The Making of African America (23 page)

This third great migration dwarfed all previous migrations of black people. It carried more than ten times the number transferred from Africa to mainland North America in the transatlantic slave trade and six times the number of those shipped from the seaboard South to the interior by continental slavers. Such a vast movement necessarily had many sources, which shifted over the course of the twentieth century and differed from place to place, as the velocity and vectors of the migration changed.
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The original impetus, however, could be found at the end of the nineteenth century, when a small beetle invaded Texas and devastated the state's cotton crop. As the boll weevil moved eastward to an even greater feast, the South's cotton economy collapsed in the face of the massive infestation. Some planters turned to other crops. These were generally less labor intensive than cotton, and black workers found themselves ousted from their old homes. Meanwhile, the boll weevil continued on its way. When it retreated, disasters—natural and man made—pressed upon black agriculturalists, adding to the omnipresent burden of poverty and exploitation engineered by white planters to maintain a labor force that was readily available and cheap, if not always as compliant as they would like.

The outbreak of war in Europe eliminated a most important market for Southern cotton and depressed prices. Even when the market revived, the boll weevil continued to make its presence felt. With no cotton to harvest and little hope that the next year's crop would be better, black tenants and sharecroppers took to the road. Trying to stay one step ahead of the dreaded beetle, they moved from areas of infestation to those where the pest had yet to arrive. There they worked at a feverish pace, increasing cotton production in hopes of escaping debts accumulated as a result of previous crop failures. But these harvests, swollen by the workers' extraordinary exertions, only drove prices down and further impoverished black workers.

The entry of the United States into World War I offered opportunities to desperate men and women to remake their lives on new ground. The war created a severe labor shortage in the industrial North. European immigrants—the men and women who had stoked American industrial expansion for almost a century—could no longer cross the war-time Atlantic. Military conscription subtracted yet other white workingmen from the labor force and exacerbated the labor shortage. Taken together, the decline of European immigration and the escalation of the draft made room for black men in Northern factories, dry docks, and railroad yards, allowing them to enter manufactories from which they had previously been barred.

The federal officials and Northern industrialists, eager to assure a ready supply of labor, added to the northward pull. The Department of Labor established the Division of Negro Economics and corporations sent representatives into the South to recruit black workers. Labor agents—some of them deeply idealistic in promoting black life outside the South and others crudely opportunistic in exploiting the migrant's insecurity—urged black Southerners to seize the moment. So too did some black leaders, most famously Robert Abbott, the militant editor of the
Chicago Defender.
Seeing the possibilities of racial advancement—along with a larger readership for his journal—Abbott wielded the biblical imagery of an Egyptian-style exodus and a promised land to promote the advantages of black life in the North. While the deterioration of the cotton economy pushed black Southerners to migrate, offers of free transportation, guarantees of regular employment, and assurances of “a better world” pulled black Southerners north.
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Still black men and women were reluctant to sever ties of kinship and fellowship generations in the making. What had been established at great cost would not be surrendered easily. Black Southerners also remained deeply skeptical that the white North was fundamentally different than the white South and doubted they would be allowed to compete as equals for employment in the urban marketplace. They worried about tales of the cold, forbidding Northern climate and equally icy religion. A fear born of the belief that they would lose what little they had deterred many black Southerners from leaving the devil they knew for one they could only imagine. Movement from the rural South would proceed with great care.

But no love of tradition or ingrained peasant conservatism tied black people to the land. The movement from the South had its origins in movement within the South. As the cotton crop, which had once drawn them to the black belt as slaves and held them there as a freed people, at last loosened its grip, black men and women had already begun leaving the land and crowding into Southern hamlets and villages. At first they arrived as sojourners or birds of passage, eager to earn some cash during the slack season in order to maintain their place in the countryside. Before long, the occasional sojourns became seasonal, and then the seasonal sojourns became regular events. At last, the country folk broke with their rural roots. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the proportion of Alabama's black population residing in cities doubled, so that by 1920 one black person in five lived in urban Alabama. A similar exodus from the countryside could be found throughout the cotton South. Until the 1930s, more black people resided in Southern than in Northern cities and much of the south-to-north movement would be a city-to-city migration.
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Southern towns, timber camps, and mine villages offered black people little in the way of prosperity. Black men and women found themselves barred from skilled work and—except in a few places, like Birmingham's steel mills—from most industrial work. Instead, black workers found themselves consigned to a broad category denominated “casual labor,” which provided neither a living wage nor regular employment. Employers mobilized these irregular arrivals from the countryside—many of them single men, unskilled and without resources—to drive down wages, even for longtime white residents and skilled workers. Black men labored long hours under brutal conditions with scant remuneration. Married men generally avoided such work; those entering were chary about importing their families, and often lived in boarding houses or sex-segregated barracks. For black workers, the towns and camps became lonely places. To reunite with wives and children and to make ends meet, they returned to the countryside seasonally to plant and harvest. But the steady shrinkage of cotton acreage and the low wages paid to seasonal agricultural labor doomed this strategy. The shuttle between town and countryside, industrial or quasi-industrial employment in camps and mines and work in the fields frayed the commitment of black people to their ancestral homes.

While men and women with families left the countryside only reluctantly, young men and women saw a different vision of the town and country. The “town,” observed sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, offered “freedom from the restraints imposed by rural churches. In dance halls, [they] could give free rein to their repressed impulses without incurring the censure of the elders for ‘their sinful conduct' ... [H]aving caught a glimpse of the world beyond ... these men and women were lured to a world beyond the small towns where they might enjoy even greater freedom and more exciting adventures.” In the words of another observer, “Negroes were churning about in the South, seeking a vent.” What they learned in the towns and villages, coal mines, sawmills, and timber camps informed them of yet other possibilities.
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The young black men and women who were already on the move within the South were among the first to leave the region altogether. Tired of the constraints of life in the South, they saw the possibilities of higher wages and better prospects for themselves and their children in the North. Writing in 1919, an investigator for the Department of Labor declared flatly, “the mere fact of a Negro's having moved out of his former home is no evidence that he had moved to a Northern city. It was the town Negroes who left the region.” Having spent time in some crossroad village and relocated to a regional center, and then perhaps moving on to Atlanta, Mobile, New Orleans, or Richmond, the men and women who reached the North could hardly be considered peasantry, and the solidarity and community of the peasant village had long since dissolved—if it ever existed—in the urban South. They had learned much from their stay in the urban South. “I had some boys working in Birmingham,” remembered one Alabama farmer who had migrated north, “so I went there first. Everything looked pretty good so I decided to bring the old lady to Birmingham, which I did. We got along pretty good there, but I heard about work up here, so me and my sons came up here, and after we got all settled, sent back for my wife and daughter.”
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As the trickle of black migrants became a flood, plantation owners and merchants sniffed “a plan to relieve the South out of its well-behaved, able-bodied labor,” and so they retaliated. Reviving old regulations designed to immobilize black workers-anti-enticement laws, controls on labor agents, and even legislation against hitchhiking— Southern planters tried to prevent black workers from leaving. But the old barriers against movement no longer held. Attempts at intimidating sharecroppers, sequestering copies of the Chicago
Defender,
and stopping trains only convinced would-be migrants that the rumors of better times in the North must be true. Finding their paths blocked by sheriffs and hooded vigilantes, migrants fled under the cover of darkness, finally having the last laugh on the agents of their oppression. Planters and merchants continued to speak of “their Negroes,” but black people dismissed the possessive.
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The fabric of Southern society continued to unravel in the 1930s as the system of cultivation that relied upon tenants and sharecroppers—shaken during the first three decades of the twentieth century—collapsed entirely. Attempts by an increasingly activist state to save the old regime only hastened its decline, leaving black country folk in an ever more precarious position. In subsidizing acreage reduction, crop diversification, and mechanization, various federal New Deal programs further reduced the need for agricultural labor. The great planters enlarged and consolidated their holdings, pushing sharecroppers and tenants from the land and creating massive underemployment and unemployment for black wageworkers. Their actions amounted to a Southern enclosure movement funded by the federal government. While landowners themselves—no more than one-quarter of black agriculturalists in the cotton belt—might be able to subsist along with their families, black tenants and sharecroppers had no work and no livelihood. Planters and furnishing merchants who once schemed to tie black people to the land now only wanted them gone. The number of black sharecroppers fell from about 400,000 in 1930 to fewer than 300,000 in 1940 and to fewer than 200,000 a decade later, as the agricultural ladder of laborer, cropper, tenant, and landowner that had been created following the Civil War collapsed.
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Black Southerners fared no better in the cities of the region. Racial solidarity led Southern employers, almost always white, to award scarce jobs to white men, even if it meant letting a black employee go. “Niggers, back to the Cotton fields, city jobs are for white folks,” the slogan of the fascist Atlanta Black Shirts, suggests the pressure that would send black urbanities to the North.
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The outbreak of a second war in Europe and then in Asia, and the American entry into those conflicts, greatly accelerated the northward and cityward movement, as velocity of the out-migration increased manyfold. The expansion of industrial production and the removal of millions of men to fight in the European and Pacific theaters again created opportunities for Southern-born black workers, just as the transformation in Southern agriculture was forcing black people off the land as workers and owners. By the 1950s, the cotton economy had been remade: tractors roamed the fields where sharecroppers had once followed mules and herbicides did the work of an army of hoe hands. Before long, mechanical cotton pickers swept the fields clean. As the pace of mechanization quickened, Southern agriculture turned from a labor-intensive to a capital-intensive enterprise. The demand for agricultural workers shrank, and black people quit the land in growing numbers. Those who did not leave voluntarily often faced eviction. By the mid-twentieth century, only 73,000 sharecroppers remained in the South. Black landowners fared no better. Thousands of black men and women exited the old plantations, some by choice but others under duress.
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Behind the hammer blows of economic change stood the region's seemingly immutable commitment to white supremacy. Represented most horrifically by the broken, mutilated bodies that swayed from a lynch noose, the protocols of white supremacy were embedded in the most commonplace acts of everyday life. From the ritual tip of the hat to Mr. Charlie to the scramble to yield the sidewalk before Miss Anne, black men and women faced lifelong humiliation, political impotence, and impoverishment. Denied the rights of manhood and womanhood, they were “boys” and “girls” until they were old enough to become “uncles” and “aunts.” Denied the rights of citizenship, they were barred from participation in the decisions that shaped their lives. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Southern legislators extended the Jim Crow system, adding the force of law to practice, officially sanctioning the segregation of parks, schools, libraries, hotels, theaters, restaurants, restrooms, and drinking fountains. Hardly a public doorway in the South did not bear a sign indicating WHITE or COLORED. Challenges to the supremacist regime—even of the trivial sort—could unleash furious rampages enacted by hooded thugs who generally took their cues from men and women who claimed impeccable respectability. Everywhere black Southerners found themselves forced to play out the galling rituals of subordination. “Ain't make nothing, don't speck nothing no more till I die,” one black-belt farmer told sociologist Charles Johnson in 1930, summing up the despair endemic to Southern black life.
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