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 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. 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 that $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.
Remarkably, some African Americans made
considerable fortunes against heavy odds un the economic context of the
South. In 1903, Maggie Lena Walker
became the first African American woman to found a bank; she was also initiated publishing and other businesses. Arthur Gaston of Birmingham, Alabama built an
entrepreneurial empire that began in 1923 with burial services and expanded
into numerous enterprises, including training people in office skills and
providing a variety of financial services.
Madame C. J. Walker became a millionaire via her various beauty industry
enterprises; she committed a large
portion of her wealth in various philanthropic endeavors.
As impressive as these African American
successes in the Jim Crow South were, black southerners seeking a better life
were increasingly inclined to depart the region of their birth:
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 industrial 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 werer 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 the inner cities of
the North.
African Americans committed their lives to the
cause of World War I (1914-1918) and had great expectation that their service
would advance their quest for equitable treatment as citizens.
Approximately 370,000 African American
soldiers (11% of United States combat forces) and 1,400 black officers served
in the United States armed forces during World War I. Over 50% of African
American soldiers served in the all-black 92nd
and 93rd divisions. These
soldiers served with great distinction:
The all-black 369th Infantry Regiment (known as the “Harlem
Hell Fighters”) compiled the best record of any United States Army
regiment. African American soldiers of
the 370th Infantry Regiment received sixteen distinguished Service
Crosses and seventy-five Croix de Guerre medals.
African Americans, though, faced great
discrimination in the context of their military service: They were not allowed to join the marines and
could not become officers in the navy.
Even those African American officers and soldiers in the United States
Army who held college degrees were assigned menial duties or served on labor
battalions. White officers frequently
humiliated African American soldiers, bringing forth numerous letters of
complaint to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker.
The United States Army cited a shortage of housing in those segregated
times as the key reason for failing to enlist the hundreds of female African
American nurses who could have helped tend fallen soldiers. Only after 1918, upon the conclusion of the
war, did eighteen African American women officially get approval for service,
becoming the first women of their race to serve n the United States armed
forces.
And hopes that the “war to make the world safe
for democracy” (in the words of President Woodrow Wilson) might induce a higher
level of democracy for themselves were grievously disappointed:
In 1917, a racial altercation in East St.
Louis, Missouri, cost at least 40 lives.
That same year, the black 24th Infantry of the United States
Army stationed in Houston, Texas, revolted against bigoted treatment of African
American soldiers by both white army officers and hatemongers in the Houston
populace. Also in 1917, three African
Americans and three whites died in the wake of rioting in Chester,
Pennsylvania. Three whites died in late
July 1918 when racially acrimonious rioting broke out in Philadelphia. And in 1919, twenty violent race riots shook
communities throughout the country, including Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Omaha, Nebraska; and Washington, D. C.
In the context of these circumstances in the
urban North, two organizations arose to protest the conditions in which African
Americans lived, to move aggressively to ameliorate the existing situation, and
to work toward a future in which public practice in American society would be
consistent with the words and intent of the 13th, 14th,
and 15th Amendments.
One of these organizations was the National
Urban League, which in 1910 brought together a panoply of smaller
organizations, including the National League for the Protection of Colored
Women (NLPCW), the Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes
(CIICN), and the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (CUCAN). The National Urban League conducted numerous
programs pertinent to the economic condition of African Americans, focusing at
first especially on helping migrants from the South make the transition to life
in urban North. The Urban League trained
people in the trades, taught them how to respond and present themselves in
interviews, assisted people in finding decent affordable housing, recruited
southerners when large companies advertised for large quantities of workers,
and conducted groundbreaking research on the demographic characteristics and
conditions of northern African American workers. Today the National Urban League is headquartered in New
York City, with an Eastern regional office in the same city and Mideastern
(Akron, Ohio), Midwestern (St. Louis, Missouri), Western (Los Angeles,
California), and Southern (Atlanta, Georgia) regional offices strategically
established across the country. Today, the National Urban League has 101
affiliates in 34 states and the District of Columbia. A bureau in the latter affiliate conducts
research into problems endemic to the urban and rural poor.
The other organization established to meet the
needs of African Americans at the beginning of second decade of the 20th
century was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP). The origins of the NAACP had
its origins in the Niagara Movement, which gained momentum in the aftermath of
a meeting at Niagara Falls in 1905 organized by William Edward Burghardt (W. E.
B.) DuBois. Key participants in this
meeting went on to found the National Negro Committee on 12 February 1909. The multiracial founders of this
organization, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Dubois, Henry Moscowitz,
Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, and William English Walling soon changed the name to the enduring
appellation, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. While the National Urban League focused on
issues related to employment, the NAACP gave prime attention to legal rights,
especially those related to the pursuit of education. For this purpose the, the NAACP established
the Legal Defense Fund to litigate cases in local, state, and federal
courts. The NAACP published a journal, Crisis, which disseminated information
about legal issues, court cases, and topics of grave concern, such as the
continuing specter of vigilante violence and the brutal lynchings still
haunting the southern landscape.
W. E. B. DuBois and fellow giants of
leadership, Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, offer contrasts in the
pursuit of full citizenship rights for African America that endured as motifs
of the 20th century:
W. E. B. Dubois (1868-1963) came of age in
Great Barrington, Massachusetts, went southward to earn a B. A. degree (1888)
at Fisk University, in Nashville, and then came back to New England to study at
Harvard. At Harvard, Dubois earned
another B. A. (1890), an M. A. (1891), and a Ph. D. (1895). Growing up in Great
Barrington and finding his academic grounding at Harvard, Dubois in both cases
operated on Massachusetts turf that was relatively hospitable to the formation
of an optimistic integrationist doctrine.
Those advocating an integrationist approach believed in the ideals of
the United States Constitution, dedicated themselves to the pursuit of justice
according to those ideals, and demanded the full exercise of citizenship in all
of its dimensions: political, economic,
and social. DuBois advocated this
position in his leadership of the NAACP and his editorship of Crisis.
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was born a
slave on a small plantation in Virginia.
At the end of the Civil War, he secured the friendship of benevolent
whites in his home state (especially in the General Lewis Rutherford family,
for whom he served as houseboy), learned to read and write, and trained at the
Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia.
At Hampton, Washington was deeply influenced by the institution’s
director, General Samuel Armstrong, who stressed the improvement of African
American lives through cleanliness, thrift, morality, character, and
proficiency in the manual trades. In
1881, Booker T. Washington was, upon the recommendation of General Armstrong,
tapped to head the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, established with a curriculum
very similar to that at Hampton. As an
advocate of what may be called the gradualist approach, Washington counseled African Americans to forego the pursuit of
full political and social rights and to accept segregation for the time being,
taking training as bricklayers, carpenters, machinists, plumbers, and stone
masons so as to thrive economically on the basis of terms laid down by Jim
Crow. He thus advised his fellows to
build thriving communities of black citizens capable of convincing even the
heaviest doubters and most virulently racist in white society of their
diligence and trustworthiness. The
gradualist approach articulated by Washington urged African Americans to get a
good basic education, master their trades, demonstrate solid citizenship and to
go about their lives in ways that converted whites to friendship over time, and
thus through self-help to be so successful as to undermine the assumptions of
Jim Crow and to eventually end the system of that venal creature.
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was born and grew up
in Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children of Sarah and Marcus Garvey. The latter was a stonemason who seemingly was
descended from the Maroons, the African slaves who escaped and successfully
defended themselves against Spaniards and the British in the 17th
century. Marcus the son took great pride
in the Maroon heritage of Marcus the
father. Faced with financial
difficulties, Garvey had to leave school at the age of fourteen, thereafter
educating himself through hard work, wide reading, and travels to Central and
South America. He trained and worked as
a printer, took an interest in journalism and for a time worked for newspapers
in Panama, and along the way became bitter over British treatment of Jamaicans
who sought work in various colonial outposts of the Caribbean. During 1912-1914, Garvey lived in London,
meeting people from the African continent for the first time, and coming under
the influence of the Epyptian nationalist, Duse Mohammad Ali. In London, Garvey wrote for the latter’s
publication, African Times and Oriental Review, reinforcing his
association with his mentor’s views. He
also gained great inspiration from the philosophy of black self-help that he
found in his initial encounter with Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery.
In 1914, at the age of 27, Garvey returned to
Jamaica and formed an all-black organization, the Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA). Garvey moved his
residence and place of operations to New York in 1917; just two years later, thirty branches of the
UNIA could be found in locations across the United States and the islands of
the Caribbean. Garvey publicized his
motto, “Race First,” urging all people of African heritage to recognize the
bond that they shared. There was no use,
he said, in trying to appeal to the sense of justice in white people, because
almost all white people harbored racist thoughts and were incorrigible. People in the Americas of African descent
should unite, work hard to make an all-black nation within a nation
economically strong, and in time transplant the nation to Africa.
Garvey’s ideas represented a synthesis of wide
reading and thinking that he had done;
he drew from the self-help notions of Booker T. Washington and the
postulations of those such as Paul
Cuffe, Edward Wilmont Blyden, Henry Highland Garnet, and Martin Delaney who had
argued for a “Return to Africa” or black nationalism . Garvey published his ideas in the UNIA’s Negro World, and he launched numerous
programs and enterprises, including a Negro Factories Corporation and the Black
Star Line of ships for transporting people across the Atlantic who sought return
to Africa. In 1920, Garvey led the first
UNIA International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World. A subcommittee from among the 25,000
attendees issued the Declaration of the
Rights of the Negro People of the World demanding that governments across the world address the
grievances and respond to the quest of African American
people for lives of economic, political, and social justice. Garvey’s career ended in controversy over the
handling of investors’ money in the Black Star Line. The United States government deported him
back to Jamaica; from there Garvey
traveled to and settled in Great Britain, where he advocated his ideas from
London until the end of his days in 1940.
These, then, were the three key approaches to
attaining a life of civic dignity for people of African descent in the United
States: gradualist, integrationist, and
nationalist. Washington’s ideas over
time were absorbed by both of the other strains, which adopted some version of
the self-help approach into their advocacy.
The other two approaches came to offer disparate routes to the
achievement of African American citizenship during the 1950s,1960s, and
1970s. The integrationist approach would
be that followed the NAACP and the Civil Rights movement as led by the Martin
Luther King at the helm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and also by such organizations, less
committed to nonviolence but still seeking integration into the civic life of
the United States, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE).
The black nationalist approach would be adopted by various
organizations, including the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims), and Black
Panthers.
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