Nationwide, bringing in black replacement workers was a common tactic of management in the bitter labor battles of the era. In Chicago, black strikebreakers were used to defeat stockyard strikes in 1894 and in 1904. Blacks were physically assaulted in both strikes, and at least one black worker was killed in 1904. But it was a teamsters’ strike in 1905 that seared the link between blacks and strikebreakers into the consciousness of Chicago whites, and led to blacks being referred to contemptuously as “a scab race.” The strike lasted more than three months and labor violence spilled over into the city as a whole. In the early weeks, blacks were recruited and transported to Chicago by the trainload. And as they tried to go to work at plants or deliver milk, coal, ice, and other commodities, they were attacked, beaten, shot, and stabbed. The city council, fearing a widespread riot, hotly debated the question of “whether the importation of hundreds of Negro workers is not a menace to the community and should not be restricted,” and the employers’ association agreed to stop bringing in black strikebreakers but refused to discharge those already working.
“You have the Negroes in here to fight us,” the president of the teamsters union told the employers’ association, “and we answer that we have the right to attack them wherever found.” Not only strikebreakers but ordinary blacks were attacked in the streets, particularly in a white working-class neighborhood bordering what was becoming the Black Belt on Chicago’s South Side. Even schoolchildren joined in the attacks, gathering by the hundreds to throw rocks at scabs.7
Blacks fought back, some of them with guns. After two black strikebreakers leaving work fired into a jeering crowd and killed an eleven-year-old white boy, enraged whites stormed black neighborhoods, and met armed black resistance. Black men were dragged off of streetcars and beaten, and a white bartender killed a black man in a saloon brawl. For a week, blacks and whites fought in the streets of Chicago. By the end of the strike, almost twenty people, black and white, had been killed, and more than four hundred seriously injured.
The period was also marked by violence against blacks in the smaller cities of downstate Illinois, where antiblack bigotry was flavored by a sometimes deceptively bucolic racial climate. The farming and mining country of southern Illinois was geographically and culturally closer to the South than it was to the burgeoning industrial giant of Chicago. What that could mean for unwary blacks was demonstrated graphically in 1908 by the riot in Springfield discussed in the previous chapter and in 1909 by a lurid racial murder in Cairo, a cotton port at the southern tip of the Little Egypt region of Illinois, where the Mississippi meets the Ohio. Cairo and environs differed little in racial attitudes from Jackson or Natchez or Baton Rouge. An accusation that a black man had raped and murdered a white woman triggered a day of violence. The accused rapist was wrestled from custody, dragged down the main street of Cairo by a rope around his neck and hanged from a steel lamppost. According to Ida Wells-Barnett, who came down from her home in Chicago in the immediate aftermath of the lynching, five hundred bullets were fired into the body. Some of the bullets severed the rope and the body fell to the ground. Wells-Barnett wrote, “The body was taken near to the place where the corpse of the white girl had been found. Here they cut off his head, stuck it on a fence post, built a fire around the body and burned it to a crisp.” Later that evening, the mob, still thirsty for vigilante justice, broke into the city jail and lynched a white man who had been accused of murdering his wife.8
Photographs of the carnival atmosphere that surrounded the lynching of the black man in Cairo were widely circulated on a popular set of picture postcards.
By 1910, St. Louis had grown to a population of 687,000 people, about 44,000 of them black. Its growth was slowing somewhat. Chicago, with 2,185,000 people, had long ago overtaken the old riverboat city and become the commercial capital of the Midwest. But St. Louis remained the fourth-largest city in America. Across the Mississippi, East St. Louis grew too, and by the 1910 census it had about fifty-eight thousand residents, most of them blue-collar workers and their families. Blacks made up about 10 percent of the population. Within five years, the black population of East St. Louis had increased to about seventy-nine hundred people—about 11 percent of the total. Then America’s first great black migration began in earnest.9
On August 4, 1914, Germany marched into Belgium to begin the Great War, and while American industrial plants ratcheted up their output to supply the European armies, immigration slowed sharply, and hundreds of thousands of European immigrants went back home to fight for their countries of birth, leaving jobs open in plants across the country.
At the same time, the boll weevil, which had crossed the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas, in 1892 and steadily marched to the north and the east, was devastating cotton crops in much of Mississippi and parts of Alabama. Also, mechanization was eliminating much agricultural handwork, and many thousands of Southern blacks, sharecroppers, and hired hands alike found themselves out of work.
Then came the severe floods of 1916, and the migration from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta became an exodus. “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,” said one black Southern observer.10 There were jobs to be had in cities of the North, Southern blacks were told, and not just by the labor agents for employers who took trainloads of blacks north every week from Southern cities. Thousands of blacks who had already made the trek to Northern cities sent cards and letters to their relatives and friends down home telling them that life was better in the North. And the black newspaper the Chicago Defender, widely circulated in the South, regularly ran stories and advertisements promoting the opportunities for black workers in Chicago, Detroit, and other Northern cities, including St. Louis and East St. Louis.
The Chicago Defender was founded in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, a deceptively mild-mannered, Georgia-born preacher’s stepson who, as a young man visiting the Chicago World’s Fair, had been inspired by the fiery speeches of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells. Abbott’s slogan was “American race prejudice must be destroyed.” He vowed that “education of the race is our job,” and he was not afraid to take strong and even comparatively radical editorial positions. He called for all trade unions to open their membership to blacks, for blacks to be represented in the presidential cabinet and in all police forces across America, and for all public schools to be open to African Americans. Like any number of black leaders before him—and long after him—he also called for federal antilynching legislation.11
As the Defender evolved and its circulation grew, the paper became a feisty mixture of heart-warmers about the accomplishments of blacks in the North and shockers about the mistreatment of blacks across the country, particularly in the South. Stories on black heroes like boxer Jack Johnson and coverage of the black struggle for justice were mixed with such mainstays of commercial journalism as obituaries, want ads, comics, and cartoons. The paper really took off, not just in Chicago but nationally, in 1910 when Abbott brought aboard a flamboyant, alcoholic managing editor named J. Hockley Smiley who ran sensationalist stories with headlines in red ink, headlines like:
100 NEGROES MURDERED WEEKLY IN
UNITED STATES BY WHITE AMERICANS
There were many real atrocities to report, and Smiley splashed them across the front page after the white press ignored or downplayed them. On slow weeks, a former Defender reporter once recalled, Smiley relied on his imagination, which produced “lynchings, rapes, assaults, mayhems and sundry ‘crimes’ against innocent Negroes in the hinterlands of the South, often in towns not to be found on any map extant.”12
Abbott set up a distribution network in the South through Pullman car porters, dining car waiters, and touring black entertainers and ballplayers. And later, working through black ministers in the South, he established “agent-correspondents,” who both distributed the paper and reported local news in dozens and eventually hundreds of
Southern cities and towns. The circulation rose dramatically. In 1915, the Defender, which had begun the size of a handbill, switched from a tabloid format and became an eight-column broadsheet. The Defender had become America’s most successful black newspaper. By 1920 the paper’s nationwide circulation had risen to more than two hundred thousand, and the paper claimed a readership of more than one million, probably not an inflated figure. The Defender was passed from hand to hand until it was worn and torn, and read aloud in barbershops and churches and other meeting places. Two thirds of the circulation was outside of the city limits of Chicago, and although the bulk of those readers were in the South, still home of almost nine out of ten black Americans, the paper’s reach was truly nationwide. The Defender sold twenty-three thousand copies every week in New York City alone.
Abbott was a great admirer of Booker T. Washington—the entire front page of the November 14, 1915, edition was devoted to a giant headline announcing Washington’s death—but he disagreed with Washington’s advice to Southern blacks to “cast down their buckets” where they stood. Abbott advised, with tempered optimism, the opposite, “Come North, where there is more humanity, some justice and fairness.”13
The Defender became a powerful engine in the Great Migration that began in the years of the First World War. Carl Sandburg, in his Chicago Daily News column, wrote in 1919 that “the Defender more than any one agency was the big cause of the ‘northern fever’ and the big exodus from the south.” Abbott relentlessly urged Southern blacks to move to the “Promised Land”—Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities of the North where underpaid, hungry Southern blacks “could get the wrinkles out of their bellies and live like men.” The Defender, and the black press in general, were very important in the black community and held considerable power to sway readers, particularly in the South, where, with the exception of the church, all the major institutions of life—the courts, the political system, the daily newspapers—were controlled by whites and almost inevitably were hostile or at best indifferent to blacks. After the Defender ran an ambitious series of stories detailing how much better blacks were treated in the North than in the South, the Chicago Urban League, which helped African Americans find jobs and places to live, received an extraordinary 940 letters from blacks who wanted to move North.14
The power of the Defender in the black community did not go unnoticed by whites. In a cruel reminder of the Redemption period in the South, the Ku Klux Klan had been revived in 1915 and was riding through the South and the lower Midwest, flogging, branding, and lynching blacks and terrorizing whites who were insufficiently racist. These crimes were ignored or given minor play in most white newspapers, while the Defender reported them in detail. Alarmed, white public officials across the South declared the Defender a menace to public order and confiscated copies as soon as they appeared in town. In response, the paper encouraged readers to subscribe and receive the paper by mail. In some areas of the Deep South, the Defender set up an underground distribution network, shipping the paper into town hidden in other merchandise.
Distributors were assaulted by members of the Klan and other racist groups and their papers were destroyed. In one incident that was far from unique, Klansmen told a black woman in Yazoo City, Mississippi, they would kill her if she didn’t stop distributing the paper. She was forced to leave town. Such threats and assaults were duly reported in the Defender, and in the long run only added to the reasons for blacks to leave the South.15
As crowds of migrants headed North, daily newspapers in the South tried to counter the influence of the Defender by running reports from Northern cities about mobs of ill-clad blacks, shoeless and hungry, shivering on the icy sidewalks and begging for money for train fare back to the Land of Cotton. The Defender responded that it was cold in the South too—particularly for people too poor to afford winter heat—and ran a series of stories about blacks literally dying of the cold in Southern winters, stories with headlines like the one on a report out of Atlanta in February:
NEGRO WOMAN FROZE TO DEATH MONDAY
The Defender concluded that report by saying, “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 son are treated with contempt and hung to a pole, riddled with bullets at the least mention that he does not like the way he has been treated? Come North, then, all of you folks … For the hard working man there is plenty of work—if you really want it! The Defender says come!”16
They came.
Also promoting northward emigration was the Illinois Central Railroad, which had bought railroad lines through the Mississippi Delta in the 1890s and offered special weekend excursion rates and group discounts for tickets from the Delta to Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, East St. Louis, and other midwestern cities, providing the infrastructure for much of the extensive black exodus to the North Central states of the early decades of the twentieth century.17
Between 1910 and 1920, at least half a million blacks moved North, the great majority of them—four hundred thousand or more—in the second half of the decade. Previously, the majority of the black emigrants had gone to New York, Philadelphia, and other eastern cities and towns. This time, more and more blacks from the Deep South were riding the railroad lines due north to the rapidly growing industrial cites of the Great Lakes, Cleveland, Detroit, and especially Chicago, as well as to St. Louis, East St. Louis, Indianapolis, and the smaller industrial cities of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The immigrants to the Midwest came in the main from the beleaguered cotton states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, and it is not coincidental that those were the states with the harshest Jim Crow laws and the worst record on lynching and other forms of brutality against blacks.18
According to the conservative figures of the U.S. Census Bureau, while the black populations of New York and Philadelphia increased by roughly 60 to 65 percent from 1910 to 1920, the black population of Chicago went up 148 percent, from about 44,000 to more than 109,000. Detroit, which had a black population of only about 5,700 in 1910, saw the number soar more than sevenfold to almost 41,000 by 1920 as the city’s automakers grew rapidly and began hiring blacks. And Cleveland’s black population rose from about 8,000 to about 34,000.19
Many thousands of the immigrants to the North were lured by offers of jobs on the railroads. For decades in the South, the roughest work on railways—the laying and replacing of tracks and maintenance of rail yards—had been done mainly by blacks, with many miles of tracks in the pre–Civil War South laid by teams of Irish immigrants and slaves owned by the railroads. After emancipation, track crews on Southern railroads were predominantly black. After World War I began, in order to fill openings created by increased shipping and the departure of large numbers of immigrants, Northern railroads openly recruited crews of trackmen in the South. Labor agents from Northern cities, including the major rail hub of East St. Louis, made weekly hiring trips to Southern cities. Public officials became alarmed at the weekly departures of carloads of young black men headed for railroad work up North, with their friends and families crowding train stations to see them off, and passed laws restricting the activities of labor-recruiting agents, or rediscovered old laws dating back to the fight against Reconstruction.
In early August of 1916, two entire trainloads of men—about one thousand black laborers—set off from Union Station in Savannah, Georgia, for track-maintenance jobs in Pennsylvania. In response, the city council of Savannah created a license fee of $1,000 for agents who sent workers out of state. Later that year, the city arrested hundreds of blacks at the station on trumped-up charges, inspiring W. E. B. Du Bois to remark in the Crisis, “All the slave catching machinery of the South is being put into motion to stop migration.”20
As they saw their work force heading North, some Southern employers raised wages and made other concessions to induce blacks to stay. An observer for the U.S. Departm
ent of Labor reported, “Negroes remaining in the South are being given a consideration never before accorded them … Owing to the scarcity of labor, a Georgia farmer near Albany this year laid aside his whip and gun, with which it is reported he is accustomed to drive his hands, and begged for laborers.”21
Beginning early in 1916, steel mills and other large Northern employers added to the exodus by offering free transportation to blacks who wanted to work in the North. The result, an observer recalled, was “like the gold fever in ’49.” The muckraking Chicago journalist Ray Stannard Baker, among the first white reporters to cover the African American community extensively, reported that, in the spring of 1916, “trains were backed into southern cities and hundreds of Negroes were gathered up in a day, loaded into the cars and whirled away to the North … Negro teamsters left their horses standing in the streets or deserted their jobs and went to the trains without notifying their employers or even going home.”22
No matter where they ended up, the great majority of the black migrants found themselves, at best, with low-paying, menial jobs. For example, Carnegie, the Pittsburgh steel giant, employed about fifteen hundred blacks before 1916. By the summer of 1917, the number had swollen to more than four thousand, but only ninety-five of them were doing skilled labor.23
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