The Bengali sailors

From the 1890s through the 1940s, Bengali Muslim sailors (lascars) left British merchant ships in New York, New Orleans, and Baltimore, forming some of America's earliest South Asian Muslim communities (documented in Vivek Bald's Bengali Harlem).

Many came from Sylhet and Chittagong, jumping ship to escape brutal shipboard conditions; facing restrictive immigration law, they married into African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods.