Mrs. Hunter, who had brought news of the North from Birmingham to Meridian, looked around. All her Mississippi friends were leaving, and country people—not her sort—were moving in. Life was becoming quite dull. She sold what she could, disappointed that she could get only seven hundred dollars for a house that was worth twice as much. She wrapped up the family’s affairs, readied the children, and boarded the Illinois Central, resigned to whatever Chicago might bring.
Horton’s Hattiesburg barbershop and community hub, too, was getting quieter and quieter. The city was clearing out. News of departures became a part of everyday conversation. From those who had “the northern fever,” a standard goodbye was making the rounds: “Only the waters of Lake Michigan can cure me.”
The whites’ dire warnings were failing. Those looking to keep their black help from leaving resorted to setting booby traps to stop them. The Hattiesburg police had a plan: they would block every entrance to the train depot, making it impossible for blacks to purchase tickets; then they would arrest anyone trying to board without a ticket. They felt triumphant as a train pulled in, took on white passengers, and then chugged out of the station with no blacks aboard. But the blacks would not be denied and swung themselves onto the train at the very last second as it pulled out of town.
Sometimes justice did not prevail. Railroad man Mr. Henderson knew this. A friend of his had gone north and sent back a half-fare ticket for his wife to join him, but when she got to the station, the station agent refused to accept the ticket, and there was nothing she could do about it.
This editorial cartoon in the Chicago Defender (January 6, 1917) illustrates the many obstacles facing blacks at the time of the Great Migration.
Henderson thought about his own life. Fifteen years he had put into the railroad, and he had no seniority, no rights or benefits, to show for it because of his race. He thought about the black folks his train carried up north, leaving everything they knew for an uncertain future. And they were making it; there were jobs for the taking. He decided it was time to act. He asked for his seniority. Just as he had always feared, he was fired on the spot. But he was moving on. When his superintendent reversed the decision and offered Henderson his job back, he turned it down. He was on his way to Chicago.
The barber Robert Horton was a deacon in his church. Cautious by nature, he watched his people leave, in a trickle at first, then in a massive wave. He was convinced that this was not about one person or one family or even about one town. This was about a people, and, as Horton saw it, they were guided by the hand of God. The time he had been praying for had come. In 1917, he packed his things and headed for Chicago.
ELEVEN
A Real Place for Negroes
THE ILLINOIS CENTRAL carried its passengers through the green hills and forests of Mississippi, up through Tennessee and Kentucky, across the bridge over the Ohio River into Cairo, Illinois, over the flat prairie land of central Illinois. As the train drew close to Chicago, greenery and blue sky were replaced by a canopy of gray smoke spewed into the air by the nearby steel mills, and passengers could begin to anticipate the gritty might of the city. When the train pulled into Chicago’s Illinois Central station, passengers were disgorged into the hustle and bustle of a city that was exciting but also immensely intimidating. Ida Wells-Barnett observed, “They arrived in Chicago in every conceivable state of unpreparedness.”
The station’s grand three-story marble waiting room was housed below a forty-five-foot vaulted ceiling, shimmering under immense shafts of light that poured through long windows lining the room. There, hundreds of people were rushing about.
Many in the Hattiesburg contingent had written back and forth about the specifics of their arrival. The luckiest migrants were scooped up out of the chaos by waiting friends or relatives. Others arrived with only an address in hand, expected to find their way to prearranged housing. Some came with no one expecting them, making the journey on faith that it would all work out somehow, arriving unannounced and unequipped, with no planned course of action beyond their first steps off the train. One migrant recalled his fear of being “completely lost . . . afraid to ask anyone where to go.”
But the city was prepared for them. In that year of 1917, the Chicago Urban League, a branch of the National Urban League headquartered in New York City, had been founded with the specific mission of integrating black migrants into city life—helping them with jobs, housing, and social adjustment.
It all began at the train station. Experienced black Urban League staff worked side by side with white women workers from the Travelers Aid Society to get migrants’ first steps on the right path. As new arrivals with bewildered faces entered the waiting room, they were met by offers of assistance. Those with addresses in hand were told how to get where they wanted to go; those with no contacts were directed to available temporary rooms in boarding houses, such as the one run by Robert Horton’s friend, or sent to board as lodgers with families who were looking to take in a little extra money. Communication was difficult at times. Many migrant men had learned in the South to be wary of speaking to white women. For their part, many frustrated aides had difficulty trying to understand the migrants’ southern drawl. A business card was pressed into the palm of each newcomer, encouraging a visit to the Urban League. Then migrants were sent out into their newly adopted city, walking or riding the streetcar toward the address that was, as of this moment, home.
Card distributed by the Chicago Urban League.
For those who hopped the streetcar, the first instinct was to move to the back. But here were blacks sitting next to whites. One migrant recalled, “I just held my breath, for I thought any minute [the whites] would start something.” Some whites did object to blacks taking seats “all over the car,” but it was rare for anyone to cause a fuss. Some migrants found this unsettling and preferred the comfort of the familiar seats in the rear. Others were exhilarated. One migrant remembered thinking, “This is a real place for Negroes.”
The streetcar rolled through the Black Belt, allowing passengers a good look at the community. The poet Langston Hughes recalled arriving in 1918: “South State Street was in its glory then, a teeming Negro street with crowded theaters, restaurants, and cabarets. And excitement from noon to noon. Midnight was like day. The street was full of workers and gamblers, prostitutes and pimps, church folks and sinners.”
T. Arnold Hill was tasked with leading the new Chicago branch of the National Urban League. He planted the offices in the midst of this black metropolis, rolled up his sleeves, and went to work. His goal was to empower the wave of migrants rolling into town to become productive citizens of their adopted city. A few blocks away, A. L. Jackson, executive director of the local Wabash Street YMCA, was pushing in the same direction. Other groups, such as Ida Wells-Barnett’s Negro Fellowship League, were pursuing the same goal.
The Urban League focused on connecting the migrants with jobs and housing, the YMCA on teaching them the ways and expectations of people in the North. Their work was respected in the black community. Many who could ill afford it gave a dollar here, a dollar there, to show their support.
Hill and Jackson were the most powerful black team around. They knew that to get anywhere, they needed to work with the powerhouses in the city who held the keys to jobs, housing, and social services. And so they went a-courting, reaching out to members of the black Refined and also to white business leaders.
Mother and child in the Black Belt, 1919.
Louis Swift and other owners of the large industries in dire need of workers gladly joined forces with Hill and Jackson. Who better to teach the southern blacks how to be good workers than men of their own race? And something else made it worth throwing in money and programmatic support. Swift and his fellow chiefs of commerce were banking on the likelihood that Hill and Jackson would have the sense not to bite the hand that fed them.
TWELVE
A Job, Any Job
MOST BLACKS LOOKING TO LEAVE the South were enco
uraged by the possibility of a better life up north. Hundreds of southerners sent letters to the Defender and to the Urban League inquiring about a job, any job. A woman from Alabama carefully set out her qualifications for work as a washerwoman: “For seven previous years I bore the reputation of a first class laundress in Selma. I have much experience with all of the machines in this laundry.” She asked for “clear information how to get a good position.” A Florida longshoreman made it plain that he was willing to take whatever was offered: “I used to have from 150 to 200 men under my charge. They thought I was capable in doing the work and at the meantime I am willing to do anything.”
Former farmers, stonemasons, and plasterers became general laborers; a barber became a house painter; a blacksmith set up shop as a barber; a teacher took work in the Union Stock Yard; a pastor became a fireman. For many, the Urban League business card they were given at the railroad station was all they had to go on. They were eager to see exactly what this Urban League could do for them.
From the very start, the migrants liked what they saw at the Urban League offices. Pride surged in their chests as they were ushered in and seated before the desks of well-dressed black men and women who asked them questions about their experience and provided leads on jobs. On the other side of the desk, League staff sized up the migrants, trying, as an Urban League report explained, “to fit the workers to the jobs and the jobs to the workers.” There was much to teach in a short time to these newly arrived migrants, who had never before seen anything like the parade of cows on Swift’s disassembly line. Gone was the slow, irregular way of southern farm life; Swift and the other northern bosses demanded speed and reliability. As one staffer saw it, the Urban League’s job was to develop “in the worker’s mind her personal responsibility to become a regular and efficient employee.”
Dozens of men waited in line outside the Chicago Urban League office.
From the League offices, migrants were sent out to job sites: some to steel mills, tanneries, or railcar shops; most to the stockyards, where the need was greatest and the commute was shortest from homes in the Black Belt. The number of blacks employed in the Yard increased quickly, from around a thousand in 1915 to more than ten thousand in 1918.
Those hired were shown to their new jobs, the jobs no one else had wanted, the hardest, dirtiest, least tolerable work left at the bottom of the barrel after the white men and then the white women had taken their pick. The newly arrived could not help but notice the unfair pecking order. They particularly resented that they, who were native to American soil, were passed over by their supervisors in favor of recently arrived immigrants. One man complained that his boss passed him over when giving out overtime hours, favoring Polish workers who had less seniority. Another remarked that complaining about unfair treatment was risky because his boss would try to “burn” him out with work.
Most southerners chose not to dwell on the favoritism they saw. Eyes were turned toward making good in the northern way that offered so much more possibility than the South. One foundry worker laid out his goals: “I’m an expert now . . . I can quit any time I want to, but the longer I work the more money it is for me. . . . I am planning to educate my girl with the best of them, buy a home before I’m too old, and make life comfortable for my family.” Down south, explained one man, you “had to take whatever they paid you.” In Chicago, there was cash in your pocket and a steady stream of new job openings if the current one wasn’t working out. One woman expressed the pleasure of not having “an overseer always standing over you.” It felt like freedom.
Louis Swift and the other industrialists liked what they saw: T. Arnold Hill and his staff were cutting waste and adding to profits by weeding out the bad apples and sending along the good ones; A. L. Jackson and his YMCA staff were creating a positive worker mindset, teaching worker efficiency, and handing out good advice on how to handle racial tension on the job.
Hill and Jackson understood their value and played it to the hilt. Hill jumped on every chance to bend the ear of the industrialists, explaining why promotion of blacks to foremen would reduce conflict and increase efficiency. The Urban League shaped the attitude of bosses with lectures on topics such as “How to Handle Negro Labor.” Jackson won programs to educate newly arrived workers, selling the idea as a good way for business owners to win black allegiance. In this way, workers learned valuable skills, signing up for company-sponsored “Efficiency Clubs” that provided training on topics such as “Progress of the Negro in the Packing Industry” and “Electricity and Its Use in the Yards.”
Captioned “A Negro Amateur Baseball Team,” this photo shows the Swift Premiums.
Jackson further parlayed the desire of the packers and other manufacturing business owners to win the hearts and minds of their black employees, setting up a host of company-sponsored social groups. Thousands of fans spent lazy summer evenings rooting for their family and friends on teams in an industrial baseball league that included the Swift Premiums. Others proudly gave formal concerts in company-sponsored singing groups. One meatpacking business owner handed out free YMCA memberships to black workers after one year of employment. Migrants responded with enthusiasm. One of them recalled, “The packing houses in Chicago for a while seemed to be everything.” Another man summed up his experience in Chicago more broadly: the “place [is] just full of life.”
THIRTEEN
Full to Bursting
THE BLACK BELT WAS, IN FACT, full to bursting. This was not a good thing. The problem was a mathematical one. In the six years from 1914 to 1920, the black population doubled, with most of that growth coming in 1916 to 1918, but the number of homes open to black Chicagoans stayed the same. Some whites living in the area moved away, but most stayed put. There simply was not enough room in the Black Belt for everyone.
Mr. Horton’s rooming-house owner friend from Hattiesburg did her best to give new folks temporary shelter. Her seven rooms were always crammed to the gills, with as many as twenty-one men boarding at a time and five to six new referrals every day. In one three-month period, for example, she temporarily housed 698 people. Families with extra space in rundown but roomy dwellings helped out too, taking in lodgers to make a little extra money. Still, there were not enough rooms to accommodate the waves of migrants that continued to flood in. The sight of newcomers wandering the streets at all hours was part of the cityscape.
Some, like the Hattiesburg clan, were organized, finding a concentration of homes where they could settle down together and recreate their community from down south. But this happy fate was not the norm. In the summer of 1917, an Urban League survey of realtors took a single-day snapshot that tallied 664 applicants for housing but only fifty homes available to them.
The overpopulation created a breeding ground for illness. Six out of every seven people struck down by tuberculosis in Chicago were black. Their prospects of escape to a healthier environment were dim. With so little housing for so many people, landlords could charge whatever came into their heads. As one man commented, “Rent goes up whenever people think of it.” Most blacks did not have the resources to get away to more sanitary conditions.
This black family lived in a one-room apartment.
The biggest surprise lay in store for the migrants who had sold property and brought cash from the South, expecting to purchase a nice home in their new city. Upon arrival, one look was all they needed to see that the Black Belt was not set up to offer them what they were looking for. A quick investigation of other neighborhoods around the city turned up all sorts of apartments and houses for rent or sale. But upon inquiry, blacks found themselves politely or not-so-politely turned away.
The middle-class whites living to the east formed property owners’ protective associations to hold the line against a black “invasion.” They made their purpose painfully clear to blacks. One real estate dealer bluntly stated: “You people are not admitted to our society.” To the west, Ragen’s Colts and other gangs held the line in Packingtown in a dif
ferent way, using the tried-and-true threat of violence: “There’s a nigger! Let’s get him!”
Blacks tried to make a go of it within the boundaries laid out for them. The owner of a black baseball team remembered that he “moved four times . . . seeking desirable living quarters.” But as the days turned into weeks, into months, into years, the day-in, day-out smells, sights, and sounds that accompany extreme congestion crowded the minds of the people, leaving room for little else. And a few fed-up souls began to push back against efforts of whites in nearby neighborhoods to lock them out.
FOURTEEN
Respectability and Respect
THERE WAS MORE TO IT than just the housing shortage. The streets of the Black Belt were becoming unrecognizable to the old settlers who had taken so much time to build a respectable community. They had to look no farther than out their front windows for a daily reminder of the “country” ways that the southerners had brought with them. Northern blacks took pride in dressing in the formal suits and dresses popular in the early 1900s. As the Urban League noted, many of the newcomers walked around outside in “dust caps, bungalow aprons, house clothing, and bedroom shoes.” They were engaged in “loud talking and objectionable deportment . . . in public places.” Something had to be done.
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