The Great Migration

Highlight what challenges African Americans face as they fled their home in the South
in one color?” Highlight what challenges they faced once in the North in another?”

Several factors caused one of the largest population shifts in the country's history.

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" that limited the vote to those
whose grandfathers were registered voters.

Intimidation and outright violence were also used not only to keep blacks from voting, but also to control and terrorize it.
At least two to three people were lynched every week. People were horribly tortured and mutilated for hours in front of
huge crowds that included women and children.

The decision to pull up one's long planted roots and journey into the unknown is not easily made. For southern migrants,
it was a balancing act. Serious questions had to be answered: How bad is it here? How good is it there? Who in the
family will make the journey? How will those left behind be cared for? How much will it cost? Where will I live?
As reports spread of job opportunities that existed in the North, the workers' situation began to change.

Every possible method was used to draw the black labor from the South. Labor agents from northern companies stood
on street corners offering train passes to the young, male, and strong. It soon sparked a migration fever. Black
newspapers carried job advertisements touting good wages and other advantages of living in the North. They also
published success stories about recent migrants already making more money than they had ever dreamed possible.
Their letters confirming success were read out in churches, barbershops, and meeting halls. Southerners soaked up all
the information available: Was this real? Would they pay? What was it like up North?

The journey north was made by train, boat, bus, sometimes car, and even horse-drawn cart. It was most often a long
and difficult 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. Fares were expensive, deterring
many would-be migrants from making the trip. Regular passenger fares - 2¢ per mile in 1915 - skyrocketed within three
years to 24¢ a mile.

Prospective migrants financed their tickets by selling all their possessions. When that was not enough, families pooled
their resources to send one member. With the breadwinner gone north, other family members had to support themselves
until the migrant made good.

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, Chicago's by 148 percent, Philadelphia's by
500 percent. Detroit experienced an amazing growth rate of 611 percent.
In the Motor City, 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.

Besides the white-black competition for jobs, there was also white-black competition for homes. Prior to the migration,
African Americans were often isolated in small clusters in several city neighborhoods. There they lived in relative
invisibility. But soon white opposition effectively closed neighborhoods to black newcomers, thereby creating ghettos.
On a single day in Chicago, real-estate brokers had over six hundred black families applying for housing, with only fifty-
three units available. When the migrants did find housing accommodations, they were usually run-down and barely
livable. Landlords maximized their profits by dividing larger units, with no alterations, into several tiny flats. Black
neighborhoods became seriously overcrowded as a result.

The combination of overcrowding, poverty, and 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. Working long, hard hours in badly ventilated spaces, coming home to equally unhealthy
conditions, getting insufficient rest and nutrition made migrants particularly vulnerable to many infectious illnesses.
African Americans death rates were consistently higher than those of whites. Children were even more at risk. A
shocking number died before the age of ten; more than a quarter of these succumbed before their first birthday. The
mortality rate for black infants was twice that of white babies. The deaths soared during the steamy summer months in
overcrowded slums.

The first years of the Great Migration would see an unprecedented wave of mob violence sweep the nation. Twenty-six
race riots - in cities large and small, North and South - would claim the lives many African Americans. But the migrants
did not instigate this bloody wave of lawlessness; it was, in most cases, directed at them.

The so-called Red Summer of 1919 actually began two years earlier in East St. Louis, Illinois, in July 1917. It was the
only one of the battles to be directly linked to racial conflict in the workplace, but white workers' fear of job competition
was likely behind all of them. The East St. Louis riot began after African-American workers were hired to break a strike at
an aluminum plant. A group of white workers met with the mayor and demanded that black migration to the town be
stopped. As they left the meeting, they were told that a black man had accidentally shot a white man during a holdup. In
a few minutes, the rumor spread that the shooting was intentional and involved an insulted white woman, then white
girls.

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 generally into homes.
Before the rampage ended, forty-eight African Americans were dead, hundreds injured, and more than three hundred
buildings destroyed.
Chicago's turn came on July 27, 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. A crowd
of blacks and whites gathered at the scene. When a black man was arrested on a white's complaint while a white man,
identified by black witnesses as a suspect, was not, blacks attacked the arresting white officer and the riot was under
way. The violence was confined mainly to the south side of the city, where 90 percent of the African-American population
lived.

In the course of several days of rioting, both blacks and whites were 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.
Although the other riots during that terrible summer varied in ferocity, it was made abundantly clear that race mattered
very much in urban America.

Though they faced discrimination, exclusion, and violence, African-American migrants never stopped moving forward. In
1890, 63 percent of all black male laborers worked in agriculture. By 1930, only 42 percent 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.