The Making of African America

by Ira Berlin

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, DuBois’s depiction of black Southerners as rural, agricultural peasants played out in infinite variations in literature, politics, and music. Visitors, contemporary social scientists, and later historians expanded on DuBois’s theme, reiterating that “the sight and sounds of the working of the South had changed but little, as if time had passed over the landscape. Generations of blacks inherited the same routines, the same provisions, the same houses, and same obligations, the same compensation.”84

  Yet what once stood still was about to move. In 1895, sensing the quakes that would again remake African American life, Booker T. Washington urged black people to “cast down [their] bucket” and remain in their ancestral home. Others added their own plea. Robert Abbott, a yet-unknown journalist, affirmed Washington’s call, declaring that “it is best ninety and nine percent of our people to remain in the southland.”85 They were, however, too late. Black life was about to change again. Abbott, as editor of the Chicago Defender, would become a ferocious advocate of Northern immigration. Blues men and women, who once sang about their native South, would soon add new themes to their repertoire. Songs of place would soon be replaced by songs of movement.86

  I’m goin’ to Detroit, get myself a good job,

  Tired of stayin’ ‘round here with the starvation mob.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Passage to the North

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, the epicenter of black life remained firmly located in the farms and plantations of the Deep South. The Northern black population—particularly in the cities—had received an influx of migrants in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, but although the proportional increase was large, the real increase remained small. Black Northerners totaled less than 10 percent of the nation’s nine million African Americans. A substantial number of black Southerners resided in the old seaboard states, the hilly interior, and the cities that ringed the South. However, the vast majority—some seven million black Americans—still lived in the rural South. Most of these could be found in the so-called black belt, a band of rich alluvial land that stretched from upcountry South Carolina across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to the Mississippi River, and then ran north and south along the banks of the great river. Having celebrated the freedom that accompanied wartime emancipation and the enfranchisement of Radical Reconstruction, black Southerners had seen their revolution run backward. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, rights were lost, freedoms shriveled, and opportunities dwindled. Ex-Confederates and their sympathizers—styling themselves “Redeemers”—regained their place atop Southern society, stripping black people of the suffrage and locking them in a position of economic dependency and social inferiority. While slavery was not reimposed, new forms of political domination and labor extraction emerged. For many black people, the weight of debt and the omnipresent threat of violence made escape all but impossible.

  Even at this desperate moment, black men and women were not without resources. Knit together by kin and community, black Southerners looked inward, drawing strength from their rooted communities. If legal ownership eluded most black Southerners, they had nonetheless made the land their own, so much so that the black belt originally named for the color of the soil had become identified with the color of the people who worked it. To many outsider observers, and to a generation of scholars, these black Southerners seemed a peasantry, tied to the land and governed by the timeless verities of soil and season that had endured since slave time. Their language, families, religion, music, and much else drew strength from the connections with the land. The sense of permanence was tangible.

  Then, amid seemingly endless commentaries on the immutability of African American life in the rural South, everything changed. Within a bit more than a half century—between 1915 and 1970—the black belt was depopulated as black tenants, sharecroppers, and laborers fled their old homes. By 1970, a near majority of black Americans resided in the North and the West, almost entirely in cities. Less than one black person in five remained on a Southern farm or plantation. The South had gone north and movement ousted place as the central feature of African American life. Yet again, black people began the reconstruction of their society.

  By midcentury, and sometimes before, the outline of the new society had taken hold. Black life no longer spoke with a rural drawl but to the quick beat of an urban tongue. Northern cities had become the dynamic center of African American society, generating wealth, creating leaders, and producing a way of life whose many manifestations were reflected in its music, to name just one important form of cultural expression. The spirituals morphed into gospel. The blues of the Delta developed an urban analog, and a new musical form with the unlikely name of jazz became a signature of African American culture.1

  The interplay of movement and place, which had taken African peoples across the Atlantic and then had taken African American peoples across the breadth of the American South, was repeated yet again. While the movement was different—voluntary rather than forced—and the place was different—urban rather than rural—the contrapuntal narrative of earlier centuries was easily recognizable.

  Contemporaries called the massive exodus of black people from the South the “Great Migration”; in fact, it was only the beginning of a third passage.2 It began with World War I and concluded in the decades following the end of World War II, and sent millions from the South to the North and from the countryside to the city. If greatness is measured by size, the Great Migration was great indeed. Between America’s entry into the European war and the stock market crash in 1929, black men and women left the South at an average rate of 500 per day, or more than 15,000 per month. The evacuation of the black belt was particularly striking. In 1910, more than 300,000 black people resided in the Alabama black belt. Ten years later, their numbers had declined to 255,000 and would continue to fall in the years that followed. By the end of the third decade of the twentieth century, when a massive economic depression slowed the movement north, a half million black people had abandoned the region of their birth. By 1930, more than 1.3 million resided outside the South, nearly triple the number at the turn of the century.3

  The flow of black migrants that began with the Great Migration slowed in the 1930s. Three of four black Americans stayed in the South, with most remaining in the countryside, and many commentators believed the northward movement had run its course. In fact the third passage had only begun to gain momentum. The impact of the third great migration had only begun to be felt.

  With the onset of World War II and the return of prosperity, black Southerners moved northward in ever-greater numbers, so that the midcentury migrations overwhelmed the earlier flight. The Great Migration would pale in comparison to the massive exodus that accompanied World War II and the postwar period. In 1940, still less than one-quarter of black Americans resided outside the South; that proportion would double by 1970, as the northward rush emptied portions of the rural South. The 1.5 million black migrants who departed the region during the 1940s more than equaled the sum total of those who had left the South during the previous three decades, and the migration continued in the decades that followed. Black men and women also headed west as well as north, as California particularly became a magnet for migrants from Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. The wave of immigrants did not stop with the return of peace. Instead, gathering speed with time, it continued unabated for another two decades. The three million black men and women who exited the South between 1940 and 1960 almost doubled the number who left between 1910 and 1930.4

  During the 1960s and 1970s, the exodus of black Southerners again slowed, and in the 1980s it reversed field. The number of black Northerners moving south increased from 100,000 between 1965 and 1970 to more than 300,000 between 1970 and 1975. The number increased sharply thereafter, as black people—for the first time in the twentieth century—were returning to the South in greater numbers than they were leaving. The growth of the bl
ack population residing in the North and West continued to slow, and the number of northward migrants declined for the rest of the century.5

  All totaled, between 1900 and 1970, some six million black men and women fled the Southern states.6 The proportion of black Americans residing in the South slipped from 93 percent in 1900 to 68 percent in 1950 and would fall again to 53 by 1970. In that year, about one-third of Southern-born black people resided in the North and some 70 percent of black Northerners had their origins in the Southern states.7

  The South had gone north. By the mid-twentieth century, the South had become the old country, much as Africa had become for black peoples transported across the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Virginia and South Carolina had become for those shipped across the continent in the nineteenth.

  This third passage not only transferred black people from south to north but also made urbanites out of country folk. While black Southerners moved to nearly every corner of the North, most settled in cities. The black population of Chicago grew from 44,000 in 1910 to 234,000 in 1930. Thirty years later it stood at nearly half a million. Black Detroit enjoyed an even more explosive growth, with the number of black residents increasing from about 6,000 in 1910 to 120,000 twenty years later. In 1950, it stood at over 300,000. A similar pattern could be found in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and a host of smaller cities from Hartford to Oakland. By 1960, almost three-quarters of the nation’s black population resided in cities, a proportion that was topped in the North, where fully 90 percent of black people lived in cities and generally in the largest ones. Seven metropoles (New York-Newark, Philadelphia-Camden, Chicago-Gary, Detroit-Cleveland, St. Louis, Los Angeles-Long Beach, and San Francisco-Oakland) housed two-thirds of the blacks residing outside the South. In 1900, the proportion of the American population living in cities was about half as great for black people as for white ones. At midcentury, the nation’s most rural people had become its most urban. Nearly all black Northerners (96 percent) and some 90 percent of black Westerners resided in cities. No group of Americans was more identified with urban life.8

  Northern cities also became blacker in progressions that were more geometric than arithmetic. Nearly everywhere, the influx of black immigrants far surpassed the growth of the white population, as restrictive legislation and war choked off European immigration and the lure of the suburbs drew white natives. While only 2 percent of Chicago’s population was black in 1910, black people totaled 6 percent in 1930, 14 percent in 1950, and 33 percent in 1970. Hardly more than 1 percent of Detroit’s population was black in 1910, but black Detroiters equaled some 8 percent in 1930 and over 16 percent twenty years later than that. At midcentury, black people comprised one-third or more of numerous Northern cities, and the black population was more urbanized than the white one. The plantation was becoming a distant memory for black Americans. The earthy connections to the land had all but disappeared. A peasantry became a proletariat.9

  This third great migration dwarfed all previous migrations of black people. It carried more than ten times the number transferred from Africa to mainland North America in the transatlantic slave trade and six times the number of those shipped from the seaboard South to the interior by continental slavers. Such a vast movement necessarily had many sources, which shifted over the course of the twentieth century and differed from place to place, as the velocity and vectors of the migration changed.10

  The original impetus, however, could be found at the end of the nineteenth century, when a small beetle invaded Texas and devastated the state’s cotton crop. As the boll weevil moved eastward to an even greater feast, the South’s cotton economy collapsed in the face of the massive infestation. Some planters turned to other crops. These were generally less labor intensive than cotton, and black workers found themselves ousted from their old homes. Meanwhile, the boll weevil continued on its way. When it retreated, disasters—natural and man made—pressed upon black agriculturalists, adding to the omnipresent burden of poverty and exploitation engineered by white planters to maintain a labor force that was readily available and cheap, if not always as compliant as they would like.

  The outbreak of war in Europe eliminated a most important market for Southern cotton and depressed prices. Even when the market revived, the boll weevil continued to make its presence felt. With no cotton to harvest and little hope that the next year’s crop would be better, black tenants and sharecroppers took to the road. Trying to stay one step ahead of the dreaded beetle, they moved from areas of infestation to those where the pest had yet to arrive. There they worked at a feverish pace, increasing cotton production in hopes of escaping debts accumulated as a result of previous crop failures. But these harvests, swollen by the workers’ extraordinary exertions, only drove prices down and further impoverished black workers.

  The entry of the United States into World War I offered opportunities to desperate men and women to remake their lives on new ground. The war created a severe labor shortage in the industrial North. European immigrants—the men and women who had stoked American industrial expansion for almost a century—could no longer cross the war-time Atlantic. Military conscription subtracted yet other white workingmen from the labor force and exacerbated the labor shortage. Taken together, the decline of European immigration and the escalation of the draft made room for black men in Northern factories, dry docks, and railroad yards, allowing them to enter manufactories from which they had previously been barred.

  The federal officials and Northern industrialists, eager to assure a ready supply of labor, added to the northward pull. The Department of Labor established the Division of Negro Economics and corporations sent representatives into the South to recruit black workers. Labor agents—some of them deeply idealistic in promoting black life outside the South and others crudely opportunistic in exploiting the migrant’s insecurity—urged black Southerners to seize the moment. So too did some black leaders, most famously Robert Abbott, the militant editor of the Chicago Defender. Seeing the possibilities of racial advancement—along with a larger readership for his journal—Abbott wielded the biblical imagery of an Egyptian-style exodus and a promised land to promote the advantages of black life in the North. While the deterioration of the cotton economy pushed black Southerners to migrate, offers of free transportation, guarantees of regular employment, and assurances of “a better world” pulled black Southerners north.11

  Still black men and women were reluctant to sever ties of kinship and fellowship generations in the making. What had been established at great cost would not be surrendered easily. Black Southerners also remained deeply skeptical that the white North was fundamentally different than the white South and doubted they would be allowed to compete as equals for employment in the urban marketplace. They worried about tales of the cold, forbidding Northern climate and equally icy religion. A fear born of the belief that they would lose what little they had deterred many black Southerners from leaving the devil they knew for one they could only imagine. Movement from the rural South would proceed with great care.

  But no love of tradition or ingrained peasant conservatism tied black people to the land. The movement from the South had its origins in movement within the South. As the cotton crop, which had once drawn them to the black belt as slaves and held them there as a freed people, at last loosened its grip, black men and women had already begun leaving the land and crowding into Southern hamlets and villages. At first they arrived as sojourners or birds of passage, eager to earn some cash during the slack season in order to maintain their place in the countryside. Before long, the occasional sojourns became seasonal, and then the seasonal sojourns became regular events. At last, the country folk broke with their rural roots. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the proportion of Alabama’s black population residing in cities doubled, so that by 1920 one black person in five lived in urban Alabama. A similar exodus from the countryside could be found throughout the cotton South. Until the 1930s,
more black people resided in Southern than in Northern cities and much of the south-to-north movement would be a city-to-city migration.12

  Southern towns, timber camps, and mine villages offered black people little in the way of prosperity. Black men and women found themselves barred from skilled work and—except in a few places, like Birmingham’s steel mills—from most industrial work. Instead, black workers found themselves consigned to a broad category denominated “casual labor,” which provided neither a living wage nor regular employment. Employers mobilized these irregular arrivals from the countryside—many of them single men, unskilled and without resources—to drive down wages, even for longtime white residents and skilled workers. Black men labored long hours under brutal conditions with scant remuneration. Married men generally avoided such work; those entering were chary about importing their families, and often lived in boarding houses or sex-segregated barracks. For black workers, the towns and camps became lonely places. To reunite with wives and children and to make ends meet, they returned to the countryside seasonally to plant and harvest. But the steady shrinkage of cotton acreage and the low wages paid to seasonal agricultural labor doomed this strategy. The shuttle between town and countryside, industrial or quasi-industrial employment in camps and mines and work in the fields frayed the commitment of black people to their ancestral homes.