The African American Experience 1880-1920
As you read the following article, answer the questions. Following this activity, you will be responsible for discussion of
these issues.
The “Great Migration”
1. What were some causes of the Great Migration of southern blacks?
2. How did Ida B. Wells influence national attention to the plight of African Americans, especially in the South?
3. What challenges did these migrants face once they were in the North? Why was this the case?
4. Why was social and economic mobility for African Americans still difficult to attain in the North?
5. How did African Americans attempt to gain political power during the turn of the 20th century?
The Great Migration
Source: http://tinyurl.com/prxp5v5
In the spring of 1916, as the attention of America focused on the Great War in Europe, few noticed the tiny stream
of Southern black men brought north by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company to work on the rail lines. Yet, between 1916
and 1918 alone, nearly 400,000 African Americans - five hundred each day - took what they hoped was a journey into
freedom. The migration was a watershed in the history of African Americans. It lessened their overwhelming
concentration in the South, opened up industrial jobs to people who had up to then been mostly farmers, and resulted in
the first significant push to urbanize. By 1925, more than one-tenth of the country's black population voluntarily moved
north. This Great Migration, which lasted until 1930, was the first step in the full nationalization of the AfricanAmerican 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 and thousands of
agricultural workers could no longer live off of the land.
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. The cessation of immigration resulted in a labor shortage at a time
when workers were needed to gear up the arms and war-supplies industries. The South, with its surplus of workers
resulting from agricultural disaster and chronic underdevelopment, clearly fit the bill. The South was behind the rest of the
country at the start of Reconstruction, and its disadvantage only grew over time. It had fewer schools, lower literacy
levels, and poorer basic services. The rural areas had slow and inadequate communication with the outside world.
In addition, the political and social climate was deteriorating. Between 1890 and 1910, most African Americans in
the South had lost the right to vote through restrictive requirements such as property qualifications, poll taxes, literacy
tests, and the "grandfather clause." The tightening of Jim Crow laws led many to leave the South. Intimidation and
outright violence were also used not only to disenfranchise the black community, but also to control and terrorize it. At
least two to three people were lynched every week. Although lynching had been used for decades, it evolved in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, becoming more sadistic and exhibitionist. People were horribly tortured and
mutilated for hours in front of huge crowds that included women and children. One African American reformer, Ida B.
Wells, a school teacher turned journalist, started an anti-lynching campaign after several of her friends were kidnapped
and lynched in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. Driven from town, Wells moved to Chicago, where she married
and became a political activist for African American rights.
MOVING NORTH
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 and fares were expensive.
However, during the early period, some northern employers assisted the migrants with transportation; the railroads, in dire
need of workers to transport war material and maintain the rail lines, were among the first employers to recruit. More
influential than the agents in the long run were family and friends. Prospective migrants financed their tickets by selling
all their possessions. When that was not enough, families pooled their resources to send one member.
The Great Migration spurred a massive increase in the African-American communities in northern cities. In the
decade between 1910 and 1920, New York's black population rose by 66 percent; Detroit experienced an amazing growth
rate of 611 percent. Here, Henry Ford started a small experiment to see if black workers could be used on the assembly
line. In 1910, fewer than 600 of the more than 100,000 automotive workers in the United States were African American.
By 1929 there were 25,000 and Ford employed approximately half of them. Once settled, 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. The arrival of masses of southern black workers changed the face of the industrial world. Employers' initial
reluctance to tap this "inferior" stock was quickly erased. "If it hadn't been for the negro at that time," said a former
official of the Carnegie Steel Company, "we could hardly have carried on our operations."
However, the migrants also became easy scapegoats. In the eyes of most whites, low wages, deteriorating factory
conditions, unemployed white males, all had but one cause: black workers had been brought in. Labor unions were
overwhelmed by the rapid introduction of tens of thousands of African Americans from the South. The labor surplus now
made it possible for employers to operate as if the unions did not exist. In the past, labor organizations had absorbed the
foreign- born into their ranks, but racism now prevented them from extending a similar welcome to the African
Americans. Arriving in the North with few assets, they were in no position to bargain over wages. The high cost of food
and lodging were sufficient incentives to force many to take the first available job. The low wages paid to black men
forced women into the workplace. In Chicago in the 1920s, over 85 percent of African-American women were on the
work rolls - 21 percent in manufacturing and 64 percent in domestic service. By comparison, only 31 percent of nativeborn white women held jobs.
OTHER PROBLEMS IN THE NORTH
Besides the white-black competition for employment in the cities, there was also white-black competition for
living space. Prior to the migration, African Americans were often dispersed in small clusters in several city
neighborhoods, where they lived in relative obscurity and invisibility. But soon white opposition effectively closed the
market to newcomers, thereby creating ghettos. Whites also fled the areas where black migrants concentrated "as if from a
plague." City government, banks, and realtors conspired to keep African Americans' residential opportunities constricted.
This combination of overcrowding and poverty, combined with poor access to quality medical treatment -even in the
North there were few black physicians and hospitals were generally segregated - ensured a variety of serious health
problems in African-American communities.
The first years of the Great Migration included an unprecedented wave of mob violence across 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. In St. Louis in
July of 1917, a riot broke out, 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,
a rumor spread that black man had accidentally shot a white man during a holdup. 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. Forty-eight African
Americans were dead, hundreds injured, and more than three hundred buildings destroyed. Chicago also witnessed
violence in 1919, as the temperature soared into the nineties. Several black children drifted into waters off a public beach,
by custom reserved for whites. Stones were thrown at them and one child drowned. After, several days of rioting
occurred, with both blacks and whites beaten. Thirty-eight people were killed, twenty-three of them black, and 537 were
wounded; most of the one thousand families left homeless were African Americans.
HELPING THEMSELVES
Service organizations arose to provide aid and support to the newcomers, such as the National Urban League,
founded in 1911 in New York. The Chicago Urban League opened its doors in 1917, and in its first two years some fiftyfive thousand migrants sought assistance in finding jobs and housing. The National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) and similar organizations also provided a needed lifeline for incoming migrants. Churches also
played a key role in the formation and aid of black communities throughout the North.
African Americans now sought political representation. Their painful experience of disenfranchisement in the
South, coupled with their belief in the power of the ballot, led many migrants to register to vote almost immediately after
arriving in the North. Their loyalty to the Republicans, however, did little, at first, to advance the interests of black
migrants. Chicago was one of the first cities where African Americans attained a measure of political influence. A number
of black politicians rose to prominence. Perhaps the most outstanding was Oscar DePriest, who became Chicago's first
black councilman in 1915; in 1928, DePriest became the first black elected to the United States House of Representatives
in the twentieth century.
In addition, Black Nationalism, spurred in particular by Marcus Garvey, became an important part of the
sociopolitical landscape. Garvey had formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in his native Jamaica
in 1914 and brought it to New York three years later. Besides advocating going back to Africa, Garvey and the UNIA
promoted economic independence and racial pride, crucial issues to people who had faced contempt, violent racism, and
socioeconomic dependence in the South, and were determined to improve their lot in the North.
Though they faced discrimination, exclusion, and violence, African-American migrants never stopped moving
forward. In 1890, 63% of all black male laborers worked in agriculture; in 1930, only 42% did so. During that period, the
number of African-American schoolteachers more than doubled, the number of black-owned businesses tripled, and the
literacy rate soared from 39 to 85 percent. Many newcomers discovered their entrepreneurial talents as storeowners, realestate brokers, and providers of various skilled services to their community and to the larger population. By the mid1920s, there were over two hundred black hospitals and twenty-five nursing schools in the United States.
Yet ultimately, leaving the South was not about economic opportunity or living a "higher moral life." Most
migrants paid dearly, in some coin or other, for their departure. The Great Migration was about African Americans
starting over and making sacrifices for future generations. As W. E. B. Du Bois concluded, the journey north represented
not the end of a struggle but only its beginning.