GREAT MIGRATION, 1910–1920

In 1914, 90 percent of African Americans lived in the states of the former Confederacy, where so-called Jim Crow statutes had legalized the separation of Americans by race. These statutes were validated by a series of Supreme Court rulings during the 1890s, culminating in the famous 1896 "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, which made segregation legal in the United States. But between 1910 and 1920, the percentage of African Americans living in the South began to fall. By 1930, more than 21.2 percent of African Americans lived outside of the South.

Historians continue to debate why African Americans failed to leave the South in large numbers at the end of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Migration itself is a result of both push and pull factors— prejudice, better economic opportunities, discrimination, etc. While the South certainly provided push factors, the North offered strong pull elements for Southern African Americans, appearing to have a more open society and better economic opportunities, though it still had its share of prejudice and discrimination.

Some historians argue that European immigration accounts for the slow start of the Black exodus. The huge demand for labor in the heavily industrialized North was met mostly by massive European immigration. Irish and German laborers first filled many of the urban factory jobs, and the remaining jobs tended to go to southern and eastern Europeans. Had Northern industries not met their demand for labor with European immigration, some historians argue that employers would have more actively recruited Southern Blacks.

World War I (1914–1918) greatly accelerated the migration of African Americans out of the rural South, where agriculture had been plagued by floods and crop failures, including a devastating plague of boll weevils that decimated the cotton crop. With greater demand for the war effort, factory owners in northern cities sent recruiters to draw workers northward with glowing reports of high wages and good living conditions. During the decade between 1910 and 1920, the African American population of the North and West grew by 333,000.

Once in Northern urban areas, however, African Americans were segregated in urban slums, where they continued to be objects of race hatred by their white neighbors, especially unskilled workers who viewed them as competitors for their jobs. A growing number of African Americans during this time began to demand the rights long denied to them, particularly higher wages, equal protection under the law, and the chance to vote and hold political office. Leading the increasingly militant National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), W.E.B. DuBois (1868–1963) took on all of these aims as key goals for the group.

Turning to terrorism, lynch mobs in the South murdered more than 70 African Americans in 1919, ten of them World War I veterans in uniform. The new Ku Klux Klan, committed to the intimidation of African Americans, gained more than 100,000 members. In 1919 the country saw the worst outburst of racial riots in American history up until that time. Two of the most tragic occurred in Washington, DC, where a majority of the offenders were white veterans; and in the Chicago slums, where for thirteen days a mob of whites fought African Americans. Before the year ended, twenty-five race riots had resulted in hundreds of deaths and injuries, and millions of dollars worth of property damage.

Most African Americans resisted their attackers, as the NAACP advised them to do, and liberal whites organized to fight intolerance and to lobby for anti-lynching laws, but by and large African Americans were neither hopeful of remedy nor ready to campaign on their own behalf. Instead, by 1923, about half a million African Americans had joined the Universal Negro Improvement Association led by Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), a Jamaican Black nationalist who proposed to create a new empire in Africa with himself on the throne. Though Garvey's plans for an empire collapsed, his movement met the powerful African American need for self-identity, racial pride, and an escape from a society that denied them dignity, opportunity, and personal safety.

See also: Jim Crow Laws, Ku Klux Klan, Plessy v Ferguson, Slum

FURTHER READING

Grimshaw, Allen D., ed. Racial Violence in the United States. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1969.

Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.

Nieman, Donald G. Promises to Keep : African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Schaffer, Ronald. America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.