Ms. Thrower's Social Studies Website



African Americans Participating in the Great Migration The Great Migration was a watershed in the history of African Americans. In 1910, seven million of the nation's eight million African Americans resided below the “Cotton Curtain” of the South. But over the next fifteen years, more than one-tenth of the country's black population would voluntarily move north. The Great Migration, which lasted until 1930, was the first step in the full nationalization of the African-American population.Several factors precipitated one of the largest population shifts in the country's history. In 1898 the tiny boll weevil invaded Texas and proceeded to eat its way east across the South. Crops were devastated, thousands of agricultural workers thrown off the land, and the long reign of King Cotton as the region's economic backbone was finally brought to an end.Even more important was World War I. Its onset in Europe, in 1914, brought a halt - within three years - to the massive immigration of European industrial workers which had been going on for some sixty years. By 1900 more than a million were settling in the United States each year.In addition, the political and social climate was deteriorating. Between 1890 and 1910, most African Americans in the South had been disenfranchised by losing the right to vote through restrictive requirements such as property qualifications, poll taxes, literacy tests, and the "grandfather clause" that limited the vote to those whose grandfathers were registered voters, thus disqualifying blacks who had gotten the franchise only with the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. The tightening of Jim Crow laws led many to leave the South.The decision to pull up one's long planted roots and journey into the unknown North is not easily made. For southern migrants, it was a balancing act. Serious questions had to be answered: How bad is it here? How good is it there? Who in the family will make the journey? How will those left behind be cared for? How much will it cost? Where will I live?As reports spread of plentiful job opportunities that existed in the North, the workers' situation began to change. They heard fantastic promises but were cautious and awaited reports from pioneers who went north to test the waters. One worker said, "Of course everything they say about the North ain't true, but there's so much of it true, don't mind the other."Rarely did young and old, able-bodied and dependent, parent and child migrate together. It was too expensive. Young men between eighteen and thirty-five who had worked as unskilled industrial laborers were usually the first to go. Many were married and had children and expected to reunite with their families as soon as they had "made their way."The migrants headed to the large industrial centers - Detroit, Pittsburgh, New York, and most of all, Chicago. Leaving home was a wrenching experience, though mitigated by exhilaration as hope for the future in some instances drowned out the accustomed sounds of the past. A migrant from Gulfport, Mississippi, reported from Chicago, "I'm tickled to death over this place. Sorry I was not here years ago."The journey north was made by train, boat, bus, sometimes car, and even horse-drawn cart. It was most often a long, grueling experience; the travelers confronted segregated waiting rooms, buses, and train coaches, as well as unfamiliar procedures and unfriendly conductors. Very little food or drink was available. Fares were expensive, deterring many would-be migrants from making the trip. Regular passenger fares - 2? per mile in 1915 - skyrocketed within three years to 24? a mile.Once settled, usually with the aid of family members or friends from "down home," migrants strove to achieve their vision of the American Dream. Long hours and several jobs were not unusual. The great majority was on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Many had been skilled craftsmen in the South but were barred from such jobs in the North by company policy, union regulations, or white-only traditions within various trades. There was also a wide disparity in pay scales. In Alabama, unskilled foundry workers earned $2.50 for a ten-hour day. The same workers in Illinois took home $4.25. As a result, southern migrants, at times unwittingly, worked for less than the going rate. White workers were decidedly unhappy at being undercut.As a consequence of the seemingly quickened pace of African-American migration to Northern urban locales, housing arrangements often caused a great deal of strife, and ultimately led to defined pockets of African-American culture within larger cities. Suddenly, the growth of a new urban, African-American culture peered out of the forefront of black life: the Harlem Renaissance emerged. Once a well-known, upper-class, all-white neighborhood in New York City, Harlem was transformed into a dense, culturally-rich hotspot that “housed some 200,000 African Americans by 1920.” As the New Negro Movement developed, shortly evolving into the Harlem Renaissance, “the black experience during the Great Migration became an important theme in the artistic movement” that would have immeasurable impact on the culture of the era for generations of African Americans to come. Considered a golden age in African-American culture, the progressive social and political landscape was manifested in literature, music, stage performance and art. Myriad of prominent figures became solidified in the great American story at this time, from Langston Hughes to James Weldon Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston to Aaron Douglas; Augusta Savage and Jacob Lawrence; and Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Cab Calloway. The authors, artists and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance left an infinite mark on the realization and recognition of well-respected African-American culture.RACE RIOTS: The first years of the Great Migration would see an unprecedented wave of mob violence sweep the nation. Twenty-six race riots - in cities large and small, North and South - would claim the lives of scores of African Americans. But the migrants did not instigate this bloody wave of lawlessness; it was, in most cases, directed at them.The so-called Red Summer of 1919 actually began two years earlier in East St. Louis, Illinois, in July 1917. It was the only one of the battles to be directly linked to racial conflict in the workplace, but white workers' fear of job competition was likely behind all of them. The East St. Louis riot began after African-American workers were hired to break a strike at an aluminum plant. A delegation of trade unionists met with the mayor and demanded that black migration to the town be stopped. As they left the meeting, they were told that a black man had accidentally shot a white man during a holdup. In a few minutes, the rumor spread that the shooting was intentional and involved an insulted white woman, then white girls.Mobs quickly took to the streets, threatening and attacking any blacks they could find. The local police made no attempt to control the situation. Some of the whites later drove through the main black neighborhood firing indiscriminately into homes. Before the rampage ended, forty-eight African Americans were dead, hundreds injured, and more than three hundred buildings destroyed.HOUSING DISCRIMINATION: Throughout the Great Migration, wherever black Southerners went, the hostility and hierarchies that fed the Southern caste system seemed to carry over into the receiving stations in the New World, as the cities of the North and West erected barriers to black mobility. There were “sundown towns” throughout the country that banned African-Americans after dark. The constitution of Oregon explicitly prohibited black people from entering the state until 1926; whites-only signs could still be seen in store windows into the 1950s. Even in the places where they were permitted, blacks were relegated to the lowest-paying, most dangerous jobs, barred from many unions and, at some companies, hired only as strike breakers, which served to further divide black workers from white. They were confined to the most dilapidated housing in the least desirable sections of the cities to which they fled. In densely populated destinations like Pittsburgh and Harlem, housing was so scarce that some black workers had to share the same single bed in shifts.At the same time, redlining—the federal housing policy of refusing to approve or guarantee loans and mortgages in areas where black people lived—served to deny them access to mortgages in their own neighborhoods. These policies became the pillars of a residential caste system in the North that calcified segregation and wealth inequality over generations, denying African-Americans the chance accorded other Americans to improve their lot. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download