no blacks on the titanic

The sinking of the Titanic on April 14, 1912, produced several million words of prose, several million motion pictures, a few songs--and one poem. This toast has been heard by a very small number of white Americans and by several million blacks. That is both curious and ironic, for not only were there no blacks on the Titanic's passenger list, but neither were there any in the crew. The ship seems to have been all white, and the one item in American folklore that widely documents its sinking is the toast, a genre performed almost exclusively by blacks.

The Titanic sailed from Queenstown, Ireland with many Irish workers aboard.

If there were no "blacks" on the Titanic, then how did the tale of Shine pass into African American culture?