More recently, a small group of predominantly Black feminist scholars has been responsible for reconstructing the androcentric African American intellectual and activist tradition by making visible Black women’s significant contributions to political discourse on a range of issues going back to the nineteenth century. An example of these reclamation projects is my own 1995 collection, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought, which makes the case for a robust Black women’s intellectual tradition dating back to 1831, with the publication of Maria Stewart’s speeches.
The period 1909–14 was pivotal in the annals of African American political history. Perhaps the best-known civil rights occurrence was the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Ida Wells-Barnett, the legendary antilynching crusader, journalist, newspaper editor, clubwoman, and suffragist, was one of only two Black women signers of the 1908 call for the establishment of the organization.
Less well known than the NAACP was the founding, by white reformer Frances Kellor, of the New York–based National League for the Protection of Colored Women in 1905. Four years later Nannie Helen Burroughs founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C. In 1910 the league merged with the Committee for the Improvement of Industrial Conditions Among Negroes in New York. Renamed the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, it was a precursor of the National Urban League, founded in 1920.
Other significant developments in Black political history during this period include Margaret Murray Washington’s 1912 founding of National Notes, the newsletter of the influential National Association of Colored Women (established in 1896); and the founding of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) by Marcus Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey in Jamaica in 1914.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s “Lynch Law in America,” written in 1900, is a powerful critique of the institutionalized racism and sexism that render Black men and women vulnerable to previously unspeakable acts of violence. Less visible in the annals of history is her militant struggle for woman suffrage. In the summer of 1913, Illinois had passed the landmark Equal Suffrage Act, which granted women in the state limited suffrage. That year, in one of this period’s most significant yet historically occluded political occurrences, Wells-Barnett founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. It was the first Black woman suffrage organization, committed to enhancing Black women’s civic profile by encouraging them to vote for and help elect Black candidates, especially men; in 1915 it would be critical to the election of Oscar De Priest as the first Black alderman in Chicago.
Wells-Barnett founded the club because Black women were prohibited from joining white suffrage organizations, such as the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). In 1913 NAWSA organized the Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C., to garner broad support for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. But because Southern white women were opposed to integration and to granting suffrage to Black women, the parade’s organizers informed club president Wells-Barnett that she and her sixty-five members could march only in the segregated Black section at the back of the parade.
As instructed by the NAWSA organizers, most Black women, including club members, participated in the march at the rear, but Wells-Barnett refused. When the all-white Chicago delegation drew near, she left the crowd and joined that procession. The Chicago Daily Tribune captured an iconic image of Wells-Barnett marching with the Illinois delegation.
By 1916, the Alpha Suffrage Club had nearly two hundred members and published a newsletter entitled The Alpha Suffrage Record.
Ignoring or minimizing the political work and writing of African American women such as Ida Wells-Barnett renders invisible the important ways these women have contributed to a broad range of social justice initiatives, such as the passage of antilynching legislation, the attainment of voting rights for women regardless of race and national origin, and the election of Black officials. Black freedom struggles and women’s liberation movements since then would not have been possible without the courageous and visionary leadership of Ida Wells-Barnett and the brilliant strategizing of women’s organizations such as the Alpha Suffrage Club in the early twentieth century.
1914–1919
THE GREAT MIGRATION
Isabel Wilkerson
They fled as if under a spell or a high fever. “They left as though they were fleeing some curse,” wrote the scholar Emmett J. Scott. “They were willing to make almost any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket, and they left with the intention of staying.”
It was the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century, and the vast majority of African Americans were still bound to the South, to the blood-and-tear-stained soil of their enslaved foreparents. It had been twenty years since Plessy v. Ferguson formalized an authoritarian Jim Crow regime that controlled every aspect of life for African Americans, from where they could sit in a railroad car to which door they could walk into at a theater to the menial labors to which they were consigned. They were now bearing the full weight of a racial caste system intended to resurrect the hierarchy of slavery and were living under the daily terror of its brutal enforcement.
By this time, an African American was being lynched every four days somewhere in the American South, and for the majority of African Americans, as the Southern writer David Cohn would later put it, “their fate was in the laps of the gods.”
The incendiary film Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915, romanticizing the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, glorifying the very violence to which African Americans were being subjected, and helping to revive the Ku Klux Klan. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the nations of Europe were at war in what was being called the War to End All Wars, which had begun in 1914 and had disrupted European immigration to the United States just as the industrial North needed more workers for its factories and steel mills. Northern labor agents traveled to the South to recruit cheap Black labor, and word spread among Black Southerners that the North was opening up.
It was then that a silent pilgrimage took its first tentative steps, within the borders of this country. It began without warning or notice or very much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach. The nation’s servant class was now breaking free of the South, in quiet rivulets at first and then in a sea of ultimately 6 million people whose actions would reshape racial distribution of the United States. It would come to be called the Great Migration.
Its beginning is traced to the winter of 1916, when The Chicago Defender made note in a single paragraph that that February, several hundred Black families had quietly departed Selma, Alabama, declaring, according to the newspaper’s brief citation, that the “treatment doesn’t warrant staying.”
This was the start of what would become a leaderless revolution, one of the largest mass relocations in American history. It would come to dwarf in size and scope the California gold rush of the 1850s, with its 100,000 participants, and the 1930s Dust Bowl migration of some 300,000 people from Oklahoma and Arkansas to California. But more remarkably, it reshaped the racial makeup of the country as we know it, and it was the first mass act of independence for a people who were in bondage in this country far longer than they have been free.
The families from Selma, and the millions who followed, carried the same hopes as anyone who ever crossed the Atlantic or the Rio Grande. Over the decades of the Great Migration, a good portion of all Black Americans alive picked up and left the tobacco farms of Virginia, the rice plantations of South Carolina, the cotton fields in East Texas and Mississippi, and the villages and backwoods of the remaining Southern states. They set out for cities they had whispered of or had seen in a mail-order catalog.
They followed three major streams, paralleling the railroad lines that carried them to what they hoped would be freedom. Those in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia went up the East Coast to Washington, D.C
., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Those in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas went to Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and elsewhere in the Midwest. Those in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma went to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and elsewhere on the West Coast.
They were seeking political asylum within their own country, not unlike refugees in other parts of the world fleeing famine, war, and pestilence, only they were fleeing Southern terror. In May 1916, just months into the migration, fifteen thousand men, women, and children gathered to watch eighteen-year-old Jesse Washington be burned alive in Waco, Texas. The crowd, one of the largest ever gathered to witness a lynching, chanted, “Burn, burn, burn,” as Washington was lowered into the flames. It was a reminder to those contemplating the migration that, however heartbroken they were to leave the loved ones who chose to stay, the region of their birth was not changing anytime soon.
“Oftentimes, just to go away,” wrote John Dollard, a Yale anthropologist who would later study the rural South, “is one of the most aggressive things that another person can do, and if the means of expressing discontent are limited, as in this case, it is one of the few ways in which pressure can be put.”
As it was, in the early years of the Great Migration, the South did everything it could to keep the people from leaving. Southern authorities resorted to coercion to keep their cheap labor in place. In Albany, Georgia, the police came and tore up the tickets of colored passengers waiting to board. A minister in South Carolina, having seen his parishioners off, was arrested at the station on the charge of helping colored people get out. In Savannah, the police arrested every colored person at the station regardless of where he or she was going. In Summit, Mississippi, authorities closed the ticket office and did not let northbound trains stop when there were large groups of colored people waiting to get on.
Instead of stemming the tide, the blockades and arrests “served to intensify the desire to leave,” wrote the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, “and to provide further reasons for going.”
The refugees could not know what was in store for them and for their descendants at their destinations or what effect their exodus would have on the country. In the receiving stations of the North and West, they faced a headwind of resistance and hostility. Redlining and restrictive covenants would keep them trapped in segregated colonies in the cities to which they fled. Many unions would deny them membership, keeping their wages lower than those of their white immigrant counterparts. And after the war, during the Red Summer of 1919, racial tensions and resentments boiled over as race riots erupted in cities across the country.
The riot in Chicago began on July 27, 1919, when a seventeen-year-old Black boy named Eugene Williams, swimming along the shore of Lake Michigan, drifted past an invisible line in the water into the white side of the Twenty-ninth Street beach. He drowned after someone hurled a rock at him. Within hours, a riot was in full cry, coursing through the South and Southwest Sides of the city for thirteen days, killing 38 people (23 Blacks and 15 whites) and injuring 537 others (342 Blacks, 178 whites, the rest unrecorded), and not ending until a state militia subdued it.
And yet despite outbreaks such as these, 6 million Black Southerners chose to seek the relative freedoms of the North and West, where they built churches and civic clubs, made enough money to send some back home to their loved ones in the South, could send their children to schools open for full semesters rather than tied to the schedule of the cotton field, and sent a message to the South that African Americans had options and were willing to take them.
“I went to the station to see a friend who was leaving,” a person quoted by Emmett J. Scott observed shortly after the migration began. “I could not get in the station. There were so many people turning like bees in a hive.”
The Great Migration grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War, and the sheer weight of it helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s. It would proceed in waves in the following decades, not ending until the 1970s, and it would set in motion changes in the North and South that no one, not even the people doing the leaving, could have imagined at the start of it or dreamed would take nearly a lifetime to play out. When the migration began, 90 percent of all African Americans were living in the South. By the time it was over, 47 percent of all African Americans were living in the North and West. A rural people had become urban, and a Southern people had spread themselves all over the nation. They fled north and west as they did during slavery.
It was a “folk movement of inestimable moment,” the Mississippi historian Neil McMillen said.
And more than that, it was the second big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.
1919–1924
RED SUMMER
Michelle Duster
I came of age on the South Side of Chicago in the wake of the 1968 urban rebellions. Too young to remember the mass destruction, violence, and tensions of the actual rebellions, I knew only that the South and West Sides of the city did not have the same prosperous look and opportunities as downtown Chicago and the North Side. The sharp racial division between white, Black, Asian, and Hispanic neighborhoods within the city was normal to me.
The magnet high school I attended was located on the other side of the city, so every day I commuted for an hour and a half each way through various Black neighborhoods on the South Side, crossed through the racially diverse downtown area, then over to another Black section on the Near West Side. Public transportation ran with varying efficiency depending on the part of the city in which I traveled. Boarded-up buildings, vacant lots, concentrated high-rise public housing units, fast-food places, barbershops, nail salons, bars, liquor stores, factories, and steel mills were prevalent in Black neighborhoods. The racial concentration also produced many Black-owned companies such as Soft Sheen, Johnson Publishing Company, Parker House Sausage, Army & Lou’s Soul Food Restaurant, The Chicago Defender, and Seaway Bank. The racial concentration was similar to what my great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells, saw as a Chicago resident all those years ago.
As I navigated the city, I knew there were certain neighborhoods to avoid, such as Bridgeport, Marquette Park, Humboldt Park, and Canaryville, because of the racist hostility demonstrated by the white people who lived there. Stories of Black people being beaten with bats, bricks, or other weapons, if they were unfortunate enough to end up in that part of town, were well known. I also remember hearing stories of Black people having bricks thrown through their windows or experiencing bombings or other forms of harassment when they tried to cross the deeply entrenched racial line and move into certain predominantly white neighborhoods.
Little did I know that the divide, hostility, and violence were a continuum of the issues that caused the 1919 Race Riot, in which thirty-eight people—twenty-three Black and fifteen white—were killed and over five hundred were injured. The tension had been fueled by a combination of several factors that included job opportunities, housing availability, and the dynamics of World War I. Chicago was among many cities that experienced riots, which gave the summer of 1919 the nickname “Red Summer.”
During the Great Migration, the population of Black people in Chicago increased by 148 percent, while the area of the city that welcomed them remained the same. White people did everything they could to keep Black people separate. Restrictive covenants were enforced and redlining was in full force to confine Black people to a small thirty-block section of the city known as the Black Belt.
Near the Black Belt was a neighborhood dominated by white Irish and Lithuanian immigrants who mostly worked in the stockyards. Their attempts to unionize, plus a shortage of workers due to World War I, induced the stockyard owners to bring in Black migrants to work, undercutting the employment of white men. Resentment and tension rose between the two groups.
In addition, Black soldiers returned from World War I, where they had f
ought for democracy overseas only to be met with resentment and violence once they got home. The sight of their uniforms created ire among racist white people. Trained to fight, the Black veterans were not willing to accept second-class citizenship.
Racial tension gradually increased, and on July 27, 1919, it boiled over into a full-blown white invasion of Black neighborhoods. The violence mostly took place on the South Side, near the stockyards, which was inhabited by working-class white immigrants, and in the Black Belt area. In the aftermath, at the beginning of 1920, a deep level of suspicion between Black Americans and white immigrants remained.
City and state leaders and officials decided to “study” the problem. The Chicago Commission on Race Relations was formed and was led by Black sociologist Charles S. Johnson. After two and a half years, a 651-page report titled The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot was produced, which included findings of systemic racism along with almost five dozen recommendations on how to solve some of the problems. To this day, the city has yet to implement most of them.
Over one hundred years after the riot, Chicago boasts a diverse population that is almost equally—30 percent each—white, Black, and Hispanic, and about 5 percent Asian. Over 30 percent of residents speak a language other than English. However, there remains extreme housing segregation as a remnant of official redlining and restrictive covenants that were enacted in the early 1920s, the “white flight” that took place in the 1950s and ’60s, and public policies that concentrated racialized poverty and underinvestment in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
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