September 9, 2026
If you ever wondered how it would feel to be one in a million, attending the annual West Indian American Day Parade in Brooklyn this past Monday was your chance. From the deep, blue Caribbean Sea in the tropics to the sea of humanity on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, the sights, sounds and smells of Island life were everywhere you looked. In addition to the organized groups in the parade, countless New Yorkers with a Caribbean connection spilled onto the roadway to march along the parade route, singing, dancing, and waving flags of their various homelands. This year’s edition took place amid an increasingly hostile political climate in which the Trump administration has been making life harder for this community. Earlier this month, the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for people from Haiti was revoked, depriving them of legal status overnight and making them subject to summary deportation. Flags of many countries were proudly waved, as well as sported on tee-shirts and bandanas, but a completely unscientific estimate by the Gazette ranked the Jamaican and Haitian ones as the most prevalent.
