The Making of African America

by Ira Berlin

  44 Kusmer, Ghetto Takes Shape, 26—28, 75—78, 99—103, 114—40, 165—70, 236—43; Katzman, Before the Ghetto, chaps. 4—6; Licht, Getting Work, 32—33; St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1945), chap. 9; Trotter, The African American Experience, 310; quoted in Spear, Black Chicago, 168 and Bayard Still, ed., Urban America: A History with Documents (Boston, 1974), 279.

  45 Meier, “Negro Class Structure and Ideology in the Age of Booker T. Washington,” 258—66; Sacks, Before Harlem, 26—28; Sacks, “Re-creating Black New York at Century’s End” in Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, eds., Slavery in New York (New York, 2005), 325—50; Katzman, Before the Ghetto; Kusmer, Ghetto Takes Shape, chaps. 5—6.

  46 Spear, Black Chicago, chaps. 9—10, quoted in p. 168; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 73—76; Sacks, Before Harlem, 68—71; Kusmer, Ghetto Takes Shape, chaps. 10—11 and note 51, below.

  47 William H. Harris, The Harder We Run: Black Workers Since the Civil War (New York, 1982), 61—66; Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, chap. 9, especially 191, 199— 222 ; Spear, Black Chicago; 150—151; Licht, Getting Work, 45, 141; David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York, 1978), 204—19; Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910—1940 (Washington DC, 1994); Trotter, African American Experience, 388; Brown, “African American Women and Migration,” 205.

  48 August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York, 1979); Elizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919—1939 (Cambridge UK, 1990), 18—19, 165—67, 205—7; Tuttle, Race Riot, 108—58; William A. Sundstrom, “The Color Line: Racial Norms and Discrimination in Urban Labor Markets,” Journal of Economic History 54 (1994), 382—96.

  49 Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, Jr., eds., A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington DC, 1989), 271 and chap. 6; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 160—82; Katherine J. Curtis White, “Women in the Great Migration: Economic Activity of Black and White Southern-Born Female Migrants in 1920, 1940, and 1970,” Social Science History 29 (2005), esp. 427; Maurine W. Greenwald, Women, War and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers (Westport CT, 1980), 20, 22—23.

  50 Kusmer, Ghetto Takes Shape, 166; Stanley Lieberson, Ethnic Patterns in American Cities (New York, 1963), 122-29; Karl E. Taeuber and Alma F. Taeuber, “The Negro as an Immigrant Group: Recent Trends in Racial and Ethnic Segregation in Chicago,” American Journal of Sociology 69 (1964), 374—82.

  51 Quoted in Kusmer, Ghetto Takes Shape, 163.

  52 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, chaps. 14, 19—22; David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York, 1981); Kusmer, Ghetto Takes Shape, 91—156; Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940—1955 (Chicago, 2007).

  53 Quoted in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York, 1925), ix; Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age ofFDR (Princeton NJ, 1983); Harold Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (Chicago, 1935); Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Outside the South, 1940—1980 (New York, 2003); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill NC, 1996), 105; Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008), chap. 4.

  54 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, chaps. 4—6, esp. 44—58, 73—79, 177; Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (Berkeley CA, 1973), 240—60; John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War 11(New York, 1976), 208—18; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 764—68, quoted in 767.

  55 Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton NJ, 1996), 26—27; Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, chaps. 1 and 3; William J. Collins, “African American Economic Mobility in the 1940s: A Portrait from the Palmer Survey,” Journal of Economic History 60 (2000), 756—81 and “Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production: Fair Employment in World War II,” American Economic Review 91 (2001), 272—86, esp. 272; Sundstrom, “The Color Line: Racial Norms and Discrimination,” 382—96; Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations and the Status of Women During World War 11 (Westport CT, 1981), 36—42; Louis Ruchames, Race, Jobs, and Politics: The Story of the FEPC (New York, 1953).

  56 Landry, The New Black Middle Class, 54—55; Claudia D. Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York, 1990), 145—47, 163; Farley and Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America, 256, 264—65; quoted in Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944), 306.

  57 Gregory, Southern Diaspora, 96, 97—99, see note 30, above; James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945—1974 (New York, 1996), 19, 382; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929—1945 (New York, 2005), 764—65; Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 65—78; Joe William Trotter, Jr., “Blacks in the Urban North: The ‘Underclass Question’ in Historical Perspective” in Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 55—84; Sharon Harley, “‘Working for nothing but for a living’: Black Women in the Underground Economy” in Harley, ed., Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (New Brunswick NJ, 2002), 6—9; Brown, “African American Women and Migration,” 212; Greenwald, Women, War and Work, 22-27, 41—43, 114—115.

  58 Landry, New Black Middle Class, 74; Farley and Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America, 263—82; Benjamin P. Bowser, The Black Middle Class: Social Mobility and Vulnerability (Boulder CO, 2007), 71—72. For the importance of public service employment, see Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader, “The New African American Inequality,” Journal of American History 92 (2005), 87—88.

  59 Cohen, Making a New Deal, 147—58; Abram L. Harris, The Negro as a Capitalist: A Study of Banking and Businesses among American Negroes (Philadelphia, 1936); Landry, New Black Middle Class, chap. 2—3; Bowser, Black Middle Class, 71—74.

  60 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 412—29; Grossman, Land of Hope, chap. 5; Phillips, AlabamaNorth, 168—79; Spear, Black Chicago, 91—97, 174—79. Nick Salvatore traces the connections in his fine biography of C. L. Franklin, Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation ofAmerica (Boston, 2005).

  61 Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940—1960 (Chicago, 1998), 28; David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Politics and White Racial Politics in Suburban America Chicago, 2007), esp. chaps. 1—5; David M. P. Freund, “Marketing the Free Market: State Intervention and Politics of Prosperity in Metropolitan America” in Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago, 2006), 16; Douglas S. Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge MA, 1993), chaps. 3—5; John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planningin Philadelphia, 1920—1974 (Philadelphia, 1987).

  62 Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890—2000 (New York, 2001), chaps. 9—10; William C. Berman, The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration (Columbus OH, 1970); Richard M. Dalfiume, Desegregation ofthe U.S. Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939—1953 (Columbia MO, 1969).

  63 Farley and Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America, 263—82; Landry, New Black Middle Class, chaps. 2—3; Bowser, Black Middle Class, 71—74; Cohen, Making a New Deal, 147—58; Harris, The Negro as a Capitalist; Thomas J. Durant, Jr., and Joyce S. Louden, “The Black Middle Class in America: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” Phylon 47 (1986), 253—62.

  64 Farley and Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America, chaps. 9—10; Landry, New Black Middle Class, chap. 2, esp.
196—97; Sharon M. Collins, Black Corporate Executives: The Making and Breaking of a Black Middle Class (Philadelphia, 1997), 3—4; William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II, 6th ed. (New York, 2007), 431; Robin D. G. Kelley, “Into the Fire: 1970 to the Present” in Kelley and Earl Lewis, eds., To Make our World Anew: A History of African Americans (New York, 2000), 565—71. The occupational index of dissimilarity between black men and white men fell from 37 to 31 and that between black women and white women from 43 to 28. It would fall even more dramatically during the 1970s. Farley and Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America, 265.

  65 Chafe, The Unfinished Journey, 423—26, 456, 466—67; William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago, 1987) and When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York, 1996), chaps. 1—5, appendix A; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, chaps. 5—7; Christopher Jencks and Susan E. Mayer, “Residential Segregation, Job Proximity, and Black Job Opportunities” in Lawrence E. Lynn and Michael G. H. McGreary, eds., Inner-City Poverty in the United States (Washington DC, 1990), 187—222; Collins, Making and Breaking of a Black Middle Class, 5—6; also see Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate and Katz, Stern, and Fader, “The New African American Inequality,” 96.

  66 In 1960, some 15 percent of black men over eighteen years of age were not participating in the labor force. That percentage would increase over the course of the twentieth century. Katz, Stern, and Fader, “The New African American Inequality,” 80—85, fig. 1, p. 82; John Blair and Rudy Fichtenbaum, “Changing Black Employment Patterns” in George C. Galster and Edward W. Hill, eds., The Metropolis in Black and White: Place, Power, and Polarization (New Brunswick NJ, 1992), 72—92; Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, chap. 5; Chafe, The Unfinished Journey, 424; Loïc J. D. Wacquant and William J. Wilson, “The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 501 (1989), 8—25; Kelly, “Into the Fire” in Kelly and Lewis, eds., To Make Our World Anew, 562; William A. Darity, Jr., and Samuel L. Meyers, Jr., “The Impact of Labor Market Prospects on Incarceration Rates” in Robert Cherry and William M. Rodgers, III, eds., Prosperity for All? The Economic Boom and African Americans (New York, 2000), 279—307.

  67 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 24—28; Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, chaps. 2, 7; Patterson, Grand Expectations, 336—37, 382; Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago, 1990), 56—76; Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged, 3—19; Kelly, “Into the Fire” in Kelly and Lewis, eds., To Make Our World Anew, 570—73. For the debate about the changing nature of inner-city African American life, see Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Migration and How it Changed America (New York, 1991); Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York, 2004); Sudhir A. Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge MA, 2000).

  68 Andrew Wiese, Places of their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2004); Harold Rose, Black Suburbanization: Access to Improved Quality of Life or Maintenance of the Status Quo? (Cambridge, MA, 1976); Karl Taeuber, “The Negro Population in the United States” in Davis, ed., American Negro Reference Book, 130—34; John Logan, “The New Ethnic Enclaves in America’s Suburbs,” 2001, Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, www.S4.brown.edu/cen2000/suburban/SuburbanReport. The travail of the black middle class is outlined in Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes, Living With Racism: The Black-Middle Class Experience (Boston, 1994).

  69 Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 419—25; David M. Grant, Melvin L. Oliver, and Angela D. James, “African Americans: Social and Economic Bifurcation” in Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles (New York, 1996), 379—411.

  70 Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston, 1997); Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting‘Tilthe Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York, 2006).

  71 Mellonee V. Burnim, “Religious Music” in Burnim and Maultsby, eds., African American Music, 61—73; Michael Harris, Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York, 1992); Bernice Johnson Reagon, ed., We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers (Washington DC, 1992); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1978), 174—89. A thoughtful meditation on the parsing of African American culture by class divisions can be found in Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black Religious and Race Records in the 1920s and 1930s” in Wahneema Lubiana, ed., The House That Race Built: Black American, U.S. Terrain (New York, 1997), 157—77.

  72 David Evans, “Blues: A Chronological Overview” and Oehler, “The Blues in Transcultural Contexts” both in Burnim and Maultsby, eds., African American Music, 79—126; William Barlow, “Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia, 1989); Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 202—97. For the rise of the blues women, see Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens ofthe1920s (New Brunswick NJ, 1988).

  73 Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago, 1966); Evans, “Blues: A Chronological Overview” in Burnim and Maultsby, eds., African American Music, 79—126; Barlow, “Looking Up at Down,” chaps. 5—9.

  74 Peter Guralnick, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke (New York, 2005), 315—450; Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley CA, 1998), chap. 4; Portia K. Maultsby, “Rhythm and Blues” and “Soul” and Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Civil Rights Movement” all in Burnim and Maultsby, eds., African American Music, 245—91, 598—624.

  75 Michael Taft, Talkin’to Myself:Blues Lyrics, 1921—1942 (New York, 2005).

  76 Ingrid Monson, “Jazz, Chronological Overview” and Travis A. Jackson “Interpreting Jazz” both in Burnim and Maultsby, eds., African American Music, 145—184; Gilbert Chase, America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present, 3rd ed. (Urbana IL, 1987), chap. 28; Peretti, The Creation ofJazz;Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago, 1994).

  Chapter Five: Global Passages

  1 David M. Reimers, Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People (New York, 2005), esp. chap. 9; Karl E. Taeuber “The Negro Population in the United States” in John P. Davis, ed., The American Negro Reference Book (Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1966), 109; Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca NY, 1992), chap. 1; Marilyn Halters, Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860—1965 (Chicago, 1993); quoted in Stanley Lieberson, “Selective Black Migration from the South: A Historical View” in Frank D. Bean and W. Parker Frisbiecorn, eds., The Demography of Racial and Ethnic Groups (New York, 1978), 122.

  2 Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation By Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge MA, 2006), 370—75. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act established a 20,000 person per nation limit for the nations of the Eastern Hemisphere and with a total hemispheric allotment of 170,000 and a hemispheric limit for the Western Hemisphere of 120,000.

  3 Zolberg, A Nation By Design, 326—33; Reimers, Other Immigrants, chap. 9, esp. 238; Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham NC, 2002), 513—14.

  4 Marilyn Halter, “Africa: West” in Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda, eds., The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965 (Cambridge MA, 2007), 283-84; Abdi Kusow, “Africa: East” in ibid., 297—98. Halter, “Africa: West” in Waters and Ueda, eds., The New Americans, 283, suggests an undercount of immigrants in the United States. For the census category of “Hispanics—origins, of all races,” see Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 525. In 2000, 11 percent of the foreign-born populatio
n from Latin America was black and some 3 percent was both Hispanic and black.

  5 Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda, “Introduction” in Waters and Ueda, eds., The New Americans, 5; John R. Logan and Glenn Deane, “Black Diversity in Metropolitan America,” Lewis Munford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, Aug. 15, 2003, 12; http://w3.uchastings.edu/wingate/PDF/Black_Diversity_final.pdf.

  6 Waters and Ueda, “Introduction” in Waters and Ueda, eds., The New Americans, 5.

  7 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 528; Sarah Collinson, Beyond Borders: Western European Migration Policy Towards the 21st Century (London, 1993), 36—37; April Gordon, “The New Diaspora—African Immigration to the United States,” Journal of Third World Studies 15 (1998), 84—85.

  8 U.S. Department of Justice, Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (Washington DC, 1991, 1995); Reimers, Other Immigrants, 232—33, 250—60; Kasinitz, Caribbean New York, 19—31; Milton Vickerman, Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race (New York, 1999), 64; Calvin B. Holder, “West Indies: Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique, St. Kitts, Trinidad” in Waters and Ueda, eds., The New Americans, 675; Flore Zéphir, The Haitian Americans (Westport CT, 2004), chap. 4; Howard Dotson and Sylviane A. Diouf, In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience (New York, 2004), 176—83.

  9 U.S. Census Bureau, Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 2000 (Washington DC, 2001), 10; David Dixon, “Characteristics of the African Born in the United States” (January 2006); Elizabeth Grieco, “The African Foreign Born in the United States” (September 2004), and Jill Wilson, “African-born Residents of the United States” (August 2000), all in Migration Information Source (www.migrationinformation.org); Violet M. Showers Johnson, “‘What, Then, Is the African American?’ African and Afro-Caribbean Identities in Black America,” Journal of American Ethnic History 28 (2008), 82—83; Reimers, Other Immigrants, 232—33, 242; Halter, “Africa: West” and Kusow, “Africa: East” in Waters and Ueda, eds., The New Americans, 283, 296; John A. Arthur, The African Diaspora in the United States and Europe: The Ghanaian Experience (Burling-ton VT, 2008), 2—4. In 1960, about 35,000 Africans had registered in the United States. U.S. Census Bureau, Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 2000 (Washington DC, 2001), 10. Approximately 71,000 Ethiopians, 68,000 Ghanaians, 44,000 Kenyans, 43,000 Liberians, and 37,000 Somalis resided in the United States in 2000.