Lost Black History
By Don Valentine
There are nuanced arguments made about what caused the Great Migration. It has made fertile suppositions for several books and lecture series. The idiom “Greener Pastures” is the Twitter version. After the sedition by the South was quelled, they refused to change the social dynamics between the races. This brutal inequality persisted across the South and the segregationist tool, “Jim Crow” would become the law of the land.
Black Southerners were still forced to make their living working the land due to Black Codes and the sharecropping system. Blacks had zero chance for economic security in the South. Sharecropping forced borrowing from merchants, who had no compunction to be fair to freed slaves. The Klan had been officially dissolved in 1869, but continued intimidation, violence and lynching of Blacks. The Black Codes and Jim Crow laws created a life that was not much of an improvement. Blacks in the former Confederate states were really free only on paper!
The Great Migration was the relocation of more than 6 million Blacks from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West from about 1916 to 1970. The academic resource history.com comments that Blacks “…took advantage of the need for industrial workers that arose during the First World War.” During the Great Migration, “Greener Pastures” helped Black people begin to build a new place for themselves in public life. They actively confronted racial prejudice, economic, political and social challenges to create a Black urban culture that would exert enormous influence. This influence is still felt in our lives today. That sustained energy helped elect the first Black President.
The ramp up for war production moved at a frenzied pace. Recruiters solicited Blacks to move North, to the vexation of racist plantation owners. Our Black newspapers, like the widely read Chicago Defender, published advertisements touting the opportunities available in the cities of the North and West, along with first-person accounts of their success.
Black migrants did not find the North or Western states to be a safe haven from the purgatory of life as a Black person. Between 1910 and 1930, the Black population in the Northern states increased by nearly 40% as a result of migration, particularly to large cities. Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore and New York City had some of the greatest increases in the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of Black people were recruited for industrial tasks, such as those related to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s growth.
Because the changes were concentrated in cities that had attracted millions of European immigrants, tensions rose as people battled for limited jobs and housing. Tensions were often fiercest between Blacks and the Irish immigrants. The Irish were defending newly obtained roles and areas. Like most White people of that era they viewed Blacks through a disparaging prism.
In our current educational climate this story would remain lost. Thanks to our Black Press we can still learn about the history of our tribulations “In The Land Of The Free…”
