The victims, the policies and the institutional battles that followed September 11 touched African, Caribbean, Afro-Latino and African American communities in ways still playing out today
At a glance
- At least four Ghanaians, three Nigerians and an unknown number of other African nationals died in the September 11, 2001 attacks, several of them at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the North Tower.
- More than 100 Caribbean immigrants from at least 14 nations and territories were among the dead, a toll advocates say remains largely absent from the national memory of that day.
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified 258 Hispanic victims among those killed at the World Trade Center, and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum estimates 67 undocumented immigrants died in the attacks.
- The FDNY was only 2.9 percent Black in 2002, in a city that was 27 percent Black, a disparity that led to a federal discrimination lawsuit and a $98 million settlement in 2014.
- Twenty-five years on, September 11, 2026 marks the largest commemoration since the 20th anniversary, with New York City releasing 170,000 pages of previously undisclosed records this week.
Twenty-five years ago today, nearly 3,000 people died when hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The dead came from 78 countries, and the story of that morning has always been bigger than the version most Americans grew up hearing. African immigrants, Caribbean immigrants, Afro-Latinos and African Americans were killed in the towers, served as first responders, and lived through a quarter century of policy fallout that reshaped how their communities move through American life. A quarter century later, that part of the story is still being told in fuller detail.
The Africans and Caribbean immigrants who died that morning
Windows on the World, the restaurant that occupied the top floors of the North Tower, employed a workforce drawn heavily from immigrant communities across Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and Asia. Ghanaian housekeeper Sophia Buruwad Addo and porter Emmanuel Akwasi Afuakwah both died there, according to the National September 11 Memorial’s victim registry, alongside fellow Ghanaians Victor Kwarkye and Japhet Jesse Aryee. Nigerian security officer Godwin Ajala, an aspiring lawyer who had come to New York hoping to sit the bar exam again, died holding open a stairwell door in the South Tower rather than leaving people behind. Fellow Nigerian immigrants Ignatius Udo Adanga, who had made his way to New York by way of Lagos, Liberia and Germany, and Olabisi Shadie Layeni-Yee, an office manager at 1 World Trade Center, were also killed. Ivorian line cook Sekou Siby survived only because a coworker had asked him to switch shifts that morning.
Caribbean immigrants made up a far larger share of the dead than is commonly remembered. More than 100 Caribbean nationals died on September 11, drawn from at least 14 nations and territories including Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Barbados and the Dominican Republic, most of them working ordinary jobs in finance, food service and building maintenance. Advocates marking this year’s anniversary argue that toll has stayed largely outside the national conversation about that day, and some are now pushing for Caribbean-specific commemorations through schools, churches and cultural centers each September.
Latino and Afro-Latino victims were significant in number as well. New York City mortality data reviewed by the CDC identified 258 Hispanic victims among those who died at the World Trade Center, 177 men and 81 women, a figure often rounded in later reporting to roughly 250. The 9/11 Memorial & Museum estimates that 67 undocumented immigrants were among the total dead, most of them Windows on the World workers whose names and even identities were harder to confirm because they had spent years living outside official systems, a reality that complicated both their families’ access to aid and the historical record itself.
How the response reshaped African, Caribbean and Muslim communities
The policy response to September 11 landed hardest on communities perceived as Muslim, Arab or South Asian, and that dragnet swept in African immigrants as well. Congress passed the Patriot Act within weeks of the attacks, expanding federal surveillance powers that remain law today. The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, established under the Bush administration, required men and boys from predominantly Muslim countries, including Sudan, Somalia and other African nations, to report for fingerprinting and interviews, with noncompliance risking arrest and deportation. In the days and weeks after the attacks, the federal government detained nearly 800 Muslim citizens and immigrants without charges. Documented hate crimes and violent attacks against Arabs, South Asians, Muslims and those perceived to belong to those groups topped 700 incidents in the years that followed, a wave that touched Somali, Sudanese and other African Muslim communities in cities like Minneapolis alongside more widely reported Arab and South Asian communities.
Civil rights advocates have long argued the backlash fit into a longer American pattern rather than existing on its own. As Hussam Ayloush of the Council on American-Islamic Relations put it, discrimination against Muslims did not happen in a vacuum, pointing to the country’s history of marginalizing other groups including African Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans.
East Africa’s connection to this history predates September 11 itself. Ten years earlier, al Qaeda operatives bombed the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing more than 220 people, most of them Kenyan and Tanzanian. That 1998 attack made East Africa an early proving ground for American counterterrorism policy, one that September 11 turned into a permanent architecture of surveillance and screening still shaping how African nationals travel, study and send money home a quarter century later.
Twenty-five years later, an unfinished reckoning
The institutional story runs through New York’s own first responders. In 2002, the FDNY was only 2.9 percent Black in a city where Black residents made up 27 percent of the population, making it the least diverse fire department of any major American city at the time, well behind Los Angeles at 57 percent people of color, Philadelphia at 51 percent and Boston at 40 percent. The Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization representing Black firefighters since 1940, filed a discrimination charge that year, and a federal court later found the department’s hiring exams had intentionally discriminated against Black and Latino applicants. The city settled in 2014, paying $98 million in back pay and benefits and agreeing to new recruitment goals, producing the most diverse academy class in FDNY history at 17 percent Black and 24 percent Latino. Vulcan Society leadership has said in the years since that firehouse culture has been slower to change than the numbers on paper.
Today’s anniversary, the biggest since the 20th, arrives with its own fresh reckoning. New York City released 170,000 pages of previously undisclosed documents this week that officials say show government efforts to shape public understanding of the attack’s aftermath, alongside the National September 11 Memorial’s traditional reading of victims’ names and the Tribute in Light installation over Lower Manhattan. For African, Caribbean and Afro-Latino communities whose losses and consequences have often sat at the edges of that annual remembrance, this year’s anniversary is also a quiet argument for a fuller accounting, one that names Godwin Ajala alongside every other name read aloud, and that treats the last twenty-five years of policy fallout as part of the same unfinished story.