Jul 18, 2020

Article #10 of Multi-Article Series >>>>> A Short Course in African American History

The Great Northern Migration

 

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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