National Humanities Center
The Great Migration; or Leaving my Troubles in Dixie
Made possible through a grant from the
Wachovia Foundation.
The Great Migration; or Leaving my Troubles in Dixie
Focus Questions
What forces both pushed and pulled African Americans from the South in the
Great Migration?
How did African Americans imagine the North at the time of the Migration?
What forces shaped the images and prominent themes that the Migration brought
to African American literature?
How were the realities African Americans encountered in "the Promised Land" of
the North comparable to experiences they had undergone in the South?
What roles did individuals, agencies, family, and business play in the movement
north?
How does an examination of westward migration and migration from rural to urban
areas within the South broaden our understandings of the Great Migration?
Trudier Harris
National Humanities Center Fellow
J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor Emerita
Department of English
University of North Carolina
At Chapel Hill
Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black
Daughter of the South (2003)
South of Tradition: Essays on African
American Literature (2002)
Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black
Women in African American Literature
(2001)
The Power of the Porch: The
Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston,
Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996)
National Humanities Center
The Great Migration;
or Leaving My Troubles in Dixie
Session I
Pushed and Pulled Out of the South
How do you incorporate the Great Migration in your
teaching?
How was the myth of the North as a freer place for
blacks created during slavery?
African Americans escaping slavery ran north as they
“followed the drinkin’ gourd.” The North Star became
the title of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper.
Harriet Tubman went south to the Egypt land of
slavery and directed black people to freedom in the
north.
Authors of slave (freedom) narratives directed their
texts to white Northerners whom they believed to be
sympathetic to abolition.
What did the North symbolize to those enslaved in
the South?
Freedom from the physical drudgery of slavery
Freedom to abandon names imposed upon them by
so-called masters
Pay for physical labor
Freedom of movement and association
Out from under the slaveholder’s shadow
The “Promised Land” of songs, poems, and tales
What Prompted the Great Migration?
Racial violence: “Between 1882 and 1927, an estimated 4,951 persons
were lynched in the United States. Of that number, 3,513 were black and
76 of those were women.”
Invention of the mechanical cotton picker
Worn-out soil
Natural disasters: failure of cotton crops in the 1910s, drought, boll
weevil infestations
Demand for labor in the North, spurred by World War I
Younger blacks did not feel the same attachment to the soil that
their ancestors felt.
Tightening of immigration laws opened jobs for which blacks could qualify
Traveling blues men, wayward husbands, relatives, and other
visitors to the North who never returned
Mobile, Ala. June 11, 1917
Dear Sir:
Will you please send me the name of the society in Chicago
that cares for colored emigrants who come north seeking
employment sometime ago I saw the name of this society in
the defender but of late it does not appear in the paper so I
kindly as[k] you please try and get the name of this society and
send the same to me at this city.
New Orleans, La., April 30, 1917.
Dear Sir: Seeing you ad in the defender I am writing you
to please give me some information concerning
positions- unskilled labor or hotel work, waiter, porter,
bell boy, clothes cleaning and pressing. I am
experienced in those things, especially in the hotel line.
Am 27 years of age, good health – have a wife- wish you
could give me information as I am not ready to come up
at present. Would be thankful if you could arrange with
some one who would forward transportation for me and
wife. would be very glad to hear from you as soon as
convenient. Thanking you in advance for interest shown
me
Palestine, Tex., Mar. 11th 1917
Sirs: this is somewhat a letter of information I am
a colored boy aged 15 years old and I am
talented for an artist and I am in search of some
one will Cultivate my talent I have studied
Cartooning therefore I am a Cartoonist and I
intent to visit Chicago this summer and I want to
keep in touch with your association and too from
you knowledge can a Colored boy be an artist
and make a white man’s salary up there I will tell
you more and also send a fiew samples of my
work when I rec an answer from you.
Temple Texas, April 29, 1917.
Mr. T. Arnold Hill, 3719 State St., Chicago, IL.
Dear Sir: Being a reader of the Defender and young man
seeking to better my conditions in the business world, I
have decided to leave this State for North or West. I
would like to get in touch with a person or firm that I
might know where I can secure steady work. I would
certainly appreciate any information you might be able to
give. I finished the course in Blacksmithing and
horseshoeing at Prairie View College this State and took
special wood working in Hampton Instititute Hampton Va.
Have been in practical business for sevaral years also I
am specializing auto work. I am a married man a
member of the church. Thanking you in advance for any
favors am very truly
Natchez, Miss., Sept 22-17.
Mr. R.S. Abbott, Editor.
Dear Sir: I thought that you might help me in Some way either personally or
through your influence, is why I am worrying you for which I beg pardon.
I am a married man having wife and mother to support, (I mention this in order
to properly convey my plight) conditions here are not altogether good and living
expenses growing while wages are small. My greatest desire is to leave for a better
place but am unable to raise the money.
I can write short stories all of which portray negro characters but no burlesque
can also write poems, have a gift for cartooning but have never learned the
technicalities of comic drawing. These thing will never profit me anything here in
Natches. Would like to know if you could use one or two of my short stories in serial
form in your great paper they are very interesting and would furnish good reading
matter. By this means I could probably leave here in short and thus come in
possession of better employment enabling me to take up my drawing which I like
best.
Kindly let me hear from you and if you cannot favor me could you refer me to
any Negro publication buying fiction from their race.
New Orleans, La., May 7, 1917.
Gentleman: I read Defender every week and see so
much good youre doing for the southern people & would
like to know if you do the same for me as I am thinking of
coming to Chicago about the first of June and wants a
position. I have very fine references if needed. I am a
widow of 28. No children, not a relative living and I can
do first class work as house maid and dining room or
care for invalid ladies. I am honest and neat and refined
with a fairly good education. I would like a position where
I could live on places because its very trying for a good
girl to be out in a large city by self among strangers is
why I would like a good home with good people. Trusting
to hear from you.
How did black people hear about the opportunities
that were available in the North?
Relatives
“So many of my folks are leaving that I thought I’d go up and see whether
or not they had made a mistake. I found thousands of old friends up there
making more money than they’d ever made in their lives. I said to one
woman in Chicago, “Well, Sister ––, I see you’re here.” “Yes, Brother, I’m
here, thank the Lord.” “Do you find it any colder up here than it was in
Mississippi?” “Did I understand you correctly to say cold? Honey, I mean it’s
cold. It is some cold.” “But you expect to return, don’t you?” “Don’t play with
me, chile. What am I going to return for? I should say not. Up here you see
when I come out on the street I walk on nice smooth pavements. Down
home I got to walk home through the mud. Up here at nights it don’t matter
much about coming home from church. Down home on my street there ain’t
a single lamp post. And say, honey, I got a bath tub!”
How did black people hear about the opportunities that
were available in the North?
Churches
Labor agents
Pullman porters
(Larry Tye, Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle
Class, 2005)
How did black people hear about the opportunities that were available in the
North?
Newspaper Reports
To die from the bite of frost is far more glorious than at the hands of a mob. I beg
you, my brother, to leave the benighted land. You are a free man. Show the world
that you will not let false leaders lead you. Your neck has been in the yoke. Will
you continue to keep it there because some “white folks’ nigger” wants you to?
Leave for all quarters of the globe. Get out of the South. Your being there in the
numbers in which you are gives the southern politician too strong a hold on your
progress. . . . So much has been said through the white papers in the South about
the members of the race freezing to death in the North. They freeze to death down
South when they don’t take care of themselves. There is no reason for any human
being staying in the Southland on this bugaboo handed out by the white press.
If you can freeze to death in the North and be free, why freeze to death in the
South and be a slave, where your mother, sister and daughter are raped and
burned at the stake; where your father, brother and sons are treated with contempt
and hung to a pole, riddled with bullets at the least mention that he does not like
the way he is treated. Come North then, all you folks, both good and bad. If you
don’t behave yourselves up here, the jails will certainly make you wish you had.
For the hard-working man there is plenty of work if you really want it. The
Defender says come.
Patterns of Migration
“The most interesting thing is how these people left. They were selling out
everything they had or in a manner giving it away; selling their homes,
mules, horses, cows, and everything about them but their trunks. All around
in the country, people who were so old they could not very well get about
were leaving. Some left with six to eight very small children and babies half
clothed, no shoes on their feet, hungry, not anything to eat and not even a
cent over their train fare. Some would go to the station and wait there three
or four days for an agent who was carrying them on passes. Others of this
city would go in clubs of fifty and a hundred at a time in order to get
reduced rates. They usually left on Wednesday and Saturday nights. One
Wednesday night I went to the station to see a friend of mine who was
leaving. I could not get in the station, there were so many people turning
like bees in a hive. Officers would go up and down the tracks trying to keep
the people back. One old lady and man had gotten on the train. They were
patting their feet and singing and a man standing nearby asked, ‘Uncle,
where are you going?’ The old man replied, ‘Well son, I’m gwine to the
promised land.’”
--Account of migration fever reported in Emmett J. Scott’s Negro Migration
During the War, 1920
One Way Ticket
Langston Hughes
I pick up my life
And take it with me
And I put it down in
Chicago, Detroit,
Buffalo, Scranton,
Any place that is North and East—
And not Dixie.
I pick up my life
And take it on the train
To Los Angeles, Bakersfield,
Seattle, Oakland, Salt Lake,
Any place that is
North and West—
And not South.
I am fed up
With Jim Crow laws,
People who are cruel
And afraid,
Who lynch and run,
Who are scared of me
And me of them.
I pick up my life
And take it away
On a one-way ticket—
Gone up North,
Gone out West,
Gone!
Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” 1937
Section IV
Negroes who have lived South know the dread of being caught alone upon the
streets in white neighborhoods after the sun has set. In such a simple situation as
this the plight of the Negro in America is graphically symbolized. While white
strangers may be in these neighborhoods trying to get home, they can pass
unmolested. But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes
him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target.
Section I
When I told the folks at home what had happened, they called me a fool. They told
me that I must never again attempt to exceed my boundaries. When you are
working for white folks, they said, you got to "stay in your place" if you want to keep
working.
I
Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” 1937
Section VIII
One night, just as I was about to go home, I met one of the Negro maids. She lived
in my direction, and we fell in to walk part of the way home together. As we passed
the white nightwatchman, he slapped the maid on her buttock. I turned around
amazed. The watchman looked at me with a long, hard, fixed under stare. Suddenly
he pulled his gun, and asked:
"Nigger, don't yuh like it?"
I hesitated.
"I asked yuh don't yuh like it?" he asked again, stepping forward.
"Yes, sir," I mumbled.
"Talk like it, then"
"Oh, yes, sir!" I said with as much heartiness as I could muster.
National Humanities Center
The Great Migration;
or Leaving My Troubles in Dixie
Session II
The Promised Land
Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” 1925
“So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula
than a human being --a something to be argued about, condemned or defended,
to be "kept down," or "in his place," or "helped up," to be worried with or worried
over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden. The thinking
Negro even has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus his
attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a
social problem.”
. . .
“Recall how suddenly the Negro spirituals revealed themselves; suppressed for
generations under the stereotypes of Wesleyan hymn harmony, secretive, halfashamed, until the courage of being natural brought them out--and behold, there
was folk-music. Similarly the mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped
from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology
of imitation and implied inferiority. By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro
problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.”
. . .
“The day of "aunties," "uncles" and "mammies" is equally gone. Uncle Tom and
Sambo have passed on, and even the "Colonel" and "George" play barnstorm
roles from which they escape with relief when the public spotlight is off. The
popular melodrama has about played itself out, and it is time to scrap the fictions,
garret the bogeys and settle down to a realistic facing of facts.”
Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” 1925
“The fiction is that the life of the races is separate and increasingly so. The fact is
that they have touched too closely at the unfavorable and too lightly at the favorable
levels.”
. . .
“The particular significance in the reestablishment of contact between the more
advanced and representative classes is that it promises to offset some of the
unfavorable reactions of the past, or at least to re-surface race contacts somewhat
for the future. Subtly the conditions that are moulding a New Negro are moulding a
new American attitude.”
. ..
“Therefore the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults
and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of
seeming to be what he is not. He resents being spoken for as a social ward or
minor, even by his own, and to being regarded a chronic patient for the sociological
clinic, the sick man of American Democracy. For the same reasons he himself is
through with those social nostrums and panaceas, the so-called "solutions" of his
"problem," with which he and the country have been so liberally dosed in the past.
Religion, freedom, education, money--in turn, he has ardently hoped for and
peculiarly trusted these things; he still believes in them, but not in blind trust that
they alone will solve his life-problem.”
Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” 1925
“This deep feeling of race is at present the mainspring of Negro life. It seems to be
the outcome of the reaction to proscription and prejudice; an attempt, fairly
successful on the whole, to convert a defensive into an offensive position, a
handicap into an incentive.”
. . .
“But fundamentally for the present the Negro is radical on race matters,
conservative on others, in other words, a "forced radical," a social protestant rather
than a genuine radical. Yet under further pressure and injustice iconoclastic thought
and motives will inevitably increase.”
. . .
“Democracy itself is obstructed and stagnated to the extent that any of its channels
are closed. Indeed they cannot be selectively closed. So the choice is not between
one way for the Negro and another way for the rest, but between American
institutions frustrated on the one hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled
and realized on the other.”
Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” 1925
How would you have us, as we are?
Or sinking heath the load we bear,
Our eyes fixed forward on a star,
Or gazing empty at despair?
Rising or falling? Men or things?
With dragging pace or footsteps fleet?
Strong, willing sinews in your wings,
Or tightening chains about your feet? --James Weldon’s Johnson’s “To America”
. . .
“Harlem, as we shall see, is the center of both these movements; she is the home
of the Negro's "Zionism." The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in
Harlem. A Negro newspaper carrying news material in English, French and
Spanish, gathered from all quarters of America, the West Indies and Africa has
maintained itself in Harlem for over five years. Two important magazines, both
edited from New York, maintain their news and circulation consistently on a
cosmopolitan scale. Under American auspices and backing, three pan-African
congresses have been held abroad for the discussion of common interests,
colonial questions and the future cooperative development of Africa.”
Leslie Rogers,
“People We Can Get
Along Without, The
Chicago Defender,
July 9, 1921
Rudolph Fisher, “The City of Refuge,” 1925
Gillis set down his tan cardboard extension case and wiped his black, shining brow.
Then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; up and
down Lenox Avenue, up and down 135th Street; big, lanky Negroes, short, squat
Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb,
women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about
the sidewalks; here and there a white face drifting along, but Negroes predominantly,
overwhelmingly everywhere. There was assuredly no doubt of his whereabouts. This
was Negro Harlem.
. . .
In Harlem, black was white. You had rights that could not be denied you; you had
privileges, protected by law. And you had money. Everybody in Harlem had money. It
was a land of plenty. Why, had not Mouse Uggam sent back as much as fifty dollars
at a time to his people in Waxhaw?
. . .
“Done died an’ woke up in Heaven,” thought King Solomon, watching, fascinated; and
after a while, as if the wonder of it were too great to believe simply by seeing, “Cullud
policemans!” he said, half aloud; then repeated over and over, with greater and
greater conviction, “Even got cullud policemans—even got cullud —”
Rudolph Fisher, “The City of Refuge,” 1925
Uggam sought out Tom Edwards, once a Pullman porter, now prosperous
proprietor of a cabaret, and told him: “
Chief, I got him: a baby jess in from the land o’cotton and so dumb he thinks ante
bellum’s an old woman.”
. . .
An airshaft: cabbage and chitterlings cooking; liver and onions sizzling, sputtering;
three player-pianos out-plunking each other; a man and a woman calling each
other vile things; a sick, neglected baby wailing; a phonograph broadcasting blues;
dishes clacking; a girl crying heartbrokenly; waste noises, waste odors of a score of
families, seeking issue through a common channel; pollution from bottom to top —
a sewer of sounds and smells.
Rudolph Fisher, “The City of Refuge,” 1925
“Stealin’? ’T wouldn’t be stealin’. Stealin’ ’s what that damn monkey-chaser tried to
do from you. This would be doin’ Tony a favor an’ gettin’ y’self out o’ the barrel.
What’s the holdback?”
“What make you keep callin’ him monkey-chaser?”
“West Indian. That’s another thing. Any time y’ can knife a monk, do it. They’s too
damn many of ’em here. They’re an achin’ pain.”
“Jess de way white folks feels ’bout niggers.”
. . .
King Solomon was in a position to help him now, same as he had helped King
Solomon. He would leave a dozen packages of the medicine — just small
envelopes that could all be carried in a coat pocket — with King Solomon every
day. Then he could simply send his customers to King Solomon at Tony’s store.
They’d make some trifling purchase, slip him a certain coupon which Uggam had
given them, and King Solomon would wrap the little envelope of medicine with their
purchase..
Rudolph Fisher, “The City of Refuge,” 1925
“Look, Mouse!” he whispered. “Look a yonder!”
“Look at what?”
“Dog-gone if it ain’ de self-same girl?”
Wha’ d’ ye mean, self-same girl!”
“Over yonder, wi’ de green stockin’s. Dass de gal made me knock over dem apples
fust day I come to town. ’Member? Been wishin’ I could see her ev’y sence.”
“What for?” Uggam wondered.
King Solomon grew confidential. “Ain’ but two things in dis world, Mouse, I really
wants. One is to be a policeman. Been wantin’ dat ev’y sence I seen dat cullud
traffic cop dat day. Other is to get myse’f a gal lak dat one over yonder!”
. . .
“Didn’t I just see him sell you something?”
“Guess you did. We happened to be sittin’ here at the same table and got to talkin’.
After a while I says I can’t seem to sleep nights, so he offers me sump’n he says ‘ll
make me sleep, all right. I don’t know what it is., but he says he uses it himself an’ I
offers to pay him what it cost him. That’s how I come to take it. Guess he’s got
more in his pocket there now.”
Rudolph Fisher, “The City of Refuge,” 1925
“Are you coming without trouble?”
Mouse Uggam, his friend. Harlem. Land of plenty. City of refuge — city of refuge.
If you live long enough ⎯
Consciousness of what was happening between the pair across the room
suddenly broke through Gillis’s daze like flame through smoke. The man was
trying to kiss the girl and she was resisting. Gillis jumped up. The detective, taking
the act for an attempt to escape, jumped with him and was quick enough to
intercept him. The second officer came at once to his partner’s aid, blowing his
whistle several times as he came.
. . .
Downing one of the detectives a third time and turning to grapple again with the
other, Gillis found himself face to face with a uniformed black policeman.
He stopped as if stunned. For a moment he simply stared. Into his mind swept his
own words, like a forgotten song suddenly recalled:
“Cullud policemans!”
Gwendolyn Brooks, “of De Witt
Williams on his way to Lincoln
Cemetery,” 1945
He was born in Alabama.
He was bred in Illinois.
He was nothing but a
Plain black boy.
Don’t forget the Dance Halls—
Warwick and Savoy,
Where he picked his women, where
He drank his liquid joy.
Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot.
Nothing but a plain black boy.
Born in Alabama.
Bred in Illinois.
He was nothing but a
Plain black boy.
Drive him past the Pool Hall.
Drive him past the Show.
Blind within his casket,
But maybe he will know.
Down through Forty-seventh Street:
Underneath the L,
And Northwest Corner, Prairie,
That he loved so well.
Swing low swing low sweet sweet
chariot.
Nothing but a plain black boy.
Alice Walker, “Roselily,” 1967
She dreams; dragging herself across the world. A small girl in her mother’s white
robe and veil, knee raised waist high through a bowl of quicksand soup. The man
who stands beside her is against this standing on the front porch of her house,
being married to the sound of cars whizzing by on highway 61.
. . .
She thinks of ropes, chains, handcuffs, his religion. His place of worship. Where
she will be required to sit apart with covered head. In Chicago, a word she hears
when thinking of smoke, from his description of what a cinder was, which they
never had in Panther Burn. She sees hovering over the heads of the clean
neighbors in her front yard black specks falling, clinging, from the sky. But in
Chicago. Respect, a chance to build. Her children at last from underneath the
detrimental wheel. A chance to be on top. What a relief, she thinks. What a vision,
a view, from up so high.
Alice Walker, “Roselily,” 1967
She thinks of the man who will be her husband, feels shut away from him because
of the stiff severity of his plain black suit. His religion. A lifetime of black and white.
Of veils. Covered head. It is as if her children are already gone from her. Not dead,
but exalted on a pedestal, a stalk that has no roots. She wonders how to make new
roots. It is beyond her. She wonders what one does with memories in a brand-new
life. This had seemed easy, until she thought of it. “The reasons why . . . the people
who” . . . she thinks, and does not wonder where the thought is from.
. ..
In the city. He sees her in a new way. This she knows, and is grateful. But is it new
enough? She cannot always be a bride and virgin, wearing robes and veil. Even
now her body itches to be free of satin and voile, organdy and lily of the valley.
Memories crash against her. Memories of being bare to the sun. She wonders what
it will be like. Not to have to go to a job. Not to work in a sewing plant. Not to worry
about learning to sew straight seams in workingmen’s overalls, jeans, and dress
pants. Her place will be in the home, he has said, repeatedly, promising her rest
she had prayed for. But now she wonders. When she is rested, what will she do?
They will make babies ⎯ she thinks practically about her fine brown body, his strong
black one. They will be inevitable. Her hands will be full. Full of what? Babies. She
is not comforted.
Alice Walker, “Roselily,” 1967
Impatient to see the South Side, where they would live and build and be
respectable and respected and free. Her husband would free her. A romantic hush.
Proposal. Promises. A new life! Respectable, reclaimed, renewed. Free! In robe
and veil.
. . .
She blinks her eyes. Remembers she is finally being married, like other girls. Like
other girls, women? Something strains upward behind her eyes. She thinks of the
something as a rat trapped, cornered, scurrying to and fro in her head, peering
through the windows of her eyes. She wants to live for once. But doesn’t know
quite what that means. Wonders if she has ever done it. If she ever will.
. . .
Her husband’s hand is like the clasp of an iron gate. People congratulate. Her
children press against her.
Alice Walker, “Roselily,” 1967
She thinks how it will be later in the night in the silvery gray car. How they will spin
through the darkness of Mississippi and in the morning be in Chicago, Illinois. She
thinks of Lincoln, the president. That is all she knows about the place. She feels
ignorant, wrong, backward. She presses her worried fingers into his palm. He is
standing in front of her. In the crush of well-wishing people, he does not look back.
Final Slide .
Thank you.