Great Migration (African American)

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The Great Migration was the movement of approximately 7 million ^[2] African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the North, Midwest and West from 1916 to 1970. Precise estimates of the number of migrants depend on the timeframe selected. African Americans migrated to escape widespread racism in the South, to seek employment opportunities in industrial cities, to get better education for their children, and to pursue what was widely perceived to be a better life in the North.^[2]

Some historians differentiate between the Great Migration (1910-1940), numbering about 1.5 million migrants, and the Second Great Migration, from 1940-1970. Not only was the Second Migration larger, with five million or more people relocating, but it had a different demographic, and migrants moved to more different places. Many particularly moved from Texas and Louisiana to California, where there were a new range of jobs in the defense industry.

(see Second Great Migration (African American)

[edit] Causes

When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, less than 8 percent of the African American population lived in the Northeast or Midwest. By 1900, approximately 90 percent of all African-Americans still resided in former slave-holding states.^[3] Most African Americans who participated in the migration moved to large industrial cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Los Angeles, as well as to many smaller industrial cities. People tended to take the cheapest rail ticket possible. This resulted in, for example, people from Mississippi moving to Chicago and people from Texas moving to Los Angeles.

Between 1910 and 1930, the African American population in the North rose by about 20 percent overall. Cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Cleveland had some of the biggest increases in the early part of the century. Because changes were concentrated in the cities, urban tensions rose as African Americans and new or recent European immigrants, also chiefly from rural societies, competed for jobs and housing with native white working class Americans.

African-Americans moved as individuals or small family groups. There was no government assistance, but sometimes northern industries recruited people because of the need for labor. African Americans migrated because of a variety of push and pull factors. The primary push factor was the racial climate in the South and terrorism from the KKK. In the North, there were better schools for African-American children and adult men could vote (joined by women after 1920). Burgeoning industries of all sorts meant that there were opportunities for jobs.

1. Many African-Americans believed they could escape the racial segregation of Jim Crow laws in the South by seeking refuge in the North.
2. The boll weevil infestation of Southern cotton fields in the late 1910s forced many sharecroppers to search for alternative employment opportunities.
3. The enormous expansion of war industries created new job openings for blacks—not in the factories but in the service jobs that new factory workers vacated
4. World War I and the Immigration Act of 1924 effectively put a halt to the flow of European immigrants to the emerging industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest, causing shortages of workers in the factories
5. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and its aftermath displaced hundreds of thousands of African-American farmers and farm workers

[edit] Effects

[edit] Demographic changes

The 20th century cultures of many of the United States' modern cities were forged in this period. For instance, in 1910, the African American population of Detroit was 6,000, by the start of the Great Depression in 1929, this figure had risen to 120,000. Other cities, such as Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, also experienced surges in their African American populations. At the same time, they were receiving hundreds of thousands of new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Major industrial cities were places of numerous languages, an influx of peoples from mostly rural cultures, and staggeringly rapid change in the early decades of the 20th century.

The rapid scale of change could be seen also in Chicago. In 1900 the city had a total population of 1,698,575.^[4] By 1920 Chicago had increased by more than 1 million residents. Its population of 2,701,705 included more than 1,000,000 Catholics; 800,000 foreign-born immigrants; 125,000 Jews; and 110,000 African Americans. It had fifteen breweries and 20,000 speakeasies to keep things lively during Prohibition.^[5]

In the South, the departure of hundreds of thousands of African Americans caused the black percentage of the population in most Southern states to decrease. In Mississippi and South Carolina, for example, blacks decreased from about 60% of the population in 1930 to about 35% by 1970.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Discrimination and working conditions

While the Great Migration helped educated African Americans obtain jobs, enabling a measure of class mobility, the migrants encountered significant forms of discrimination in the North. Because so many people had migrated in so short a period of time, the African American migrants were often resented by the white working class in the north, who feared that their ability to negotiate rates of pay, or even to secure employment at all, was threatened by the influx of new labor competition. Sometimes those who were most fearful or resentful were the last immigrants of the 19th and new immigrants of the 20th c. In many cities, working classes tried to defend what they saw as "their" own territories.

The migrants also discovered that the open discrimination of the South was only more subtly manifested in the North. Mortgage discrimination and redlining in inner city areas limited the migrants' ability to determine their own housing, or even to get a fair price on that housing. Populations increased so rapidly among African American migrants and new European immigrants both that there were housing shortages, and the newer groups competed even for the oldest, most rundown housing. Ethnic groups created territories that they defended against change. More established populations of cities tended to move to newer housing being developed on the outskirts. In the long term, the National Housing Act of 1934 contributed to limiting the availability of loans to urban areas, particularly those areas inhabited by African Americans. ^[6]

[edit] Integration, and non-integration

As African Americans migrated, they became increasingly integrated into society. As they lived and worked more closely with whites, the divide that existed between them became increasingly stark. African Americans found that they needed to be not just as good, but better at what they did than their white counterparts in order to be considered equal to them.^{[citation needed]} This period marked the transition for many African Americans from lifestyles as rural farmers to urban industrial workers.

During the migration, migrants would commonly move as a community rather than as individuals or families. Similarly, immigrants from rural European communities tended to settle in the US with people from their home villages. These tendencies among the newer ethnic groups contributed to maintaining the "racial divide" in the North, perhaps even accentuating it.

Since African American migrants sustained many Southern cultural and linguistic traits, these cultural differences created a sense of "otherness" in terms of their reception by others who were living in the cities before them. ^[7] Stereotypes ascribed to "black" people during this period often were derived from the migrants' rural cultural traditions, which were maintained in stark contrast to the urban environments in which the people resided.^[7]

[edit] References

1. ^ The Great Migration 1920s
2. ^ ^{a b} Great Migration, accessed 12/7/2007
3. ^ The African-American Mosaic
4. ^ Gibson, Campbell (June 1998). Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990. U.S. Bureau of the Census - Population Division.
5. ^ Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967; reprint, Chicago: Elephant Press, 1992, p.93
6. ^ Racialization and the State: The Housing Act of 1934 and the Creation of the Federal Housing Administration Kevin Fox Gotham Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 291-317
7. ^ ^{a b} ‘Ruralizing’ the City Theory, Culture, History, and Power in the Urban Environment

• Arnesen, Eric. Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents (2002).
• Grossman, James R. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1991).
• Lemann, Nicholas. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), on the 1940-60 migration.
• Scott, Emmett J., Negro Migration during the War (1920).
• Sernett, Milton. Bound for the Promised Land: African Americans' Religion and the Great Migration (1997).

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