’s Chinatown. In the 1920s Puerto Ricans in substantial numbers began arriving in New York, and by 1930 some seven hundred resided in Queens. More Chinese and Puerto Ricans, as well as smaller numbers of other Asians and Latin Americans, would arrive by the 1950s.

It is at this point, the summer of 1949 to be exact, that I moved from Washington Heights in Manhattan to Fresh Meadows, Queens, and began kindergarten at PS 26. My grandparents had arrived from Croatia and Ireland in the great early 20^th century immigrant wave—both my grandmothers preceded my grandfathers, and both worked as maids in hotels. With immigration ended after 1924, my parents grew up not in flourishing Croatian or Irish communities constantly augmented by new arrivals, but in ethnically mixed, second-generation-New-Yorker networks of friends and acquaintances. This frequently resulted in religiously and ethnically mixed marriages, like my parents’, often over their parents’ objections. New York was 90 percent white when I was a young boy, but in many neighborhoods like Washington Heights and Fresh Meadows its white residents were also diverse, if certainly segregated by race. My godparents were Italian and Irish, my brother’s Jewish and Italian, and my parents’ friends included many mixed marriages. In Fresh Meadows I recall my closest playmates were O’Neill, Rognan, Levy, and Halper—Irish and Jewish names—though I was still barely conscious of this when we moved to the suburbs after I completed third grade.

I returned to Queens in 1972 as a professor at Queens College, my first choice among job offers. I remain proud to teach in the public City University of New York, though I regret deeply the loss of free tuition for students in 1976. In the early 1970s the majority of Queens students were Jewish, and there were probably more African American students then, before York College expanded, than now. During that decade the number of Italian, Greek, and other European surnames on my class rosters grew.  By the early 1980s Latin Americans and Asians of many nationalities were adding to the Queens College mix, and the black student population was increasingly also West Indian and African.

In 1982 I began a team research project in the most diverse area of Queens, Elmhurst and Corona, Community District 4. I was interested in discovering how the older white population—largely the children and grandchildren of diverse European immigrants, like me—were responding to the incredible ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious complexity now making their neighborhood, as well as Queens County, subject of much press and public notoriety. Some, I learned, moved out—looking for mainly white residential areas. Others stayed, with the same live-and-let-live attitude they had always maintained toward their neighbors. Still others saw, and some even appreciated, the new diversity of Elmhurst and Corona as offering opportunities to organize block and tenant associations, to press for new and renovated schools, to replenish declining church congregations, or to gather allies to push politicians and city agencies for better services and improved quality of life. Some whites, indeed, even realized that their neighborhood’s enemies were other whites—lazy cops who lived in the suburbs, business owners encroaching on residential streets, landlords and realtors overbuilding and subdividing local housing. And when need arose to cool down conflict, local leaders--white, black, Asian, Latin American--began to seek common ground.

As an anthropologist I put myself on the spot in Elmhurst-Corona--in services at houses of worship, meetings of business associations, public protests and celebrations, the annual Queens Festival in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, and in schools, stores, the Queens Center mall, local parks, hospitals, and the 110^th Precinct house. It was at monthly community board meetings where I first met the local state assembly member, Helen Marshall (and sometimes we were the only audience members left by 11 pm or later.) And Helen was not the only neighborhood leader who became experienced in working with and building ties in new communities outside her own. Many were also women: Rose Rothschild, Edna Baskin, Daok Lee Pak, Haydee Zambrana, Rev. Lyn Mehl, Carmela George, Lucy Schilero. Men provided neighborhood leadership as well, but the importance of women leaders and the ties they forged—“women are the glue” Edna used to say—are not well enough appreciated.

I was joined by colleagues studying the the local Chinese, Koreans, Latin Americans, African Americans, and South Asians, and we followed how all these older and newer groups related to each other. We produced six books documenting these changes in Queens during the 1980s and 1990s: my own THE FUTURE OF US ALL, Chen Hsiang-shui’s CHINATOWN NO MORE, Kyeyoung Park’s THE KOREAN AMERICAN DREAM, Steven Gregory’s BLACK CORONA, Milagros Ricourt and Ruby Danta’s  HISPANAS DE QUEENS, and Madhulika Khandelwal’s BECOMING AMERICAN, BEING INDIAN. And we also include UNDERGROUND HARMONIES, Susie Tanenbaum’s book about diverse subway musicians and audiences, as part of this effort to document the new Queens as it began to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s, and became the most diverse county in the United States today.

So what about the future? It seems that people from everywhere have already come to Queens. My students this semester include: Busola Oluwafemi, Kamaljit Ram, Lingling Xiao, Maria Brandao, Antonella Mangione, Akash Sookdeo, Nubia Encarnacion, Mariel Little, Dov Rosenbaum, Yudraj Tiwari, and Sebastian Ramirez. I can trace back the history of Queens, and my own history as resident, teacher, researcher, author, shopper, restaurant customer, and fan of this borough. But my past never included the day-to-day experience that my students, and children growing up in Queens, have of each other and of global diversity as an expected, even ordinary, part of life.

We still have work to do here. Racial segregation and steering continues to plague the housing and real estate market. Incidents of cross-ethnic, racial, or religious disrespect, even violence, occur. Some, usually monolingual themselves, do not listen when they hear accented English spoken by another who is bi- or maybe multilingual. America’s future is here in Queens, and it is the youth and young adults now living that future--in ways us older folks did not--who will bring a taken-for-granted Queens cosmopolitanism to face these outstanding challenges. I am fortunate that I spent part of my childhood in Queens, and I think they are too.