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138 Major Problems in African-American History

Hmmm, Chickasaw don’t pay no woman no mind.
Hmmm, Chickasaw don’t pay no woman no mind.
And she stops, picking up men, all up and down the line.

Sgz E S S A Y Se
Peter Gottlieb, archivist at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, lays out the struc­
tural factors that shaped the life African Americans might make in North or South
in the first decades of the twentieth century, arguing that family and community
resources were crucial in shaping the decisions that potential migrants made about
relocation—and re-relocation. The second essay reminds us that although conditions
within the United States generated this migration, it was part of a hemisphere-wide
shift in labor demands and transportation networks. Irma Watkins-Owens, who teaches
African-American studies and history at Fordham University, focuses on the forty
thousand immigrants from the British West Indies who relocated to Harlem in the
early twentieth century. She asks how they accommodated themselves to life in this
new country and how their presence remade the black community in New York.

The Great Migration
PETER GOTTLIEB

This essay is a contribution to the historical assessment of black migration. … In
particular,… it is an attempt to place the Great Migration from 1916 to 1930 in the
context of blacks’ northward movement from the 1870s to the 1970s. Drawing on
the example of migration to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and its surrounding industrial
region (Allegheny County), it examines the dynamics of blacks’ movement to
northern cities as a way of understanding both the underlying conditions from
which migration sprang as well as the distinctive character of the Great Migration.

Recent studies of African-American migration have demonstrated the mi­
grants’ creative role in their geographic movement. Unlike earlier investigations
that primarily concerned the exterior facets of migration—the causes, destinations,
numbers of migrants, and living conditions in origin and destination areas—the
newer studies focus on the experience of geographic movement. Rather than ex­
plore only why and where southerners moved, this literature also reconstructs how
they moved. It looks at the structures of group life and the values, attitudes, percep­
tions, and status that migrants brought to their movement. This view moves the
forces that produce migration into the background and places the migrants them­
selves closer to the center of the geographic movement. Here the picture is not one
of economic, political, or social conditions shuttling rural peoples from country to
city. The emerging portrayal of African-American migration shows men and
women responding to these conditions on the basis of deep-rooted social practices

Peter Gottlieb, “Rethinking the Great Migration: A Perspective from Pittsburgh,” in The Great Migration
in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender, edited by Joe William Trotter, Jr.,
pp. 68-75, © 1991 by Indiana University Press. Reprinted with permission.

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tan< nor mo the nev Bk ind Wc poi em bet wo am nal the ne' mt lea mt fre ins Rural Exodus and the Growth of New Urban Communities 139 and customs, developing a pattern of movement which reflected both the general causes of migration and their own social organization and aspirations. Approached in this way, African-Americans’ voluntary migration springs from an interplay between socioeconomic structures and the migrants’ community and culture. Migrants draw in particular ways on various resources to contend with in­ ducements stemming from socioeconomic structures. The way in which African- Americans engage their resources with the pressures on them to move creates a migration dynamic—the motive force behind their movement. From the end of the Civil War to the 1960s, the structures of southern agricultural backwardness, African-Americans’ lack of land, capital, and occupational skills, and racial segre­ gation and discrimination conditioned geographic mobility. But particular induce­ ments to migration changed over time, as did the material and cultural resources that African-Americans deployed in different ways to make their journeys. Thus the dynamic of northward migration shifted from one period to another, marking dis­ tinct phases in the 100-year flow of African-Americans out of their native region. We can begin to explore the dynamics of northward migration by reviewing the genesis of blacks’ World War I movement to Pittsburgh, examining factors in both the South and the North that contributed to the particular energy of that migration.... We usually describe the Great Migration in terms of several characteristics that distinguished the movement during World War I and the 1920s. First, there was a rapid growth in the northward migration streams when hundreds of thousands of southern blacks began journeys to eastern and midwestem cities. Behind this sud­ den increase in the number of migrants were material and social forces that simul­ taneously encouraged blacks to leave their rural homes and attracted them to the northern destinations. Finally, two results of the wartime migration have seemed most salient: the entry of black migrants to industrial jobs previously closed to them; and the élan of the migrants themselves, which reflected an awareness of a new historical period beginning and their power to enter it on advantageous terms. Viewed from Pittsburgh, the Great Migration displayed most of these aspects. Black newcomers from the South began flooding into the city and its surrounding industrial district a little after the onset of the general northward movement during World War I. From 1916 to 1919, the Pittsburgh area’s workshops, mines, trans­ portation facilities, construction crews, hotels, and private homes badly needed employees to replace men going into the army and women shifting to new and better-paying jobs. The European conflict disrupted the flow of foreign-born workers to Pittsburgh on which the city’s employers depended for their labor force and even drew some of Pittsburgh’s immigrant workers into the armies of their native countries. The arriving southern blacks wanted the vacant jobs and the wages they paid that were two or three times higher than daily earnings in the South. As news of job openings and comparatively high wages spread through southern com­ munities, African-Americans expressed an eagerness to reach Pittsburgh and to learn more about conditions there. “I have a very large family and would like very much to come north if I could get a good job for all of my folks...,” wrote one man from Georgia in 1922. Another prospective migrant stated, “ ... if I can get [an] inside Job for the winter I will get rady [sic] and come in short.” 140 Major Problems in African-American History Beneath this tableau of enthusiastic northward movement, powerful induce­ ments to migration were at work. Primary among these was demand for African- American labor. Its source and its impact on male and female workers differed according to northern city or industry, but labor demand influenced most aspects of migrants’ journeys and subsequent experiences. The male newcomers in wartime Pittsburgh were wanted for jobs both where they had customarily been employed, and, more noticeably, where few had been hired before—in the large, integrated steel mills and in some of the foundries, machine shops, and electrical equipment factories. Several large employers who had never before hired African- Americans enrolled hundreds after 1915, including Oliver Iron and Steel, Pitts­ burgh Forge and Iron, Duquesne Steel Foundry, and Mackintosh-Hemphill. The explosive growth during World War I in the number of black laborers in such Pittsburgh workplaces was an indicator of the demand for their services. By 1920, black iron and steel laborers alone had increased nearly 500% over the number in the Pittsburgh area in 1910. While male migrants could enter jobs in heavy industry, construction, and transportation, female migrants in Pittsburgh during the war had a much smaller range of job possibilities. The women could occasionally find temporary places in the packing and shipping rooms of department stores and in a few industrial plants, but they most often were limited to the same occupations they had had before the war: cooking, cleaning, and washing in private homes. Black men had a definite advantage over black women, both in terms of their expanding work opportunities and in the wage differential between their new jobs and their old ones. Labor demand in rural and urban areas of the South also shaped the dynamic of the Great Migration. Though rural African-Americans faced natural disasters and threats to cash crop harvests, as a group they were not losing their place on the land. It is true that flooding of homes and crop lands in 1916 at least temporarily uprooted families in certain localities of Alabama. More significant was the de­ struction of cotton crops by boll weevils that had become a fact of agricultural life since the turn of the century. Dwindling cotton harvests in many areas did make life precarious for thousands of African-American cultivators, particularly in South Carolina and the Georgia Piedmont during the early 1920s. Some landowners and tenants, however, had learned how to use pesticides on weevils or how to grow other crops until the infestation passed, and rising prices for the smaller total har­ vest sometimes yielded higher incomes for successful farmers. This was especially the case during World War I, when demand for American cotton rose sharply. Despite weevils and natural disasters, agricultural incomes in the South increased during the War and postwar years, bringing a measure of prosperity to rural African-Americans as well. This reflected only a trickle from the net gains of the wartime cotton boom, yet reports from farming districts in 1917-19 refer to African-American cotton growers purchasing their first cars, buying new clothes for their families, and refurbishing homes and farm equipment. There were widening avenues to employment in southern urban areas too, where African-Americans had moved in search of work for many years. The war economy generated new jobs in industries throughout the South. Coal and iron ore mining, dockside labor, railroad and trolley line construction, and the lumber and turpentine industries all had openings in this period for male laborers. Building and mail Amt to ir anni peri« tic v fron cons peri« tract spor they to h< sine tion enfc of v time abo5 on t Ami phei earl pros POP one but wel that emj priv one hon woi exp pl°’ Afr fan: san tane thei to i age stra Rural Exodus and the Growth of New Urban Communities 141 maintaining military installations in the South provided additional jobs. African- Americans had filled these occupations in the past, moving seasonally from farms to industrial sites to earn extra income before returning to their rural homes. The annual cycle of cotton cultivation, from ground breaking to harvest, included rest periods when men customarily looked for day labor and women tried to find domes­ tic work in white households. Other African-Americans had shifted permanently from agriculture to wage labor, filling the unskilled jobs in extractive industries, construction, transportation, and domestic service throughout the South. Long ex­ perience in moving to jobs within their native region gave southern blacks added traction as they began moving toward new job openings during the war. African-Americans’ outlook on this escalating labor demand framed their re­ sponses to wartime conditions. Through life-long racial oppression in the South, they regarded work opportunities in the North in a different light from those closer to home. Codes of racial conduct and status had been tightly constricting their lives since the 1880s. Whites had barred access to adequate education, skilled occupa­ tions, and the franchise. Segregation and discrimination were often most strictly enforced in the southern towns and cities where African-Americans went in search of wage labor. The most prosperous black landowners and town merchants some­ times attracted whites’ resentment and reprisals for lifting their living standards above sanctioned levels. Whites’ growing sensitivity to any kind of encroachment on their status, real or imagined, frequently broke out in violence against African- Americans. Middle-aged men and women saw their lives blighted in this atmos­ phere, but the rising generation of African-Americans, bom in the late 1880s or early 1890s and approaching adulthood around 1916, felt especially restless at the prospect of coming of age in such an incubus. African-Americans’ quick departures from the South after 1915 under such popular slogans as “Crossing Over Jordan” and “Going to the Promised Land” was one expression of their engagement with the inducements to northward movement, but the dynamic of the Great Migration arose more directly from other sources. The welling migration streams were fed by myriad kinship and community networks that channeled individuals and small groups toward specific destinations, northern employers, urban residential districts, and even particular boarding houses and private homes. Families carefully rearranged their members’ commitments to allow one or more to go on northern scouting expeditions while the others remained at home to cultivate a cash crop or earn wages for the household in nearby towns and work sites. Favorable news about job openings and housing from the dispatched explorers attracted other family members to the North. Though this particular de­ ployment of kinship resources was more feasible for the minority of landowning African-American families, it was similar to strategies that many urban and rural families used. Community relationships among southerners supported migration in much the same way. Neighbors, friends and workmates passed information and offered assis­ tance to each other. Clubs, churches, and fraternal lodges sponsored migration of their members as well. Personal connections for information and help were preferred to impersonal contacts, but hundreds of letters of inquiry from migrants to public agencies, social welfare organizations, newspaper editors, and employers demon­ strated African-Americans’ efforts to seek information from a variety of sources. 142 Major Problems in African-American History The kinship and community resources that migrants drew on for their initial journeys to the North also supported return trips to the South that were a prominent feature of the Great Migration in Pittsburgh. In some families, relatives had settled in southern towns and cities; in others, they had retained farms against all odds. More important, the persistence of labor-intensive tenant farming and daywork in cotton cultivation through the 1920s protected the foundations of rural African- American communities. These conditions made it possible for northern migrants to return to their relatives, to birthplaces, to family homes, and to native communities during the Great Migration. Aside from sheer homesickness or loneliness, there were a variety of reasons for return journeys: illness, injury, loss of work, whites’ hostility (especially in crises like strikes and race riots), and family and community celebrations. Walter H. and Laura L. each left Pittsburgh to fulfill obligations to family members who had remained in Virginia. Harrison G. and Chamer C. returned to Georgia and South Carolina, respectively, to marry women from their home communities. Trips such as these were temporary returns to the South, but in the aggregate they helped to maintain migrants’ links to their origin communities». Visits “down home” for some southerners in Pittsburgh became a regular part of the calendar, scheduled to coincide with the Christmas holidays or the lay-by period in cotton cultivation, when rural blacks held church revivals, barbecues, and homecoming celebrations for former residents. Members of migrants’ families reunited in northern cities as well, but southern communities and southern branches of migrants’ kinship groups played a crucial nurturing role in the northward movement. Social structures in Pittsburgh contributed in a number of ways to the constant circulation of migrants between their origin and destination areas. First, southern­ ers found, at best, cramped space in the city for building their northern homes. The unskilled, casual labor to which most of them were confined resulted in frequent layoffs and periods of unemployment. For male migrants in Pittsburgh, the stagna­ tion of the steel industry after the mid-1920s heightened this general lack of job security. Though women’s domestic service jobs exposed them to labor market fluctuations somewhat less than men’s industrial work did, the low wages paid to all African-Americans were insufficient for supporting homes, even when two adults in a household held jobs. Second, racial discrimination and whites’ resistance to black progress gener­ ally withered the hopes for prosperity, equality, and justice that some migrants had cherished. Mortgage lenders and real estate companies prevented them from buy­ ing or renting houses outside the deteriorating housing districts, forcing severe overcrowding. Housing conditions in Pittsburgh were worse than some southerners had seen in their home towns. “I never lived in such houses in my life. We had four rooms in my home,” fumed a woman from Georgia as she prepared to leave her one-room apartment and return south. Hospitals, police, courts, welfare agencies, and most other public service providers treated African-Americans as inferiors. In Pittsburgh, the Hill District, where most of the city’s blacks lived, was subjected to sweeps by police whenever officials detected a public concern over crime. Finally, migrants in Pittsburgh got little constructive help from long-term residents of their own urban communities as they tried to assimilate to the North. Rural Exodus and the Growth of New Urban Communities 143 Arriving in a city whose relatively small African-American community before 1916 derived largely from Virginia, whose black work force included a significant proportion of skilled men, the World War I southern migrants stirred as much alarm as any group of greenhorn newcomers to industrial America ever had. The men and women from Low Country Georgia and South Carolina, quickly distin­ guished by their speech and other mannerisms, were branded “Geechies” and dis­ regarded by their Pittsburgh brethren and by other migrants alike. Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee migrants similarly betrayed their scant education and common labor backgrounds. Some black churches and settlement houses, like the Urban League of Pittsburgh, extended practical assistance, but often with a conde­ scending attitude toward the new arrivals’ backgrounds. The migrants found many community institutions that mirrored the scorn of northern-born blacks toward them. Tensions that arose from growing differences of class and culture within the African-American population were not overcome by the rising awareness of a common racial identity, actively promoted by the Pittsburgh Courier and by some prominent figures in the community. Whatever the adverse circumstances that forced migrants to return South dur­ ing or just after World War I, changing conditions allowed them to move north again and resume their former occupations. Southerners departed from Pittsburgh in droves in 1920-21 when the postwar boom collapsed, causing widespread unem­ ployment. Two-fifths of the entire black population of Allegheny County left the re­ gion in that interval. Federal restrictions on foreign immigration, a sharp upswing in the business cycle, and the steel industry’s addition of a third shift to accommo­ date the new eight-hour day in continuous operations elicited a new northward surge in 1922-23. Some of the migrants in this period had clearly awaited the return of prosperity. As labor demand accelerated, they wrote to Pittsburgh contacts to find out if the city’s industries would hire them again, “i worked in the Diamond & Corbin iron works & several mills, i boarded in 12 ward on 30th St.,” were the bona fides offered by one former resident. Another man inquired about job possibilities in Pittsburgh, though his heart was clearly set on a destination further west. “. . . I prefer Ohio, as I worked at the Firestone Rubber factory and won much fame.” Just as the survival of African-American rural communities in the South during the 1920s provided a sheltering base for Pittsburgh migrants, recurring demand for black labor in northern industry helped to make the Great Migration more a circula­ tion of population than a one-way passage. Evidence from Pittsburgh suggests that the dynamic of the Great Migration arose from conditions in the North and South that strongly induced African- Americans to move, but left them wide options and resources to do so. They met these conditions by rapidly mobilizing family and community relations, convert­ ing them to conduits of information and material support for migration. Equally significant, southern blacks quickly adapted their prior experiences in intra­ regional migration and wage labor to the northward movement. The result was an initial, intense burst of out-migration followed by an energetic flow of population between north and south. This dynamic, however, was also evanescent. It grew out of an international crisis and lasted only as long as southern blacks had a wide range of choices as 144 Major Problems in Ajncan-American History well as time, income, and group resources to maximize their chances for successful movement. Before the Great Migration, inducements to move north were compara­ tively weak, and relatively few men and women left the South. After the migration, and especially from World War II until the 1960s, changes in southern agriculture and land tenure systems forced blacks to take refuge in urban areas, whether or not they could find employment there. Though these periods of migration preceding and following the 1916-30 era also profoundly influenced the development of African-American communities, their dynamics grew from trends that were very different from those of the Great Migration. Caribbean Connections IRMA WATKINS-OWENS Between 1900 and 1930 some 40,000 immigrants of African descent, most of them from the British-held colonies of the Caribbean, settled in Harlem as it was emerg­ ing as a black community in New York City. This settlement converged with that of African American migrants from the states of the southeastern seaboard and elsewhere. The result was the creation of a new ethnic community, unique in the American experience. ... A 1930s WPA guide to New York City noted, “Negroes blended into their New York environment habits and qualities carried from the southern states, Africa and the West Indies.” Yet more recent investigations rarely emphasize Harlem’s diverse origins, or explore the intraracial ethnic dimension as an important dynamic in African American community life... . At the scene of their encounter in America, migrating southern and Caribbean blacks found themselves in the midst of a changing New York African American community after 1900. In this year blacks began moving from scattered and crowded downtown Manhattan communities into previously all-white sections of central Harlem. Due to over-building in the 1890s African American real estate agents such as Philip Payton were able to induce a few white landlords to accept black tenants.. . . When the IRT Lenox Avenue subway line was completed in 1904, central Har­ lem became more accessible. In addition the race riots of 1900 and 1905 convinced many that “there is no safety for any Negro in this part of the city at any time.” Families and single adults deserted old tenements on crowded West 53rd Street and the San Juan Hill section (West 63rd to 66th Streets, later Columbus Hill), doubled up to pay the rents, and poured into Harlem. Others were displaced by the con­ struction of Pennsylvania Station on the site of their old homes around 34th and 35th Streets and sought better housing in Harlem. White tenants and landlords bit­ terly resisted this “invasion” at first. But spurred on by ambitious real estate agents like Payton, the migration from downtown took on the character of a crusade. By 1910, African American ministers joined real estate entrepreneurs in spearheading an “On to Harlem” movement. Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930. Copyright © 1996 by Indiana University Press. Reprinted with permission. 5th mij fro Isli Afi the cer ove Atl nat Ne Ch Ne ind Ma the 19: wo for ane twe lea int< pe< 19( the or < ane Ce An am sci in i oce stri int pai alu tio mc qu; Ha 1