Facing the ferry station house of Ellis Island one sunny day, Augustus Sherman planted his clunky black-box camera on a tripod to take the portraits of a group of immigrants. The skies were clear, and the open space on the island, far from Manhattan’s soaring towers, provided better lighting. Sherman, who worked more than one job on the island from 1892 to 1925, including clerk and secretary to the commissioner of immigration, was also assigned to photograph the would-be Americans whose portraits displayed remarkable variations in faces, garments and poses.
Tense and restless, the immigrants often kept a straight face. Most of them sought prosperity, having escaped agricultural and economic crises in various parts of Europe. They now awaited the auspicious moment they might find solace. One of them, a dashing tanned man draped in a striated gown with an ornate deep collar and wearing a white turban, stood out among the sullen faces. He was smiling.
The “Algerian Man,” as Sherman dubbed him in his photograph, with no additional biographical details, held a cigarette in his right hand and grinned at the sunny skies. He stood at the threshold of the American Dream.
In a second photograph taken just a few days later, the Algerian Man, still unnamed, wore the same white turban and striped gown, but he was now stripped of his smile. His testimony before the Board of Special Inquiry — a panel of inspectors who determined the admissibility of immigrants deemed less likely to be let in — proved to be unsuccessful.
The Algerian Man was sent aboard the SS Chicago back whence he came, to Le Havre, a port city in northern France. His abrupt deportation epitomized the failed attempts at immigration that were often experienced by Muslim immigrants — Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian alike — during the early 20th century. (It is noteworthy that the first Muslims to arrive in the Americas over a century earlier were West African slaves, but their resettlement was not a matter of choice.) In deciding to deport the Algerian Man, the board didn’t resort to the often-used LPC (likely public charge) clause, which denied entry to foreign nationals on the pretext that they were liable to become financially dependent (a clause that later was often applied to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany). Instead, he was expelled on grounds of polygamy.
But Mohamed Juda, one of America’s first Algerian immigrants, who remained unnamed in Sherman’s photograph until very recently, was not even married.