The Making of African America (24 page)

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.
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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, enjoy 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 from 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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.

Still, the transit was not easy. Northward migration required black Southerners to pool their resources, shuffling familial responsibilities and sending one or two family members who had the wherewithal to earn a living in the North. These scouts reported back and prepared the larger family for the northward trek. Over time, families composed a larger and larger share of the migrants, and the number of individuals traveling alone declined.

In some places, entire communities mobilized, forming emigration clubs, sharing knowledge, sending a few men and women ahead to establish a beachhead, and then—when all seemed secure—calling for family and friends to join them. Church congregations and congeries of neighbors also collectively agreed upon how, when, and where they would move. In various places, they transported themselves and took up residence in the same neighborhood or even the same tenement building. For many, doing so fulfilled the entire purpose of the move—maintaining the sanctity of familial and communal ties that had been threatened by the transformation of the Southern economy. Unlike earlier, forced migrations across the Atlantic or to the interior of the South, the movement north became the occasion to restore, rather than destroy, family and community life.
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