IN MOTION: The African-American Migration Experience

ERA OF THE GREAT MIGRATION Family arriving in Chicago during the period known as the "Great Migration"Source: Allan Spear's Black Chicago, The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1900-1920

As Northern U.S. industrialization took off during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the demand for labor was met by extensive immigration from Europe. World War I produced yet another economic boom while at the same time closing the seemingly endless supply of labor. Pulled by the economic opportunities in the North and pushed by the segregation and discrimination of the South, many families, like the one pictured above, migrated from rural areas in the southern United States to urban, industrial areas in the North. Chicago was one such destination. By 1920, just over 50% of Chicago's African American population was migrant. The cultural and economic contributions of these families to the urban landscape cannot be overlooked.

Black migration from the Southand its consequences.

Migration has been one of the defining characteristics of black life in the United States since the forced migration of African slaves to the New World. Major movements before the Civil War included the Atlantic slave trade, the extension of slavery to the Mississippi Valley (1820-1850), the manumission and escape of slaves to freedom in the North, the movement of free people of color from the South to the North and Canada, and the immigration of small numbers of black Americans to Africa.



During and after the Civil War emancipated men and women moved to secure their freedom. At the same time many northern free blacks went south as soldiers, and other black men and women traveled south to teach and help lead communal institutions. The Exoduster movement (1877 to 1881) during which forty thousand to seventy thousand African-Americans left the former slave states for Kansas was the first grass-roots movement out of the South. Blacks, in protest against the loss of political rights, sought equality and opportunity in the West. Then and later, the "Talented Tenth"—educated African-American leaders—fled the rise of Jim Crow and moved northward. Others considered emigration, but only a few ever returned to Africa.

Feet of a black cotton hoer near Clarksdale, Mississippi, June, 1937, Photo by Dorthea Lange, Farm Security Administration collection of the Library of Congress

The onset of the Great Migration—the mass movement of black people from the rural areas of the South to the cities of the North—came in the 1890s, as black men and women left to settle in eastern coastal cities such as Philadelphia and New York. The single largest movement of African-Americans occurred during World War I when approximately 500,000 people moved from the rural and small-town South into the cities of the North and the Midwest. The steady migration out of the South lasted until the 1970s; from 1916 through the 1960s, more than 6 million black people made the move. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, more black people moved to the South than left, part of a general population shift to the Sunbelt. When migration out of the South ebbed in the 1960s, the urban North and West became the focal point of black life. And even in the South, a majority of African-Americans lived in cities.

Mississippi Delta children, 1936. Photo from the Farm Security Administration collection of the Library of Congress

The Great Migration was a grass-roots, leaderless movement. All the migrants—male laborers, women domestics, families—made individual decisions to move. Nonetheless, the deterioration of the quality of life of southern blacks in the two decades prior to World War I, coupled with a labor shortage in the industrial North, stimulated the migration. In the South, the rise of Jim Crow, the disfranchisement of black voters, and the spread of lynchings and other mob violence against blacks provided strong impetus for individuals and families to move. Widespread flooding and the infestation of cotton by the boll weevil created additional economic woes in the rural South.

Two black welders, representative of the workers of many racial groups which helped construct the first Liberty Ship named for an African-American, prepare to cut the steel plates which released the SS Booker T. Washington down the ways at its launching on Sept. 29, 1942, at the California Shipbuilding Corporation's Wilmington yards. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer from the Farm Security Administration collection of the Library of Congress Great Migration.

For the first time, the North needed southern blacks. Before World War I most northern factories had barred blacks, and few other well-paying positions were open to them. But the war in Europe stretched American industrial capacity to its limits at the very time that European immigration, which had exceeded 1.2 million in 1914, dropped sharply to 100,000 in 1918. Many businesses now hired anyone they could get, and black men and white women found new jobs and industries open to them. Although most blacks obtained only semiskilled and service jobs and their wages were usually lower than those received by white men and women for the same work, they nevertheless earned far more than they could in the South.



The Great Migration differed from previous migrations in that it was a movement directly from the rural South to the urban North. Railroads and black sleeping car porters were an important link between rural black communities and northern cities. Pullman porters on the Illinois Central Railroad distributed the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, on their trips south and facilitated the migration of fellow blacks to Chicago. In the cities of the North, vast black ghettos appeared. Chicago's black population grew from 44,000 in 1910 to 110,000 in 1920.

African Americans where just one ethnic group who migrated in great numbers to northern cities like Omaha, Nebraska, in the first years of the new century. This segment is from the program "A Street of Dreams", produced in 1994 by NETV.

http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0700/stories/0701_0131_02.html QuickTime movie of the migration of blacks to Omah, Nebraska.

Not all northerners welcomed the migrants, and white violence against blacks became common. Major race riots occurred, as in East St. Louis in 1917, when white rioters killed thirty-nine African-Americans. There were more than twenty major race riots in 1919. In Chicago a riot turned into a race war, as black workers and returned veterans fought back. After five days, federal troops were called in; twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites were dead.

http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_010500_blackmigrati.htm


The African American Great Migration

New societies, new peoples, and new communities usually originate in acts of migration. Someone or ones decide to move from one place to another. They choose a new destination and sever their ties with their traditional community or society as they set out in search of new opportunities, new challenges, new lives, and new life worlds. Most societies in human history have a migration narrative in their stories of origin. All communities in American society trace their origins in the United States to one or more migration experiences. America, after all, is "a nation of immigrants."



But until recently, people of African descent have not been counted as part of America's migratory tradition. The transatlantic slave trade has created an enduring image of black men and women as transported commodities, and is usually considered the most defining element in the construction of the African Diaspora, but it is centuries of additional movements that have given shape to the nation we know today. This is the story that has not been told.

Segregated railroad waiting room at the Union Terminal, Jacksonville, Florida, 1921. Source - Florida State Archives.

In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience presents a new interpretation of African-American history, one that focuses on the self-motivated activities of peoples of African descent to remake themselves and their worlds. Of the thirteen defining migrations that formed and transformed African America, only the transatlantic slave trade and the domestic slave trades were coerced, the eleven others were voluntary movements of resourceful and creative men and women, risk-takers in an exploitative and hostile environment. Their survival skills, efficient networks, and dynamic culture enabled them to thrive and spread, and to be at the very core of the settlement and development of the Americas. Their hopeful journeys changed not only their world and the fabric of the African Diaspora but also the Western Hemisphere.

http://www.inmotionaame.org/home.cfm The most comprehensive compilation of documents related to our migration experiences.

Article in the African American newspaper the Cleveland Advocate, March 6, 1920. Like many black newspapers, the Advocate reported on the great migration. Source - LOC.


Asante Sana: DaBlkHrdLiner