How We Got to Where We Are Today in the Inner Cities of the United States >>>>> Part Two >>>>> The Great Northern Migration

Note to My Readers  >>>>>  Please notice that this is the second article posted at about the same time, a companion to the one immediately below as you scroll on down the blog.  These articles are a two-part posting explaining how we got to the point where we are now in terms of the dilemmas faced by African Americans living at the urban core.  In many other places on my blog, I discuss what we need to do to address those dilemmas, explaining that the program for action resides in the first-ever provision of a knowledge-rich K-12 education delivered by teachers possessing legitimate master's degrees (in fields of discipline other than education:  no M. Ed.'s) and the pedagogical ability to impart their knowledge to all students.


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Before the Great Northern Migration that began in earnest about 1915, there had already been a trend toward movement of African Americans out of the South. Much of this movement was westward, onto the Great Plains, where Native Americans typically welcomed fellow people of color with a knowledge of English; and to Texas and onward through the southwest to California. In all of these places, African Americans worked with horses, took jobs as agricultural laborers, bought property, started small businesses, and gained the training necessary to enter the professions.


Hundreds of African Americans responded to the flyers of Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, who touted the abundance of jobs in “Sunny Kansas.” Known as “exodusters,” those responding to the message of Singleton 27 eventually landed not only in Kansas but also in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. In the latter, black pioneers established the famous towns of Boley and Langston, and also those of Arkansas Colored, Bailey, Bookertee, Canadian Colored, Ferguson, Liberty, Lincoln City, Overton, Summit, Tullahassee, and Wild Cat.


Out on the plains, Nat Love (1854-1921) and Bill Pickett (1860s-1932) gained fame as cowboys:


 Love was an expert with the rifle, the rope, and the Spanish language. He eventually published a memoir entitled, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in Cattle Country as Deadwood Dick.


Pickett was a master of many skills of the cowboy, gaining particular fame for his superior technique in steer wrestling. Such was his fame that in 1914 he was invited to perform for King George V and Queen Mary of England; and in 1954 he was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame (Oklahoma City), the first African American to be so honored.


Also gaining fame on the Great Plains were the Buffalo Soldiers, the name given to the African American Ninth and Tenth United States Army Regiments by Native Americans, who likened them to their sacred Buffalo. Amidst numerous ironies and a certain pathos, the Buffalo Soldiers worked skillfully to protect mostly white settlers who wanted to establish ranches and farms on the prairies and plains of the Midwest and West. The Buffalo Soldiers also erected forts, escorted trains, accompanied stage coaches, protected cowboys on cattle drive, mapped new areas for settlement, and built new roads. They had a hand in capturing both Billy the Kid and Geronimo, and they pursued the latter’s tough and determined Apache people over many years.


In addition to the particular enthusiasm for moving westward and southwestward from the South, a yearning abided among African Americans to move northward, as they had done as individuals and in small groups since the days of the Underground Railroad.  Both the fierceness of racism in the South in late 19th century and the early 20th century;  and the difficulty life in the context of a rigged economic system;  catalyzed the movement North:


African Americans in the rural South mostly eked out a living from the meager returns of sharecropping. Many were not even settled enough to root themselves in a sharecropper’s existence; a great number of blacks roamed the countryside from farm to farm taking temporary jobs working in the fields for as little as $60 and seldom more than $180 per year. In the cities, African Americans hired out as carpenters, earning somewhere between $0.75 and $1.25 per hour, or as cooks earning an average $5.00 per month in 1902. African Americans also tended to work as janitors, chauffeurs, stonemasons, and barbers.


A small but very influential black middle class did form in the urban areas of the South by the turn of the 19th century into the 20th century. African Americans thrived best in fields eschewed by whites, or businesses in which whites could not or would not serve black customers. Hence, the fields of insurance, undertaking, banking, cosmetics, and personal grooming attracted African American entrepreneurs, some of whom built up sizable fortunes by seizing the thread of opportunity available to them.


Urban life in the North beckoned to increasing numbers of Americans of all ethnicities at the dawn of the 20th century. The iron and steel industries were booming, and these attracted white and black Americans, and immigrants from the various countries of Europe. African Americans faced heavy discrimination when they filed for union membership, so they were left to scramble for jobs as construction workers, doormen, and sleeping car porters, for which the competition with whites was not so fierce.


But when the black worker did manage to land a job such as a meatpacker in one of the factories of the North, the wage differential between southern rural and agricultural employment and northern industrial labor could result in glowing letter sent back home, extolling economic opportunities of the North and raising the expectations of friends and family members who might themselves be persuaded to make the move northward.


In the years after 1910, African Americans moved from the rural South to the nindustrial North in unprecedented numbers.  Between 1915 and 1930, about one million black people migrated from the South to the North. New efficiencies in the burgeoning industries of the North created jobs that drew African Americans to cities that, according to the reports of loved ones and friends who had pioneered the migration, offered wages and a social atmosphere making possible lives of prosperity and freedom that were clearly denied to African Americans living in the Jim Crow South.


During the second and into the third decade of the 20th century, the industrial and service economies of northern cities absorbed into their work forces the labor of these African American migrants, who took their positions alongside Italian, Irish, Russian, and Eastern European immigrants who also flocked to the American North during these years.  For these immigrants and for African Americans of the Great Northern Migration, New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, and St. Louis were among the most popular destinations.


In 1920 in Chicago jobs as laborers (5,300), iron and steel workers (3,201), railway porters (2,540), waiters (2,315), porters in domestic or personal service (2,139), male servants (1,942), building or general laborers (1,835), janitors (1,822), non-store clerks (1,659), semiskilled slaughter and packinghouse house workers (1,490), and laborers, porters, and helpers in stores (1,210) proved to offer the best chances for African Americans looking for jobs. Others worked as tailors (371), house painters (286), carpenters (275), musicians or music teachers (254), clergy officials or pastors (215), coopers (148), plumbers (105), and lawyers (95).


Earning higher wages than they had ever earned before, and dwelling in an atmosphere that seemed freer and less overtly bigoted than that of the South, African Americans at first found their northern environs a seductive alternative to the formal restrictions of the Black Codes and the violent hatred of the vigilantes. But over time, African Americans dwelling in the urban North found whites guilty of subtle and insidious forms of racism that in the course of the 20th century caused African Americans as much misery as they had known in the frankly brutal South.


The frustration that African Americans came to feel as second-class citizens in a region to which they had come with so much hope became one of the most regrettable motifs in 20th century United States history; in time, that motif and those frustrations became manifest in the lives of the African American underclass living at the urban core, especially in in the inner cities of the North.




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Our system of K-12 education has never properly served African Americans living at the urban core.
As middle class whites and blacks departed for the suburbs in the course of the 1970s and beyond, those who were left behind constituted the poorest of the poor.  Our systems of public education, already wretched by international standards, were overwhelmed.  For at least 35 years the Minneapolis Public Schools and other urban systems of public K-12 education have failed our students miserably.


The problem is us, the citizenry.  We have not cared enough to think through what must me done to transform failing systems of K-12 education.


We will get nothing right until we provide young people living in our inner cities a knowledge-rich education, imparted by knowledgeable and pedagogically skilled teachers.


The time is now. 


We must provide such an education via the conduit of locally centralized systems of public K-12 education.


I am exerting every effort, by all the means at my disposal, to make this happen.