by Ira Berlin
While men and women with families left the countryside only reluctantly, young men and women saw a different vision of the town and country. The “town,” observed sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, offered “freedom from the restraints imposed by rural churches. In dance halls, [they] could give free rein to their repressed impulses without incurring the censure of the elders for ‘their sinful conduct’ ... [H]aving caught a glimpse of the world beyond ... these men and women were lured to a world beyond the small towns where they might enjoy even greater freedom and more exciting adventures.” In the words of another observer, “Negroes were churning about in the South, seeking a vent.” What they learned in the towns and villages, coal mines, sawmills, and timber camps informed them of yet other possibilities.13
The young black men and women who were already on the move within the South were among the first to leave the region altogether. Tired of the constraints of life in the South, they saw the possibilities of higher wages and better prospects for themselves and their children in the North. Writing in 1919, an investigator for the Department of Labor declared flatly, “the mere fact of a Negro’s having moved out of his former home is no evidence that he had moved to a Northern city. It was the town Negroes who left the region.” Having spent time in some crossroad village and relocated to a regional center, and then perhaps moving on to Atlanta, Mobile, New Orleans, or Richmond, the men and women who reached the North could hardly be considered peasantry, and the solidarity and community of the peasant village had long since dissolved—if it ever existed—in the urban South. They had learned much from their stay in the urban South. “I had some boys working in Birmingham,” remembered one Alabama farmer who had migrated north, “so I went there first. Everything looked pretty good so I decided to bring the old lady to Birmingham, which I did. We got along pretty good there, but I heard about work up here, so me and my sons came up here, and after we got all settled, sent back for my wife and daughter.”14
As the trickle of black migrants became a flood, plantation owners and merchants sniffed “a plan to relieve the South out of its well-behaved, able-bodied labor,” and so they retaliated. Reviving old regulations designed to immobilize black workers-anti-enticement laws, controls on labor agents, and even legislation against hitchhiking— Southern planters tried to prevent black workers from leaving. But the old barriers against movement no longer held. Attempts at intimidating sharecroppers, sequestering copies of the Chicago Defender, and stopping trains only convinced would-be migrants that the rumors of better times in the North must be true. Finding their paths blocked by sheriffs and hooded vigilantes, migrants fled under the cover of darkness, finally having the last laugh on the agents of their oppression. Planters and merchants continued to speak of “their Negroes,” but black people dismissed the possessive.15
The fabric of Southern society continued to unravel in the 1930s as the system of cultivation that relied upon tenants and sharecroppers—shaken during the first three decades of the twentieth century—collapsed entirely. Attempts by an increasingly activist state to save the old regime only hastened its decline, leaving black country folk in an ever more precarious position. In subsidizing acreage reduction, crop diversification, and mechanization, various federal New Deal programs further reduced the need for agricultural labor. The great planters enlarged and consolidated their holdings, pushing sharecroppers and tenants from the land and creating massive underemployment and unemployment for black wageworkers. Their actions amounted to a Southern enclosure movement funded by the federal government. While landowners themselves—no more than one-quarter of black agriculturalists in the cotton belt—might be able to subsist along with their families, black tenants and sharecroppers had no work and no livelihood. Planters and furnishing merchants who once schemed to tie black people to the land now only wanted them gone. The number of black sharecroppers fell from about 400,000 in 1930 to fewer than 300,000 in 1940 and to fewer than 200,000 a decade later, as the agricultural ladder of laborer, cropper, tenant, and landowner that had been created following the Civil War collapsed.16
Black Southerners fared no better in the cities of the region. Racial solidarity led Southern employers, almost always white, to award scarce jobs to white men, even if it meant letting a black employee go. “Niggers, back to the Cotton fields, city jobs are for white folks,” the slogan of the fascist Atlanta Black Shirts, suggests the pressure that would send black urbanities to the North.17
The outbreak of a second war in Europe and then in Asia, and the American entry into those conflicts, greatly accelerated the northward and cityward movement, as velocity of the out-migration increased manyfold. The expansion of industrial production and the removal of millions of men to fight in the European and Pacific theaters again created opportunities for Southern-born black workers, just as the transformation in Southern agriculture was forcing black people off the land as workers and owners. By the 1950s, the cotton economy had been remade: tractors roamed the fields where sharecroppers had once followed mules and herbicides did the work of an army of hoe hands. Before long, mechanical cotton pickers swept the fields clean. As the pace of mechanization quickened, Southern agriculture turned from a labor-intensive to a capital-intensive enterprise. The demand for agricultural workers shrank, and black people quit the land in growing numbers. Those who did not leave voluntarily often faced eviction. By the mid-twentieth century, only 73,000 sharecroppers remained in the South. Black landowners fared no better. Thousands of black men and women exited the old plantations, some by choice but others under duress.18
Behind the hammer blows of economic change stood the region’s seemingly immutable commitment to white supremacy. Represented most horrifically by the broken, mutilated bodies that swayed from a lynch noose, the protocols of white supremacy were embedded in the most commonplace acts of everyday life. From the ritual tip of the hat to Mr. Charlie to the scramble to yield the sidewalk before Miss Anne, black men and women faced lifelong humiliation, political impotence, and impoverishment. Denied the rights of manhood and womanhood, they were “boys” and “girls” until they were old enough to become “uncles” and “aunts.” Denied the rights of citizenship, they were barred from participation in the decisions that shaped their lives. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Southern legislators extended the Jim Crow system, adding the force of law to practice, officially sanctioning the segregation of parks, schools, libraries, hotels, theaters, restaurants, restrooms, and drinking fountains. Hardly a public doorway in the South did not bear a sign indicating WHITE or COLORED. Challenges to the supremacist regime—even of the trivial sort—could unleash furious rampages enacted by hooded thugs who generally took their cues from men and women who claimed impeccable respectability. Everywhere black Southerners found themselves forced to play out the galling rituals of subordination. “Ain’t make nothing, don’t speck nothing no more till I die,” one black-belt farmer told sociologist Charles Johnson in 1930, summing up the despair endemic to Southern black life.19
The heavy hand of racial subordination fell hardest on those who dared to contravene the logic of white supremacy. Challenging racial stereotypes provoked the ire of Klansmen and whitecappers. “Whenever the colored man prospered too fast in this country under the old rulins,” lamented one sharecropper, “they worked every figure to cut you down, cut your britches off you.” The northward migration drew precisely from those determined to wear their trousers at full length. For such black men and women, the South offered few prospects for advancement, either in educational opportunities or access to political power.20 The possibilities of life in the North never appeared as good as when they were compared to the constraints of Southern life. As violence against blacks increased—lynching, a grisly indicator of white terror, peaked in the early twentieth century—so too was the willingness of black men and women to risk everything in the North. Behind the pushes and pulls of economic opportunity were men and women who wanted to stand tall and, at last, enj
oy the full fruits of republican citizenship promised in the revolutions of July 4, 1776 and January 1, 1863.
As opportunities in the North presented themselves, black men and women seized the moment to flee the omnipresent racism. “I want to get my family out of this cursed south land down here a negro man is not as good as a white man’s dog,” declared one black Mississippian. The dreary landscape of limited opportunities seemed even more disheartening to the veterans of the great war against Fascism. Flush with Rooseveltian rhetoric of democratic pluralism—as well as the frustrations of fighting in a segregated army—they had no desire to once again don the familiar straightjacket of white supremacy. The wish to escape the suffocating racial restrictions sent many more black Southerners northward. In the years following World War II, military service offered a passport from the white supremacist regime, and many took it. In 1970, over 40 percent of Southern-born veterans resided outside of the South.21
Still, black migrants faced a chancy future. Opportunities for employment in the North ebbed and flowed much like the agricultural crisis in the South. The relationship between these two vectors—the pushes and the pulls—was unstable, always changing over time. Sometimes they complemented one another, enlarging and speeding the migratory flow; sometimes they conflicted, slowing or even reversing the movement of black men and women. Even when they worked in tandem, the pushes and pulls never functioned evenly, making some regions the sites of intense migratory activity and leaving others almost untouched. For example, the return of peace following World War I and the resumption of European immigration weakened the northward pull and in some places reversed it. The postwar depression had much the same effect. When Pittsburgh’s economy collapsed following World War I, some 40 percent of the region’s black population deserted the city. But by the middle third of the twentieth century, black Southerners had established a foothold in the North and, when another worldwide conflict again swelled industrial production, the exodus resumed. Even before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War 11, the demand for workers—stoked by the ubiquitous labor agents—beckoned black men and women to Northern factories in ever-greater numbers and with ever-greater rapidity. American entrance into World War II would increase those opportunities many times over.22
The same interplay of agricultural collapse in the South and industrial opportunities in the North also influenced the character of the migrants. At various times and in various places, it changed the balance between men and women, between young and old, and between individuals and families, both nuclear and extended. At times, migrants came from the city and other times from the countryside; some of them were propertied and some propertyless.
In general, as one South Carolina migrant remembered, “the mens left first and the womens followed,” as young men unencumbered with families and much desired in heavy industry generally took the lead. During the 1920S, more than one-third of the black men between the ages of fifteen and thirty left Georgia, a pattern reproduced in subsequent decades. But women were quick to follow, and sometimes they led, for they had reasons of their own to flee the South. Within their own households, they often found themselves doing the work of both mother and breadwinner, cooking and cleaning for their own family and laboring for a white family as well. Outside their own households, domestic work—the most common employment for black women—left them vulnerable to sexual abuse along with the usual regimen of economic exploitation. The sexual balance of most urban black populations, which had historically leaned heavily toward women, began to move in favor of men.23
Always, however, migration favored the young, who were at once less attached to the South, more willing to take their chances in the North, and eager to escape the constraints that had shaped their parents’ lives. The wholesale evacuation by young people grew steadily over the course of this third passage, so that between 1940 and 1950 Georgia and Alabama lost nearly one-third of their black populations between the ages of fourteen and thirty-four, and Mississippi lost nearly a half. These young men and women had an equally powerful effect on the population of the North. In a pattern typical of many Northern cities, young men and women composed two-thirds of Cleveland’s black population in 1930, as the third great migration reduced the proportion of the very young and the very old and skewed the Northern black population toward young adults.24 Northern cities, like the Southern interior a century earlier or tidewater Virginia in the eighteenth century, were youthful places.
The character of the migrants differed according to their age, sex, and family status. The first wave of northward-moving black Southerners, many of whom had already made the transit from rural to urban and from field to factory in the South, were generally more skilled and literate than those they left behind. They moved north with confidence, experience, and, at times, material resources. But fast on the heels of these black urbanites were country folks who had little experience with city life. As the cotton economy collapsed and as word of the possibilities in the North spread, migrants increasingly derived from the countryside. Penniless, displaced tenants or sharecroppers innocent of urban life and carrying all their belongings in cardboard suitcases replaced men and women familiar with urban life, wage work, and industrial employment. Over time, the northward migration again became increasingly selective, drawing the urban and the educated who had long before been pushed off the farms and plantations and into the cities of the South. In 1940, less than one-quarter of the black Southerners residing in the North had lived on a farm five years earlier. By their education and occupation, many stood atop black society in the South. Fully one-fifth of the adult black migrants carried with them a high school diploma, a proportion four times that of the Southern black population generally. Among those traveling north were the South’s best and brightest ministers, lawyers, businessmen, and not a few musicians.25
The circumstances under which black Southerners traveled also changed over time. While conditions never resembled anything like that of the slave trade, they nonetheless could be grim. No whip-wielding merchants of men lorded over the migrants, to be sure, but they confronted surly ticket agents and cantankerous conductors aplenty. Likewise, while the northbound migrants never faced the nightmare of tightpacking, they were herded into the “straight-backed seats filled with the dust and grime of neglect.” One migrant remembered that the “negro cars ... were little more than box cars fitted out with benches.” They generally stood at the end of the train, catching the fumes and sucking up the cinders from the rail beds. Sanitary facilities, to the extent they existed, were of the most primitive sort. After long hours inhaling the noxious fumes, covered with soot and forced into an impossible posture, the travelers could be forgiven if they recalled their ancestors’ transit across the Atlantic even as they streamed north on the Sunshine Special.26
But if the cramped, constrained quarters echoed earlier migrations, the food migrants carried made it clear that this was a movement of free men and women. While those transported across the Atlantic and the continent survived on tasteless gruels and mush, northward migrants often moved amid a culinary feast, exchanging biscuits, fried chicken, and other homemade treats. Louis Armstrong, who arrived in Chicago from New Orleans in 1922, recalled, “colored persons going North crammed their baskets full of everything but the kitchen stove.”27
Still, this was no joy ride. The price of the ticket added to the migrants’ woes. Free passes grandly promised by labor recruiters soon disappeared—if they ever existed—and the migrants were on their own. Travel was expensive in relation to the migrants’ meager incomes. To finance the move, many sold what property they had and depleted their savings. If they were not poor before they left the South, they were likely to be poor by the time they reached the North.28
Along with the financial uncertainties came a host of less tangible concerns. The long ride to the North was the first time on a train for many black Southerners, and for nearly all it was the farthest they had traveled fro
m home. The giant locomotives presented a bewildering spectacle, leaving many migrants as apprehensive and fearful at this smoke-belching beast as their African ancestors would have been by a multisailed caravel. The unknown multiplied such concerns. Departing Memphis, where he had migrated less than two years previous, the Chicago-bound Richard Wright “was seized by doubt.” His anxieties hardly subsided when he reached his destination. He wondered if he had made the right decision, bracing himself for the worst even as he hoped for the best. “I had fled a known terror, and perhaps I could cope with this unknown terror.”29 However faintly, the shivers of fear first felt aboard the slave ships echo across the centuries.
Unlike with the forced migration that had moved their ancestors, black people took control of the movement north. As the first arrivals settled in their new homes, they invited families and friends to join them. Whereas Africans and African Americans migrating as slaves had been transported as isolated individuals, separated from family and friends, free black men and women moved north as families, or they soon reconstructed their families and joined neighbors—people with whom they had lived and worked. When they arrived at their destinations, most did not have to invent fictive kin or reestablish social networks, as the family and friends preceding them had. If the first and second passages had broken families and dismembered communities, the third passage had just the opposite effect. A survey of some five hundred black men living in Pittsburgh in 1918 found that most were married, more than one-third lived with their wives, and another third planned to bring their families north.30
Nothing distinguishes the third passage from the earlier, forced migrations more than the existence of what scholars—with a strange sensitivity to the implications of such language—have called “chains.” Like other free people, individuals, families, and sometimes entire black communities were retracing the paths that relatives and friends had blazed. Many of these first arrivals returned to the South to explain precisely the nature of the opportunities—and the liabilities—that Northern life presented. Occasionally, these ambassadors from the North—returning south with their city clothes and metropolitan swagger—lectured at local churches, although more frequently they held forth in barbershops or juke joints. They told of simple acts of entering the same door as white people, not having to yield the sidewalk to anyone, and voting. Pullman car porters, who worked on the North-South runs, were yet another source of information for would-be immigrants, as was the U.S. mail. The grapevine telegraph of word-of mouth communication, whose history reached back into slave times, regained its viability in freedom. While enslaved Africans and African Americans lost their ability to communicate with their loved ones, messages between northward migrants and their kin filled mailboxes, telegraph wires, and, in time, telephone lines. Eventually, a host of social service agencies, church-based associations, and fraternal societies supplemented these personal communications to ease the migrants’ passage.31 The informal groups of kin and neighbors and the formal associations created by black people reflected the fundamental difference between the third great migration and the earlier ones. African Americans were now taking control over the levers of change and—to the extent anyone could guide the massive movement of people—were directing the movement north.