THE GREAT MIGRATION

For many African-Americans, the years after the Civil War were very much like the years before the Civil War. While they were legally free, economically and socially they were still in bondage. “Jim Crow” laws made sure of this. The demon of racism manifested itself now in unjust laws promulgated by white governments to maintain its hegemony over its African-American population.

A sort of African-American revolution occurred in the early twentieth century when millions of African-Americans migrated to northern cities. The so-called Great Migration is one of the most puissant images of African-American resistance to racism. As surely as the Puritans left England to form a New Jerusalem in North America many African-Americans left Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas to seek out a New Israel in Detroit, Chicago, and Boston. The Great Migration was the greatest transfer of a population group in world history. In the sense that African-Americans were leaving a place of unhappy circumstances to seek a better life elsewhere, it was also one of the greatest protest movements in world history.

Most African-Americans throughout this century have looked to the Northern urban setting, the “Promised Land.” The North was African-America’s “Diaspora.” Lucy Ariel Williams wrote:
Huh! de wurl’ ain’t flat

An’ de wurl’ain’t roun’
Jes’ one long strip
Hangin’ up an’down
Since Norf is up
an’ Souf is down,
an’Hebben is up,
I’m upward boun’!

The first wave migration occurred from about 1900-1940. From 1900 to the 1955 most African-Americans moved from Southern agrarian centers to northern cities. And, from 1955-present, the rural areas still constituted the main source of African-Americans moving into cities. The migration, then, of African-Americans to Northern and Western cities was inexorable and unstoppable since at least 1900.

The Great Migration to the North was primarily caused by the availability of jobs and the hope that racism would be absent or abated in the North. During World War I, and later when foreign immigration was severely limited by nativistic fears, jobs were abundantly available. Wages in the North were considerably higher than in the South. The welfare capitalism prevalent in a larger northern company were infinitely more appealing than the cotton mill in Macon, Georgia. And, Woolworths was a better place to buy something than the mom and pop store in Tupelo, Mississippi. This was part of the “pull” North. Racism, though, was never absent or abated.

At the same time, the “push” was a series of economic setbacks in the rural South–the boll weevil and tightened credit. By 1900 the mechanical cotton picker had made the sharecropper system obsolete. The sharecropper system began in the years after the Civil War as the means by which cotton planters’ need for a great deal of cheap labor was satisfied. The issue of the labor supply was important because it was really the issue of race. Cotton planters no longer needed large numbers of African-American people to pick their cotton, and inevitably the nature of African-American society and of race relations changed. Racial relations, never very good, became worse when whites no longer needed African-American labor. This partially explained the surge in nativism and increased Klan activity in the early 1920’s.

Again, though, the demon of racism reared its ugly head in the northern city. African-Americans were as profitably exploited by white northerners as they had been by white southerners. This exploitation was painfully clear to the African-American community. Segregation assured that whites would retain some social status no matter what their socio-economic situation. A South Carolina mill owner warned his white mill hands that manufacturers planned to place them “on the same basis as a free negro.” This owner was appealing to the white’s greatest fear: lost of independence by sinking to “Negro status.”

Southern society at the beginning of the Great Migration was a feudal-like society, not unlike what existed before the Civil War. Every big farm was a fiefdom; sharecroppers lived their lives within a few miles of their homes. The sudden ending of slavery in 1865 did not mean an equally sudden end of fear on the part of African-Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr., on a visit to an Alabama plantation in 1965, was amazed to meet sharecroppers who had never seen United States currency. Education usually ended with the eighth grade. Many homes were a rough two- or three-room shack on the edge of a treeless cotton field. There was no plumbing of course and the only heat came from a wood burning stove. There was no electricity, usually the roof leaked, and families slept two and three to a bed. Most white southerners made every effort to keep the African-American sharecropper system isolated from the rest of southern society. Isolation enhanced control. Limited reward, control, and then exploitation emerged as inescapable themes of American racial history.

During the first half of the twentieth century, race was essentially a Southern issue. After the Great Migration it was an American issue. The South, and only the South, had to deal with the contradictions of segregation. But the African-American migration to the city made segregation and racism national issues.

The African-American community demographic center shifted from a rural southern base to an urban–northern and southern–base. But needs and wants remained the same. With this Great Migration came many dreams, hopes, and expectations that were not satisfied. Great anger resulted. The first great attempt of national assimilation occurred during the Great Migration. It was an unmitigated failure.

Life was not much better in the North. In many ways it was worse. In 1910, there were 10 million African-American heirs of the slave system. Many now lived in northern cites. They occupied the bottom of the ladder of American society. They died younger, they were sick more, they were hungry most of the time. Many could not read, many did not have jobs. Northern migrations did not appreciably improve African-American life.

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