I had been looking for sources that named Irvin Brooks as “West Indian.”  Courtesy of Paul Wendt, here is Cumberland Posey, writing about Brooks in the Pittsburgh Courier (April 3, 1943):

Brooks, you’ll remember, was not literally “West Indian”—he was born in the United States, and so were his parents, as far as we can tell; but he and his family lived among (and sometimes with) Caribbean immigrants in Key West, and he could well have had more substantial connections to the Bahamas of one sort or another.

If anybody has access to the digitized Pittsburgh Courier, maybe you could search for “Chester Brooks,” and see what comes up.