Chapter Thirteen

Blacks Arrive in Northern Cities

Mexicans trekking to El Norte were not the only people who migrated northward in the early twentieth century. Southern blacks were moving by the tens of thousands to the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest. The spirit behind this migration was later described by Zora Neale Hurston, an African American writer who was a sharecropper’s daughter:

And Black men’s feet learned roads. Some said good bye cheerfully . . . others fearfully, with terrors of unknown dangers in their mouths . . . others in their eagerness for distance said nothing. The daybreak found them gone. The wind said North. Trains said North. The tides and tongues said North, and men moved like the great herds before the glaciers.

In just ten years, from 1910 to 1920, the black population jumped from 5,700 to 40,800 in Detroit, from 8,400 to 34,400 in Cleveland, from 44,000 to 109,400 in Chicago, and from 91,700 to 152,400 in New York. The African Americans who made this journey were both pushed from the South and pulled to the North.

Pushed and Pulled

Like the immigrants from Asia, Mexico, and Europe, southern blacks were driven from their homes by economic and social forces. After the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of the slaves, most blacks in the South had been forced to become sharecroppers and tenant farmers. They were dependent on white landowners and enslaved all over again, this time by debt.

The ordeal of sharecropping was crushing. After months of labor, at the end of the harvest season tenant farmers were often disappointed to find themselves deeper in debt. They were politically free but in economic bondage, with no hope of getting ahead and owning their own land:

Where I come from

folks work hard

all their lives

until they die

and never own no part

of earth nor sky.

Meanwhile, they were pulled to the North. World War I, which had begun in Europe in 1914, had cut off the flow of European immigrants into the United States. This created tremendous labor shortages in the nation’s industries. Factories, mills, and workshops that had once refused to hire black workers now sent labor recruiters to the South to sign them up.

Southern blacks jumped at this opportunity. Whole trainloads of them set out for the North, drawn by the offer of better work and better wages. One black worker told a reporter, “The best wages I could make [in Georgia] was $1.25 or $1.50 a day. I went to work at a dye house in Newark, N.J., at $2.75 a day, with a rent-free room to live in. The company paid my fare North.”

Like Mexican immigrants, African Americans were following the jobs. Those who went North sent home glowing reports about work. A South Carolina newspaper described the good fortune of a young man from a Greenwood County farm who had gone north to work for twenty-five dollars a week: “He came home last week to assist his people on the farm and brought more than one hundred dollars and plenty of nice clothes. He gave his mother fifty dollars, and put fifty dollars in the Greenwood bank and had some pocket change left.”

But something more was happening among blacks in the South, something that went deeper than economics. The generation that had been freed from slavery was dying out, and so were the habits that slavery had bred into that generation: habits of giving way to whites, of accepting their “place” in society. Southern whites lamented that the humble, polite, and courteous blacks they had known were disappearing. In their place a new generation of blacks was rising.

The New Generation

In place of the old-time former slaves, the South now had younger African Americans who had been born after the Civil War and had never known slavery. Unlike the older generation, this new generation did not feel the lingering power of the master-slave relationship. Whites complained that the younger blacks were “discontented and wanted to be roaming.” They wanted to see something of the world.

Most of the blacks who moved North belonged to the generations that arose after the Civil War. In addition to the higher wages they expected to earn in the North, these African Americans also hoped to escape the racial violence and prejudice of the South, to find a place where they could claim some dignity. A black-owned newspaper called the Chicago Defender spelled out the need for African Americans to come north for the sake of their safety and self-respect:

Why stay in the South, 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?

Freed from the shadow of slavery, young blacks could imagine new possibilities for themselves in the North. By 1930, about two million of them had migrated to the cities of the North. Their freedom had been given to them by the North in the Civil War, but their migration was their own choice.

African American Chicago

Chicago was a major destination of the African American blacks. The fast-growing industries of this midwestern city were creating jobs and actively inviting blacks to fill them. It was easy for southern blacks to get to Chicago, too. The Illinois Central Railroad connected the city to the small towns of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

In 1900, Chicago’s black population numbered 30,000. Twenty years later, it had jumped to 109,000, concentrated in the mostly black neighborhoods of the city’s South Side. This rapid increase in the black population sparked an explosion of white resistance.

White citizens formed organizations to pressure real estate agents not to sell houses to blacks. They also urged white property owners not to sell or rent to blacks. A leader of this movement declared, “The districts which are now white must remain white. There will be no compromise.”

The conflict over housing increased during World War I as blacks flocked to fill jobs in Chicago’s war-related industries. In 1917 the Chicago Real Estate Board announced that southern blacks were “pouring into Chicago at the rate of ten thousand a month.”

Workplaces also became racial battlegrounds. In 1910 about half of all working blacks were employed in service jobs: servants, laundresses, janitors, and waiters. The war created a sharp demand for labor and opened new opportunities in industry. By 1920 the majority of black men and 15 percent of black women worked at factory jobs rather than service jobs. For the first time in their lives, these young African American men and women were working in industries and making what they considered good wages.

Managers deliberately hired black workers to undermine the union activities of white workers. Company owners hired a black man named Richard Parker to set up a black union, the American Unity Labor Union. Although Parker appeared to be working to promote African American interests, in reality he was paid by the white business owners to pit black workers against whites, so that blacks would not join the white union. It was the old strategy of divide and control again. By keeping black and white workers from uniting, management kept both groups from reaching their full strength.

Parker urged black workers not to trust the whites and to sign up only with the black union. The strategy worked. When a white union called the Stockyards Labor Council opened the door to black members, its offer was rejected.

Racial tension in the workplace added fuel to conflicts in the neighborhoods. In 1917 the homes of several black families were bombed. White gangs attacked blacks in the streets and parks, murdering several men. Race hatred exploded into a riot after a young black man drowned when he floated into the “whites only” section of a public beach. Frustrated because the police made no arrest, blacks attacked whites. White gangs then began beating blacks, and violence between the races raged for days. By the time the rioting ended, twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites were dead, and 342 blacks and 178 whites were injured.

African Americans in Chicago responded to racism by depending on themselves. Black ministers and community leaders called for people to start their own shops, banks, and insurance companies. Blacks, they said, should rent from other blacks and spend their dollars on goods made and sold by African Americans.

Black Pride in Harlem

The other major destination of the African American migrants was New York City, home of Harlem, a neighborhood that was sometimes called the “Negro Capital of the World.”

Blacks had lived in Harlem since the seventeenth century, when they were the slaves of Dutch colonists in North America. In 1790, not long after the United States won its independence, a third of Harlem’s population was black. Over the years, though, the African American presence there grew smaller. By 1890 Harlem was a wealthy, mostly white neighborhood—and then the black migration from the South changed it again.

Just as the migration started, a housing boom in Harlem collapsed, leaving a large number of apartments empty. Black real estate agents leased these apartments from the white landlords and then rented them to black tenants at a profit. In this way Harlem began to become a black neighborhood again, in spite of residents who tried to keep African Americans out, just as they had done in Chicago.

In 1914 about 50,000 blacks lived in Harlem. During the 1920s more than 118,000 whites left the neighborhood, and more than 87,000 blacks moved in. Harlem had become the home of more than two-thirds of all the African Americans who lived in Manhattan.

Soon, however, Harlem was overcrowded. Living conditions grew worse as landlords neglected the upkeep of their properties. Tenants complained about broken pipes, leaking roofs, and rats. Yet discrimination made it difficult for blacks to move to other parts of the city, so they were forced to remain in Harlem, paying higher and higher rents.

High rents were a burden to African American tenants because most of them worked in low-paying menial or service jobs. Some black women worked in the garment industry, but the majority was employed as domestic servants. Some men were longshoremen or teamsters, but many were janitors, elevator operators, and waiters.

Despite crowded living conditions and poor wages, African Americans in Harlem felt a surge of power and a sense of pride. They were inspired to create a community that became more than just a place to live. To black intellectuals, Harlem became what poet Langston Hughes called the center of the “New Negro Renaissance.”

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The Renaissance Casino ballroom in Harlem, New York City, 1927.

Black poets like Hughes, novelists like Jean Toomer, painters like Jacob Lawrence, and musicians like Cab Calloway were attracted to Harlem, a community that reflected a vision of black pride and creativity. Drawing their inspiration from black people’s lives, history, and culture, Harlem’s black intellectuals created a literature that rebelled against mainstream, white-dominated, middle-class America.

Part of the New Negro movement was the search for identity that Hughes revealed in his poetry. He asked whether he belonged to Africa or to “Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem.” Like other African Americans, he was struggling to create a sense of himself that was both African and American.

The Great Depression

By the late 1920s, Harlem had become a slum, the home of poor people desperately clinging to dreams. The Harlem Renaissance, with its cabarets, its swinging jazz, and its literary successes, hid much of the ghetto’s squalor. Then came the stock market crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression that lingered for most of a decade. The shattering of the economy revealed the grim reality behind the glamorous image of Harlem.

African Americans everywhere fell into deeper poverty. Despite the great migration to the North, most American blacks still lived in the South in the 1930s, growing cotton as tenant farmers and sharecroppers for white farmers. Their livelihoods crumpled along with the stock market. When blacks moved to cities in search of work, they were met by angry out-of-work whites shouting against the hiring of African Americans.

By 1932 more than half of all blacks in southern cities were unemployed. The unemployment rate for blacks in northern cities was similar. Black employees were the first to be fired when times got tough. One study found that the proportion of unemployed blacks was 30 to 60 percent greater than that of whites. Many desperate families, unable to afford apartments or groceries, lived in cellars and foraged in garbage cans for food.

Federal aid programs for people in distress forced African Americans to take a backseat. White farmers and workers received higher rates of support than blacks. This crisis led to debate among black Americans about their future.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the nation’s leading black historian and scholar and a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had long pushed for integration, an end to racial separation. During the hardship of the Great Depression, however, he suggested that African Americans should practice voluntary, temporary segregation, banding together and helping one another, doing business only with one another, forming a black nation within the United States. The NAACP harshly criticized this idea, calling instead for a movement that would “unite all labor, white and black, skilled and unskilled, agricultural and industrial.”

Blacks had indeed begun to enter industrial employment and the big national labor unions. In 1933 the United Mine Workers led a campaign to bring black workers into the union, and the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) soon did the same. In the auto industry, the United Auto Workers urged blacks to join, pledging that the union was against racial discrimination. These achievements did not mean the end of racism among white workers, but they showed that solidarity across racial lines was essential for workers who were struggling against management in a time of economic crisis.

Meanwhile, Democratic politicians recognized the size and potential power of the black vote. They began addressing the needs of blacks. In response, blacks started to abandon the Republican Party—the party of Abraham Lincoln, who had freed the slaves—in favor of the Democratic Party. Black Americans were becoming politically important, but their advances in labor and politics were soon swept up, along with much else, in the international currents of World War II.