And I put it down in Chicago
—Langston Hughes
“One-Way Ticket”
NINE
A Higher Call
IN 1917, IMMIGRANTS AND BLACKS ALIKE, along with men of every ilk across the United States, left their Chicago homes, their families, and their jobs, and took up President Woodrow Wilson’s call to enter the Great War that was raging in Europe: to “fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy . . . and [to] make the world itself at last free.”
European Americans responded with patriotism for their adopted land. But the President’s words resonated with a special significance for America’s blacks. In Chicago, they volunteered for duty in large numbers, a fact the Chicago Defender proudly pointed out: “Let us take notice of the loyalty of Colored American citizens by way of contrast, with but a half chance to live, how they are accepting the whole chance to die.” Another newspaper commented, “Many indulge the hope that America’s entry in the conflict to ‘make the world safe for democracy,’ will result in giving a new meaning to democracy in America.” This was a convergence of interests that blacks had been looking for.
In October, Chicago’s all-black Eighth Infantry Regiment prepared to leave on the long journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the European continent. Two seasons had passed since President Wilson asked for volunteers. As they were waiting for orders, black men and women were too excited to sit idle. Ida Wells-Barnett and various women’s clubs launched “liberty bond” campaigns to raise money for the war effort. Men recruited friends to join the Eighth. They were ready to get going.
Advertisement in the Chicago Defender encouraging black men to join the Eighth Regiment, April 21, 1917.
A great football, track, and baseball star, Sam Ransom, traveled all the way from Minneapolis to sign up with the Eighth, and a track star, Binga Dismond, left his medical school studies to enlist. They joined thousands of ordinary young men, eager to prove their bravery. As they waited for instructions to march, they practiced their French and bantered with the Irish Seventh Regiment. These two regiments had become friendly during the Mexican Revolution while patrolling the United States border with Mexico the year before and hoped to be fighting side by side in France.
At last, orders came to move out. Families and friends gathered on a crisp October morning, soaking up the gravitas of the moment. At noon, the officers of the Eighth were photographed, preserving for future generations a record of the part to be played by blacks in the great battle ahead.
Eighth Regiment soldier Edward Pryor embraces his daughter, 1917.
At one o’clock, the move out began with a call for the soldiers to assemble. A great cheer went up as they fell into line and began to march toward the train station, black business leaders at the fore, followed by a shiny brass band blaring “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Behind them came the soldiers, shoulders squared, jaws set, elbows clutched by the mothers and sweethearts they were leaving behind, marching through a shower of tears, cheers, and pride. A great consensus was reflected in the statement of the Eighth Regiment’s black leader: “There is no color in patriotism. Patriotism is as deeply rooted under the black skin as under any other.” Waving and blowing kisses to loved ones as the military trains pulled out of the station, the black soldiers were at last on their way to fight for freedom.
As the men sailed off to war, the business owners who manned the home front were in a pickle. Their workers were setting down tools and leaving work behind. At the same time, as men across Europe were enlisted to fight for their countries, the flow of immigrants into the United States ceased. There was no longer a supply of foreign laborers to mold steel, unload lumber ships, or slaughter cattle. Total annual immigration to the United States dropped by ninety percent between 1914 and 1917. Net immigration into the United States in 1918 was a mere 6,023.
While the number of workers was dropping, the war was creating a huge new market for industrial products. Soldiers needed uniforms, coats, and boots. Clothing manufacturers and leather production companies were called upon to meet the increased demand. Steel mills stepped up to produce guns, artillery, and helmets. The United States promised European allies a fleet of airplanes to be powered by the new 410-horsepower, twelve-cylinder Liberty engine. To make good on this offer, the automobile manufacturing plants were called into service. Scads of new laborers were needed to churn out nearly eighteen thousand engines in two years.
Family and friends say their goodbyes to Eighth Regiment soldiers headed off to war, 1917.
The packing industry was under the same pressure. For Louis Swift, the dilemma was crystal clear. He saw before him the possibility of reaping the highest profits ever. Even before President Wilson mobilized United States troops, Swift had been called on for meat to feed the massive European armies that already had been battling for several years. In 1916, before the United States entered the war, American packers exported 70 million tons of canned beef, 262 million tons of fresh beef, and more than 500 million tons of bacon. That year, Louis cleared a profit of twenty million dollars, up from nine million before the war started. Now, with the added millions of American soldiers to feed, the potential profits were astronomical. To fill the increased demand for meat, Swift needed more workers, but now he had fewer. Somehow, he had to find new sources of labor.
Closest to home, Swift turned to the womenfolk. Many a woman, white or black, waving to her husband as the trains of soldiers pulled out of the station, harbored anxiety alongside her sadness and pride, worried about how to make ends meet. She and her children had depended on every penny her husband earned. Army pay did not measure up. And now with so many immigrant men at war, no longer needing a place to stay in Chicago, immigrant wives lost the extra money the family had taken in from boarders. To feed her young ones, she would have to take a job outside the home. Packinghouse work might not be appealing, but it would pay the bills. Along with other industrialists, Swift and his confreres hired thousands of women to fill jobs vacated by men fighting overseas.
Still, thousands of jobs in the Yard remained unfilled. With all other sources of workers exhausted, Swift and his fellow packers turned their gaze to the blacks of the South.
TEN
The Northern Fever
THE TIMING COULD NOT HAVE been better. Southern blacks were ready to leave. More than fifty years had passed since blacks around the country joined John Jones and his abolitionist friends in celebrating the end of slavery. As Ida Wells-Barnett had in her youth, many newly freed men and women had chosen to stay in the South. Most lived in rural country and were eager to put a stake in the lush ground, no longer as slaves but as farmers of their own land. Ida Wells-Barnett discovered firsthand that life did not turn out as she had hoped, and other southern blacks made the same discovery. Over those fifty years, their optimism was quelled by the continued reign of white supremacy.
In 1915, Mother Nature added to blacks’ suffering when a tiny insect pest, the boll weevil, spread through the cotton crop, destroying the South’s major source of income. Over the next two years, many southern blacks found themselves out of work or working for next to nothing, earning barely enough to cover basic necessities. One man summed it up: “Wages is so low and grocery [bills] is so high until all I can do is to live.”
Some blacks with education and skills, like Ida Wells-Barnett, had managed to get away to cities like New York or Philadelphia or Chicago. But since almost all jobs in factories like Swift & Company were handed out to immigrants, most blacks did not consider a move north to be worthwhile. In 1910, the last census before World War I recorded that 90 percent of the nation’s blacks were living in the South. Though life there was hard, they seemed to have no better alternative.
As they mulled over their future, southern blacks looked to the Chicago Defender, a source of inspiration and the unvarnished truth about the world around them, for guidance. The Defender’s founder, Robert Abbott, had been born in the South, and
like the Barnetts and Gustavus Swift, he recognized Chicago as a place where he could do big things. Like Barnett, he first looked to practice law, but as he saw the waiters lose their struggle for equal pay and the strikebreakers being used and discarded by Swift, Abbott turned to the power of the press to organize blacks to action. In 1905, Abbott scrounged together twenty-five cents to purchase notebooks and pencils, successfully pleaded for a little startup help from a friendly printer, and with an initial run of three hundred copies, began to spread the printed word.
Blacks around the country were yearning for a newspaper like the Defender that celebrated their success stories and exposed the injustices heaped upon their race. One black leader of a Mississippi town observed, “Negroes grab the Defender like a hungry mule grabs fodder.” The newspaper’s circulation was approximately 33,000 in early 1916, 90,000 the following year when the United States entered the war, and 130,000 in 1919, the year of John Turner Harris’s fateful encounter at the beach, making the Defender the largest-selling black newspaper in the United States. The number of readers was even greater than the number of subscribers, as copies were passed from hand to hand.
Robert Abbott.
For more than a decade after its startup in 1905, the Defender advised southern blacks to stay put. The newspaper acknowledged that times were tough down south but cautioned that the employment market for blacks up north was too weak to support a mass of new job seekers. In January 1915, the Defender warned, “The only wise thing to do is to stick to the farm.” But before long, the Defender was singing a new tune. Orders were pouring into northern factories for food, clothes, and munitions for soldiers fighting in Europe, and the factories were looking for new workers. In February 1917, the Defender counseled, “For the hardworking man there is plenty of work [in the North]—if you really want it. The Defender says come.”
The Chicago Defender spreads word of the Great Migration, August 19, 1916. A black man is shown waking up from sleep on a bale of cotton, symbolizing his independence from the southern economy.
The Illinois Central Railroad runs a thousand miles south to north down the middle of the United States. Its southernmost point is the city of New Orleans. Its northern terminus is the city of Chicago. In between, it chugs through the lush rolling hills of Mississippi, through mile after mile of cotton fields and pine forests, past towns and small cities dotting the landscape. In the years 1916 to 1918, thousands of southern blacks boarded the train and traveled north to a new life. In 1917, Charles S. Johnson, a black sociologist and later the first black president of Fisk University, captured some of their stories in interviews with Mississippi migrants about their move to Chicago.
Mr. Henderson (first name unknown) was a railroad man hailing from those southern Mississippi hills. He had worked the railroads for fifteen years, making enough money to build his wife a house on a nice property of a hundred acres of land. His take-home pay was good—one hundred and twenty-five dollars each month. He felt satisfied with his accomplishments. But the train took him to places far away from his small slice of happiness, and the world he saw was full of pain and sorrow. The stories he could tell! On a stop through Mobile, Alabama, a black man accosted him, crying and begging for a ride up north. It seemed his business had been snatched right out from under him, taken over by a white man, and there was nothing he could do. Neither man nor law would come to his aid in Mobile. He was left with no way to earn a living. The man’s plight touched Mr. Henderson’s heart.
Other stories, closer to home, weighed heavily on Mr. Henderson’s mind. Sometime around 1913, a black man had killed a white policeman just a few miles from Henderson’s home. An enraged mob killed the black man, then continued in its fury to destroy property owned by blacks in the surrounding area. A couple of years later, a trainman’s beautiful mixed-race wife, alone at night while her husband was away on a run, was visited by a white man who thought he might just have “a good time” with her. Trips away were never the same again for Henderson, always tinged with anxiety about leaving his wife alone. He daydreamed of moving up north. He had been there from time to time on railroad passes; he liked what he saw. But he also knew there were no jobs open to him that could pay like his current one or offer the same security. So Henderson decided to bide his time.
As 1916 rolled around, excitement was building along Henderson’s route through Mississippi. In Meridian, a Mrs. Hunter (first name unknown) returned from a trip to the big city of Birmingham, Alabama, brimming with news. She’d heard that many people were leaving Birmingham for the North, for the higher wages they said they could earn in northern cities. Mrs. Hunter found the information hard to believe. Wages in Birmingham were already twice as high as in Meridian. She could not imagine an even better job market up north, but she urged her son to go to Chicago and see with his own eyes. Three weeks later he wrote, “Everything is just like they say, if not better.” He made arrangements to bring his family to join him—first his wife to set up house; later, when all was ready, Mrs. Hunter would bring their six children.
A little down the way, in Hattiesburg, the Defender was generating excited conversation at Robert Horton’s barbershop. Proud of his shop’s status as the community hub, Horton took forty to fifty copies of the Defender every week, magnanimously distributing them to customers at cost. The Defender’s talk of political freedom in the North fascinated him. Blacks didn’t just have the right to vote; they had the right to vote their own into office.
Horton could think of no greater satisfaction. But he was cautious. His barbershop, his Hattiesburg clientele, was his livelihood. It seemed too risky to go up north and start from scratch. He had been tempted once, when he traveled to New Orleans to attend his daughter’s graduation from Straight University. Looking to pass some time while his daughter was otherwise engaged, he had sauntered down to the local barbershop, where he met a man who was talking up the North, promising a bushelful of jobs, offering free train tickets to Chicago. Horton shook his head. He wasn’t ready. But he couldn’t dismiss the idea, and he mulled it over with family and friends when he returned home to Hattiesburg.
Moving day in the Black Belt.
The word was spreading. Someone up north had sent a letter to someone in Georgia, and that letter was carefully handed from person to person, winding its way across state lines to Laurel, Mississippi, where it was taken up and read out loud at a meeting of the Sisters Home Mission.
Back in nearby Hattiesburg, a family—the Martins (first names unknown)—decided to test the waters. Mr. Martin went up first and reported back that wages in Chicago were high and that for the first time in his life, he felt like a man. Sell everything and join me, he told his wife. Mrs. Martin showed the letter to her friends, who were excited, and to her pastor, who was very much against it. But she paid him no mind. She sold her house, chickens, cow, and as much furniture as she could, and led a group of ten to Chicago.
All these people would need lodging: a friend of Horton’s owned a boarding house in Hattiesburg, and that’s what she concluded. She sold her Hattiesburg place and opened a new boarding house up north, telling her Hattiesburg boarders that she would give them “privileges” at her place in Chicago. And Mr. Horton passed along names and addresses of people he knew who would be needing a place to stay when they reached their destination.
The stories piled up. One girl who had been making two dollars per week in Meridian wrote home to say she was now working in the Chicago stockyards and making two dollars per day.
Northern schools were better, too. In the South, many black children were allowed to attend school only a few months each year; from planting time to harvest, they worked long days on the farm. Even when school was in session, getting an education was not easy. The school system separated blacks and whites in unequal schools. Many black children had to walk miles each day to get to a one-room shack supplied with just a few used books. Most did not attend high school at all. They lived too far away to attend any of the few high schoo
ls open to black students. Black teachers, though highly respected in their community, were paid very little. The stories from up north painted a much rosier picture of education in Chicago. Bosses did not pull children out of school, and there were schools within walking distance for everyone; the school year was six whole months long, and teachers got monthly pay of thirty dollars.
The buzz grew and grew. People were leaving the South and heading to Chicago in parties of twenty, sixty, even more.
This migrant family has just arrived in Chicago with suitcases and overcoats
Some southern whites did not take this well. As a national black leader, Booker T. Washington, put it, the southern way of life was dependent on “the Negro and the mule.” Whites tried to entice “their” blacks to stay, talking up the perils of the North—race riots and cold weather, both of which would bring misery and death. It was better, they counseled, to stay put with friends and family and the familiar life of the sunny South. But blacks didn’t appear to be listening. And that troublemaking Defender seemed to be everywhere the whites turned. The thing to do was to keep that rabble-rousing nonsense out of black hands. In Meridian, Mississippi, where Mrs. Hunter lived, the chief of police confiscated the Defender from men selling it on the street.
For the most part, blacks did not protest. In the South, whites could take out their anger in any way they wanted. To blacks’ way of thinking, there was no sense in suffering the humiliation of public tongue-lashings and insults. And it wasn’t worth the risk that some white man would respond by beating them to a pulp or dragging them off to jail or even taking them out in the night and hanging them from a tree. But they quietly placed mail orders to receive the paper in the privacy of their own homes.
A Few Red Drops Page 6