The Great Migration

1. The Great Migration Professor Nora Faires Western Michigan University Teaching American History Flint, Michigan 25 June 2008

2. James Weldon Johnson, Historian and writer,1930: Migrants came north in thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands - from the docks of Norfolk, Savannah, Jacksonville, Tampa, Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston: from the cotton fields of Mississippi, and the coal mines and steel-mills of Alabama and Tennessee; from workshops and wash-tubs and brickyards and kitchens they came, until the number, by conservative estimate, went well over the million and a half mark.“ (Black Manhattan)

3. Organization of the Session • Overview • Overall causes and Motivations for the Great Migration(s) • Chronology • Scope and Scale: How many? Where from? Where to ? • Consequences • Sources • Discussion

4. Organization, ctd. • Closer Looks • Images, Texts, Voices • Discussion • Bringing the Great Migration to the Classroom and Students • An Artist of the Great Migration: Jacob Lawrence

5. Overview • Overall Causes • The Economic Explanation • “Labor Migration”: balancing the demand for labor in the industrializing, urbanizing areas with the declining rural South • Northern and Great Lakes states, later Far West, require workers; Southern states shed excess population from farms and towns • people use nearby transportation routes to reach destinations thought to be booming

6. Economic Explanation, ctd. --demand for “internal migrants” increases with: • economic upswings in North, Midwest, and West, especially during WWI and WWII • decline in immigration, especially during WWI and with immigration restriction act of 1924 • worsening conditions in the South, especially with the effects of the boll weevil, drought • demand for “internal migrants” decreases when Depression hits (1929-mid 1930s)

7. Beyond Economic Causes • Difference between “causes” and “motivations” for migration • Importance of understanding context of individuals, families, communities • Examine ambitions, aspirations, skills, education, and experiences of migrants • Understand the role of kin and other social networks • For Black Southerners: Jim Crow

8. Charles S. JohnsonSociologist, 1923 “Persecution plays its part.” --from his study of the reasons for Southern blacks heading North

9. 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 --Langston Hughes, One Way Ticket (1949);

10. Terms: Types of Migration • Return Migration • Circular Migration • Chain Migration • Career Migration • “Diaspora” Great Migration involves all these forms.

11. Taking a Look at the Numbers Data from tables in: James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America

12. Scope of the Great Migration:Number of Blacks Leaving Southby Decade • 1900-10 204,000 1980-90 603,000 • 1910-20 437,000 1990-2000 516,000 • 1920-30 811,000 • 1930-40 392,000 Total, 1900-2000: • 1940-50 1,447,000 7,882,000 • 1950-60 1,106,000 • 1960-70 813,000 • 1970-80 1,553,000

13. 20th-Century Southern Diaspora Total Numbers Leaving the South, 1900-2000 Blacks: 7,882,000 Whites: 19,584,000 Hispanics: 1,143,000

14. States with Large Numbers of Southern Black Migrants,1970 New Jersey 231,000 New York 567,000 Illinois 452,000 Indiana 119,000 Michigan 358,000 Missouri 126,000 Ohio 321,000 California 571,000

15. Regional and Racial Differences • Rural South has two main zones: • “Outer South”: • more mixed economy of general farming • some extractive industries (mining, lumber, fishing, oil) • located in arc from West Virginia through Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas • mostly white

16. Regional Differences, ctd. • Lower South • more devoted to cotton • some 600 counties stretching from the Carolinas to East Texas • heart is the rich lands of Mississippi and Alabama • “black belt” • mostly home to African Americans

17. Chronology • First Phase • begins around 1900, as Black sharecroppers, tenants, small landowners leave Southern farms, many looking to continue farming • accelerates with WWI and demand in urban and industrial centers: 3 million factory and transport jobs; demand for domestic service • continues to grow in 1920s with good times in North and Midwest; boll weevil,mechanization, and increased discrimination in South • families, single people, women, men • some among “best and brightest”

18. Chronology, ctd. • Depression: Interlude of 1930s • First phase of Great Migration showed many similarities in Black and white patterns • but whites more likely to go West, especially to California • 1930s: drought hits the Plains—”Dust Bowl” • New Deal policies do little for most Southerners • “Okies”: Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma hard hit • some “return migration” for Blacks and more for whites

19. Chronology, ctd. • Second Phase • 1940s through1960s • begins with build up for WWII and continues through US economic heyday of 1950s-60 • ebbs with slowdown in industrial North and Midwest; boom in South and Southwest • especially large migration to California and Far West, for Blacks and whites • includes some Native Americans leaving reservations • diverse migration

20. Chronology, ctd. • Second Phase, ctd. --drawn from remaining farms, rural areas, towns, smaller and larger cities • importance of chain migration, newspapers,labor recruitment, better transportation (rail and car), military service • “brain drain” accelerates • context of growing opposition to Jim Crow and increasing demand for civil rights, and heightened racial conflict

21. Chronology, ctd. • Post-Diaspora • by 1970, period of great outpouring from the South has ended • most Southern states become destinations for migration • 1965 to 1970: 700,000 more people move to South than leave; rate increases after 1970 • growth of the Sun Belt, attracting migrants from across the US • many Southern-born Blacks or their children return to the South, especially in the 1990s

22. Rates of Return Migration(ratio of Returnees/Migrants)Blacks Whites • 1935-40 .20 .30 • 1955-60 .22 .54 • 1965-70 .34 .78 • 1975-80 .76 .98 • 1985-90 .95 .75 • 1995-2000 1.32 .85

23. Important Sources In preparing this presentation I have drawn from numerous sources. See especially: • James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) • JamesGrossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

24. Important Sources, continued • Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945 ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1999). • for a local focus, see Rhonda Sanders, Bronze Pillars: An Oral History of African Americans in Flint (Flint: Alfred P. Sloan Museum and Flint Journal, 1995).

25. Key Websites • For James Gregory’s book: http://faculty.washington.edu/gregoryj/diaspora/index.htm • For a brief overview by James Grossman of Chicago and the Great Migration, including suggestions for lesson plans: http://www.lib.niu.edu/1996/iht329633.html

26. Key Websites, continued • Library of Congress American Memory Project: African American Odyssey: • http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaphtml • Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—In Motion: The African American Experience • http://www.inmotionaame.org/home

27. Key Websites, continued History Matters: The U.S. Survey on the Web http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5332 Includes: "Sir I Will Thank You with All My Heart"Seven Letters from the Great Migration Seven letters to the Chicago Defender— a black newspaper published in Chicago that strongly urged southern blacks to migrate North—attest to migrants' strong desire to “better their condition,” often risking their lives and possessions to make the trip north.

28. Key Websites, continuedThe Blues—The Music of the Great Migration http://www.pbs.org/theblues/classroom/defmigration.html Langston Hughes: Artist and Historian by Medria Blue Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute: http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1996/1/96.01.02.x.html

29. Closer Looks Images, Texts, and Voices of the Great Migration

30. Work in the fields of the Cotton Belt

31. Workers in a Cotton Field, 1929

32. A Southern family, c. 1920

33. Tobacco Workers in a Southern Factory

34. Life in the Rural South When wages were paid, they averaged about 75¢ a day before World War I. A minister from Alabama commented, "The Negro farm hand gets his compensation hardly more than the mule he plows; that is his board and shelter. Some mules fare better than Negroes."

35. Separate Facilities as a way of life (1908)

36. Afamily prepares to leave the South.

37. Robert Abbott, founder and first editor of Chicago Defender

38. Sample Letter to the Chicago Defender Sirs: Noticing and ad in Chicago Defender of your assitance to those desiring employment there I thought I mayhaps you could help me secure work in your Windy City. I’m a married man have one child. I have common school education, this is my hand write. I am presently employed as a miner has been for 14 years but would like a Change. I’m apt to learn would like to get where I could go on up and support myself and family. You know more about it than I but in your opinion could I make anything as pullman porter being inexsperienced? I’d be so grateful to U. to place me in something I’ve worked myself too hard for nothing. I’m sober and can adjust my life with any kind and am a quiet christian man. * * * NEW ORLEANS, April 22, 1917

39. Ad in the Chicago Defender, 1917

40. Pullman Porters, 1917: connecting the South to the North and West

41. Segregated Waiting Room, Jacksonville, Florida,1921

42. Typical Rail Fares, 1918 Norfolk to Pittsburgh: • 1 adult: $8.00 • Family of six: $ 48.00 New Orleans to Chicago: • 1 adult: $ 22.50 • Family of six: $ 90.00

43. A 1909 investigation of Southern life compares blacks to immigrants arriving from Europe

44. Arrivals at Ellis Island, c. 1912

45. A Southern family arriving in Chicago during World War I.

46. Violence and the First Phase of the Great Migration Between 1889 and 1932, over 3,700 people were lynched in the United States. More than 85 percent of these lynchings were of blacks living in the South.

47. Torture and Killing near Waco, Texas, 1916

48. The Southwestern Christian Advocate, an African-American newspaper; April 26, 1917: "[S]ome months ago Anthony Crawford, a highly respectable, honest and industrious Negro, with a good farm and holdings estimated to be worth $300,000, was lynched in Abbeville, South Carolina. He was guilty of no crime. He would not be cheated out of his cotton. That was insolence. . . . [The mob] overpowered him and brutally lynched him. Is any one surprised that Negroes are leaving South Carolina by the thousands? The wonder is that any of them remain."

49. Billie Holiday sings “Strange Fruit”

50. World War I Veterans returning home