MIGRATION

Americans are known as a restless people who travel and relocate, and this restlessness is part of the idea of "American exceptionalism." Euro-America was settled by immigrants who had left their homes for a better life. Many American Indian groups, especially the Plains Indians, were migratory. Some tribes were removed by the U.S. government.

African American slaves, taken by force from Africa, were frequently transferred among owners. When slaves escaped they fled north, often into Canada. After the Civil War tens of thousands of the newly freed slaves migrated to the cities of the North. Thus Americans are a people prone to "movin' on."

THE OKLAHOMA LAND RUSH

A series of events led to the rush by non-Indians for Oklahoma land, part of Indian Territory, created by the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834. In the late nineteenth century, railroad lines were rapidly covering the United States. The national rail network grew from thirty-five thousand miles in 1865 to ninety-three thousand miles in 1880. During the 1880s more than 70,000 miles of line were built, with 164,000 miles in operation by 1890. In the spring of 1887 the Santa Fe Railroad was completed from Arkansas City, Kansas, to Gainesville, Texas, creating a new passage through Oklahoma. Railroad workers and passengers sometimes settled in the area, creating tent towns, largely ignored by the authorities.

This changed with the violence of the boomers, a group of whites seeking to open the unassigned lands. Named "boomers" because they wanted a boom in real estate development, they brought national attention to the Oklahoma district. Elias Boudinot II (1854–1896), a Cherokee, declared in a Chicago Times article (17 February 1879) that two million acres, unassigned to any tribe, were available for settlement. The Oklahoma Territory, bordered by Kansas on the north, was known for its open, relatively uninhabited prairies of fertile soil. Boudinot's announcement added to a growing state of excitement about free land.

During the 1880s and 1890s Oklahoma's Native Americans were experiencing their own significant changes. The nations were divided concerning non-Indian settlement. At a boomer conference in Kansas City on 8 February 1888, John Earlie of the Ottawa Nation in northeastern Oklahoma supported settlement by non-Indians, believing it mutually beneficial to whites and Indians. Some other nations strongly disagreed with the boomers, protesting "invasion" by "alien forces." Finally several of the Indian nations agreed, some out of desperate financial need, to sell portions of their land to the U.S. government. In early 1889 a proclamation by President Benjamin Harrison opened the Oklahoma areas for settlement by non-Indians. Over the next few years homesteaders were able to settle the land by means of a series of "land runs," actual races by horseback or horse-drawn wagons.

Oklahoma Territory fascinated many adventurous souls, including Huckleberry Finn. At the time of the publication of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the Indian Territory was topical and controversial. Contemporary readers would have understood the significance of Huck's words at the end of the novel: "I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest" (p. 229). However, this statement is an anachronism. The action of the novel is set, according to the author, "forty or fifty years ago," with Huck lighting out long before the territory was open to white settlers.

MIGRATION OF BLACKS

Rutherford B. Hayes, who became U.S. president through the Compromise of 1877, withdrew federal troops from the South, officially ending Reconstruction. Without the support of the national government, many African Americans, former slaves, found themselves in a New South that was as physically and economically dangerous and uncertain as the Old South. They remained susceptible to the racism and hatred of whites, sometimes their former owners, who had recently been defeated in a humiliating war. In the 1880s racial bigotry was legally sanctioned by the passage of Jim Crow laws (named after a character in a minstrel song), legalizing racial discrimination and effectively segregating blacks from whites in the South.

Because African Americans were no longer valuable property, white southerners had very little to lose by terrorizing the former slaves. Blacks were tortured and publicly lynched by white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Leaving the South became a dream and a goal for many blacks. Consequently southern blacks escaped this oppression by moving north, especially to the large metropolitan areas of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York, among others. Some traveled by railroad, some by wagon, and some even walked the hundreds of miles to their new homes.

One organized effort encouraging southern blacks to migrate north was the exodus movement, the participants being called "exodusters." Benjamin "Pap" Singleton (1809–1892) of Memphis, Tennessee, was instrumental in black migration. In 1869 Singleton and Columbus M. Johnson traveled to Kansas to investigate homestead land. While in Tennessee, Singleton and W. A. Sizemore created the Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association for fund-raising, transportation, and Kansas homesteading. Singleton and Sizemore also collaborated to achieve the incorporation of the Singleton Colony in Dunlap, Kansas, in June 1879. Later that year migrants from Tennessee and other southern states began arriving in Singleton, Kansas. Singleton organized the Colored Links political party in an African American section of Topeka, Kansas, called "Tennessee Town" because most of its residents were from that state. For a short while he even advocated a large migration to Liberia.

A descendant of an exoduster, Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951) was a noted filmmaker who also wrote semiautobiographical novels about black settlers in the Midwest. In The Conquest (1913), the protagonist works at a series of jobs in northern cities until he purchases a relinquishment on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota and attempts to homestead his thousand-acre allotment. He fails as a farmer, suffers an unhappy marriage, and is a broken man. Micheaux's The Homesteader (1917) is a chronicle of a black pioneer, Jean Baptiste, who also farms land in South Dakota. Unlike the protagonist of The Conquest, Baptiste succeeds at farming and settles into a happy marriage. In his novels and films Micheaux praises and promotes the ideals of rugged individualism, the work ethic, and moral courage in the face of adversity.

Other African American writers explored the theme of travel and migration. Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), dubbed "the Poet Laureate of the Negro Race" by Booker T. Washington, established himself as a poet writing in two distinct poetic voices, formal English and southern black dialect. The voices, varying in tone from light humor to somber elegy, are randomly combined in his volumes of poetry. In his novel The Sport of the Gods (titled The Jest of Fate when published in England in 1903), Dunbar relates the migration of the Hamilton family, former slaves, from the South to New York City. Dunbar offers an ambivalent message: the South is economically and socially disastrous for blacks, but the northern urban centers destroy their very souls.

Military enlistment was another important reason for migration and relocation of African Americans. The characters of F. Grant Gilmore's The Problem: A Military Novel (1915) leave their homes in Virginia to serve in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and to settle finally in Washington, D.C. This migration narrative is a treatise on the mixing of races, the "problem" of the title. It is also a polemic extolling the courage and patriotism of "Negro" troops.

In 1896, the year of the "separate but equal" Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, another African-American novelist, J. McHenry Jones, published Hearts of Gold, a novel of black migration. However, McHenry's novel depicts black migration from the North to the South, and his northern black characters are from the middle and upper classes.

In James Weldon Johnson's (1871–1938) novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), the protagonist moves from the South to the North and to Europe. The protagonist lives in the South, Connecticut, New York City, Paris, and London. He finally settles into family life in New York City, feeling guilty because he has chosen to pass as white and not claim his black heritage. The protagonist of Charles Waddell Chesnutt's (1858–1932) "The Wife of His Youth" (1898) is a prominent businessman in his northern town. He is proud of his light skin and his comfortable lifestyle. On the eve of his marriage to a pale, elegant northern woman, he is confronted by an old, uneducated, and very dark woman from the South. She is his first wife, representative of his youth, for whom, out of loyalty and honor, he jeopardizes his place in society.

Usually the first to migrate to the North were the younger men. After finding employment and settling into their new environments, these men would send money home to their families. Eventually, in the usual pattern of migration, they would move their families north. In the large city, young women, particularly if alone, faced their own difficulties. These women were vulnerable to involvement in criminal behavior, particularly prostitution. Organizations were formed to assist these young black women in adjusting to life in urban areas. Foremost among these was the National League for the Protection of Colored Women, established in New York City in 1905. Other organizations were created to unite and empower the new black citizens. The National Negro Business League was formed in 1900, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and the National Urban League in 1911.

In addition to migration within the United States, some former slaves proposed immigration to Africa, in particular Liberia, as a solution to their problems. Liberia, "founded" by the American Colonization Society in 1817, was extolled by both blacks and whites as a panacea to race and slavery issues. Henry Adams, a freedman from Louisiana who had gained political attention through his work with the Republican Party, campaigned strongly for immigration to Liberia. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, Adams and others with similar feelings gave voice to the anguish and growing frustration of the former slaves by focusing attention on the idea of emigration. Liberia is a setting in Henry F. Downing's The American Cavalryman: A Liberian Romance (1917), a narrative of emotional and political relationships among white Americans, white Liberians, native black Liberians, and Americans of mixed blood.

Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) and the "Garveyites" were among proponents of sending African Americans "back" to Africa. Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica in 1914. When he migrated to New York in 1916, he moved the UNIA headquarters with him. Garvey's weekly newspaper Negro World, published from 1918 to 1933, was managed and staffed entirely by blacks. The UNIA proposed sending American blacks to Africa not as migrants but as missionaries and ambassadors, bringing education, independence, and Christianity to Africans.

Not all African Americans supported migration. Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) strongly opposed emigration from America to Africa. He argued that American Negroes were, first and foremost, Americans. For these Americans to leave their country would diminish the blacks and the country: "Drive out the negro and you drive out Christ, the Bible, and American liberty with him. The thought of setting apart a State or Territory and confining the negro within its borders is a delusion" (p. 390).

In contrast to the migration to northern cities, some southern blacks sought rural areas in the West and Midwest, where they hoped to purchase or homestead their own farmland. Due to John Brown's highly publicized abolitionist activities in Kansas during the summer of 1856, some African Americans thought of Kansas as a land of freedom. Several black Kansas towns were founded in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Of these, Nicodemus remains the most famous. Located in northwestern Kansas, Nicodemus was founded by African American settlers from Kentucky. Two white real estate developers, W. R. Hill and W. J. Niles, had recruited the settlers for the town. The Nicodemus Historical Society still promotes Nicodemus as "an all African-American pioneer town."

A Nicodemus resident and Kansas state auditor from 1883 to 1887, E. P. McCabe envisioned the settlement of Oklahoma as a black state. He helped found Langston, Oklahoma, forty miles northwest of Oklahoma City on the direct route of the Santa Fe Railroad. A college established in Langston was first named the Colored Agricultural and Normal College, then Langston College, and now Langston University; it remains a predominantly African American university. Liberty, Oklahoma, another black township, was promoted by McCabe and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church but was abandoned because of the racial violence of the white residents of nearby Perry. Boley, Oklahoma, was settled on land previously owned by Creek Nation freedmen. Taft, Oklahoma, was a settlement of black freemen on land bought from D. H. Twine, a prominent black man in the area. The black Blind and Orphan Home, the State Training Institute for black girls, and the state hospital for the insane were established in Taft.

All black migrants did not travel to the North or to the Midwest. In 1900 Frank Boyer and Daniel Keyes walked from Georgia to southeastern New Mexico. On 5 September 1903 Boyer and Keyes, among others, signed the articles of incorporation for the Blackdom Townsite Company in order to establish a "Negro colony." Blackdom was a moderately successful farming settlement even though drilling artesian wells in semiarid New Mexico was very costly. By the early 1920s, due to crop failure and lack of water, residents had abandoned Blackdom. Most relocated in nearby Roswell, Artesia, and Hobbs. These black settlements are among the dozens established between the Civil War and the Great Depression.

Due to economic difficulties, many residents left the black townships, frequently settling in established African American communities in large northern cities. In 1870 U.S. census figures indicate that over thirty-one southern-born blacks had moved from Kentucky or Tennessee to East North Central states, mostly Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. During the same period, 13,889 Virginia-born blacks were living in Ohio.

Although some African Americans migrated to the North, most moved primarily within the South. As William Cohen states, "The pattern began to change in the 1890s, but it was not until the decade of World War I that the northward movement assumed truly significant proportions" (p. 93). According to Carter G. Woodson, among the first African American historians, the black populations of some major cities increased by several thousand in the decade between 1900 and 1910. Chicago's black population grew from thirty thousand to forty thousand, Philadelphia's from sixty thousand to eighty-five thousand, and New York's from sixty thousand to ninety thousand.

RURAL TO URBAN MIGRATION

In addition to the movement from the South to the North, Americans were moving in large numbers from rural to urban areas. In the decades after the Civil War urban population figures steadily rose, except for the 1870s. The panic of 1873 caused a decrease in manufacturing, and many industrial workers moved to rural areas. From the 1880s through the first quarter of the twentieth century, urban population steadily grew.

The literature of the period reflects this shift from rural to urban population. In the opening passage of Sister Carrie (1900), Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) writes of the evil city where innocents from small towns and farms are corrupted. In the final section of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), the young protagonist, as naive as any of the era's innocents, leaves his small hometown for the big city and a career as a journalist. The protagonists of Bayard Taylor's novels John Godfrey's Fortunes (1864) and Joseph and His Friend (1871) leave rural Pennsylvania for New York City.

In Main-Travelled Roads (1891), Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) deals with aspects of the American migration from rural to urban communities. "Up the Coulee" is the story of a man who has moved to the city where he has become accustomed to his life as an actor in the large urban atmosphere. When he returns to his rural home, he realizes that he has very little in common with his relatives and old friends. He has moved beyond his hometown, socially and emotionally. In "God's Ravens" a Chicago man returns to the farmlands of his childhood where he recovers his failing health through the simple kindness and devotion of the farmers. He was unhappy in the city but finds peace and happiness in the village. The protagonist of "A Branch Road" also returns to his rural home and is able to save his longtime beloved from a cruel husband and the drudgery of farm labor. In dozens of novels Horatio Alger Jr. writes of the "rags to riches" stories of young men from rural areas who become successful in the big city through their determination and hard work.

THE WEST AND BEYOND

Hamlin Garland echoes Alger's sentiments in his novel The Long Trail (1907), in which a young man leaves Minnesota for the Klondike. Over several months of traveling north he experiences adventures with his new prospecting friends. With hard work and determination, he makes his fortune in the Yukon gold fields and returns home a local hero. Jack London (1876–1916) also wrote of travel to the Klondike and other northern regions. The characters of "To Build a Fire" (the 1908 version), "An Odyssey of the North" (1900), and The Call of the Wild (1903) do not have the luck of the protagonist of The Long Trail. Unsuited for the harsh environment, they suffer defeat and often death in their struggles against nature.

The Great Migration, homesteading, land runs, and other large-scale internal migration are indications of the vast changes occurring in the United States during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Migration literature stands as a record of the growth and power of the nation between the Civil War and World War II.

see alsoBlacks; City Dwellers; Frontier; Immigration; Main-Travelled Roads; Reconstruction

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. New York: Modern Library, 1947.

Cherokee Cavaliers: Forty Years of Cherokee History as Told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot Family. Edited by Edward Everett Dale and Gaston Litton. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939.

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. Tales of Conjure and the ColorLine. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998.

Douglass, Frederick. "The Future of Blacks in the United States." In "The Narrative" and Selected Writings. New York: Modern Library, 1984.

Downing, Henry F. The American Cavalryman: A LiberianRomance. 1917. College Park, Md.: McGrath, 1969.

Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. 1900. New York: Penguin, 1980.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Sport of the Gods. 1901. New York: New American Library, 1999.

Garland, Hamlin. The Long Trail: A Story of the Northwest Wilderness. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907.

Garland, Hamlin. Main-Travelled Roads. 1891. New York: New American Library, 1962.

Gilmore, F. Grant. The Problem: A Military Novel. 1915. College Park, Md.: McGrath, 1969.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. 1912. New York: Knopf, 1927.

Jones, J. McHenry. Hearts of Gold. 1896. College Park, Md.: McGrath, 1969.

London, Jack. The Call of the Wild. 1903. New York: Dutton, 1968.

London, Jack. Short Stories of Jack London: AuthorizedOne-Volume Edition. Edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, and I. Milo Shepard. New York: Macmillan, 1990.

Micheaux, Oscar. The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. 1913. New York: Washington Square Press, 2003.

Micheaux, Oscar. The Homesteader. 1917. College Park, Md.: McGrath, 1969.

Taylor, Bayard. John Godfrey's Fortunes: Related by Himself; A Story of American Life. 1864. New York: Putnam, 1883.

Taylor, Bayard. Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania. New York: Putnam, 1871.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. New York: Norton, 1977.

Secondary Works

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. The Railroads: The Nation's First Big Business; Sources and Readings. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965.

Cohen, William. At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861–1915. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.

Crockett, Norman L. The Black Towns. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979.

Glaab, Charles N. The American City: A Documentary History. Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1963.

Greene, J. Lee. Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel's First Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996.

Hoig, Stan. The Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1989.

Nicodemus, Kansas. Bogue, Kans.: Nicodemus Historical Society, 1989.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Rodgers, Lawrence R. Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Vincent, Theodore G. Black Power and the Garvey Movement. San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1972.

Wiseman, Regge N. Glimpses of Late Frontier Life in New Mexico's Southern Pecos Valley: Archaeology and History at Blackdom and Seven Rivers. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico, 2000.

Woodson, Carter G. A Century of Negro Migration. 1918. New York: AMS Press, 1970.

Kelvin Beliele