The Making of African America (25 page)

Such connections represented yet another distinction between the third passage and the earlier, forced transatlantic and transcontinental migrations: the movement north was not a one-way trip. While many black people left the South without looking back, others maintained their ties to their old country. Having moved piecemeal, the first-arriving family members prepared to receive others. Migrants regularly returned home not merely to visit families and friends, but to gather their kin and neighbors and carry them north. Still others shuttled back and forth, sending children south during their summer vacations to visit with grandparents and accepting nieces and nephews eager to see the big city. As men and women—in increasing numbers—moved between the South and the North, such bidirectional transit made the urban North almost as familiar as the rural South to many would-be migrants. Movement became a familiar, even natural, part of their lives.
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Every new arrival in the North seemed to add a link to the chain that connected North and South, so that by midcentury and often before, few black Southerners did not travel north without some knowledge of the communities into which they were entering. No longer was it necessary to send scouts to explore an unknown territory. Many knew precisely which employers would hire black workers and which landlords accepted black tenants. A few had jobs and housing waiting for them. Networks of kin and community that bound black people together in the South thus extended northward, not only substantially reducing the material costs of migration but also easing the psychological burden as well.

Chain migrations also made the third passage more homogeneous than either the transatlantic or the transcontinental slave trade. Existing transport routes—often the particular railroads and bus lines—that carried migrants northward reinforced the familiarity of the migration and the transfer of Southern regionalism. Migrants from Mississippi took the Illinois Central Railroad to St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. Those traveling from Georgia and the Carolinas followed the Seaboard Air Line (a railroad) along the Atlantic coast to Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Other patterns could be found. Those traveling from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama tended to settle down in Cleveland and Detroit, and, during World War II, the trans-Mississippi migration carried black people from Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas to California, Oregon, and Washington. Far more than the Chesapeake had become Igbo Land or South Carolina a New Angola in the eighteenth century, Cleveland became Alabama North and Oakland became Louisiana West in the twentieth.
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Though the starting and ending points were fixed, the movement north was hardly linear or direct. Just as the transit from Africa to America or from the seaboard to the interior was made in a series of small jumps—so-called stage migration—so too was the movement from south to north. Rather than travel from the Southern countryside to some Northern metropolis, black Southerners—perhaps a majority—migrated northward in series of small, irregular steps. Richard Wright left Jackson for Memphis, found a room and a job, and was joined by his brother. Then they “began to save toward the trip north,” as he later noted, “plotting our time, setting tentative dates for departure.” Madame C. J. Walker, who started life in rural Mississippi as Sarah Breedlove, migrated to St. Louis, Denver, and Indianapolis, before settling in New York City. Ida B. Wells left Holly Springs for Memphis and then Chicago. But unlike the earlier, forced migrations, the repeat migrations of free men and women took another form, as some migrants moved on to new communities while others retraced their steps back to their place of origin.
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Once the migrants arrived in the North, they did not stop. One pattern seemed to have been a sort of ladder, where migrants moved from countryside to town, then from town to city, generally in a south to north direction. Having earlier left the countryside for a small Southern town, black men and women journeyed to a larger town, and then began the northward trek in the same way. For many, arrival in some Northern metropolis was not the end of the journey, but often only the beginning. Rather than settle permanently, they retraced their steps back to that small way station in which they had first alighted or moved on to yet another place with more promising opportunities. Jacob Lawrence's family stopped in so many places that the individual towns and cities faded from memory. The “last two cities I can remember before moving to New York,” he noted in his memoir, “were Easton, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia.” The rest remained a blur.
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In time, the movement north took on a life of its own. The northward routes became well-worn grooves in which many traveled. Transportation was increasingly available and inexpensive, as the bus replaced the train and as the automobile—no matter how dilapitated—became an option. Every would-be migrant seemed to have relatives or friends who would welcome them at the end of their journey. The ability of black people to manage the move from the South mitigated the worst features of the earlier, forced migrations. As free men and women, they traveled with a degree of comfort that their enthralled ancestors never experienced. In addition, an increasing number of governmental offices, private agencies, and religious organizations assisted the new arrivals in finding employment and housing while dispensing large doses of advice about urban living.

With the regularization of movement north, the third great migration—like earlier ones—developed a seasonal rhythm. In some places, migration followed the ebb and flow of the agricultural calendar, as migrants awaited the completion of the annual settling up. Elsewhere, the yearly departure of young men and women was incorporated into the academic calendar, as the graduates—with diplomas in hand—bid farewell to friends and relatives. In the weeks that followed, they collected small gifts and weighty advice. Then, with a neatly packed box of goodies, they boarded a train that became known as the “Chicken Bone Special,” ready to seize the opportunities they could not hope to enjoy at home.
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As the Southern countryside emptied, there seemed fewer reasons for staying and more reasons for going. Abandoned tenant shacks and sagging barns were no match for the promises of the big city. No one wanted to be the last remaining black man or woman. “Ain't enough people I know left to give me a decent funeral,” sighed one migrant as she departed Mississippi.
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The migration fever that touched so many black Southerners during the second decade of the twentieth century morphed into a persistent virus that left few black Southerners untouched during the fifty years that followed.

But if, in time, more and more black Southerners followed the path established by their predecessors, new variations continually emerged as the links between North and South solidified, some opportunities grew and others declined, and the nature of transport changed. But no matter how they traveled, the spirit emanating from the transports was nothing like the brutal violence that had accompanied the transatlantic trade or the dismal funeral marches that were the slave coffles moving across the continent. Rather the mood was a yeasty mixture of high jinks and quiet contemplation as men and women dwelled upon what, for most, was the most important decision of their lives. While migrants missed their family and friends and some were home-sick, few suffered the kinds of despondency and depression that had accompanied the permanent separation of the slave trade.

Blues musicians like Otis Hicks—“standin' at the Greyhound bus station”—captured the contrapuntal moment, as place ousted movement as the central feature of African American life—as he was “just standin' there thinking.”
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Arrival in the North was an event in itself. As with the cruel separations from families and friends that had accompanied earlier migrations, few men and women would forget the rush that accompanied their entry into the North's great metropoles. Richard Wright captured the mixed emotions as well as any. “My first glimpses of the flat black stretches of Chicago depressed and dismayed me, mocked all my fantasies,” recalled Wright. Chicago “seemed an unreal city whose mythical houses were built on slabs of black coal wreathed in palls of gray smoke, houses whose foundations were sinking slowly into the dank prairie.” Most newcomers, however, hardly had time for Wright's sober reflections. Peering at the phalanx of humanity that gathered at the train or bus station—perhaps the largest assemblage they had ever witnessed—they searched for that familiar face that had promised to meet them while carefully avoiding eye contact with the hustlers who seemed to lurk everywhere. When at last that long-sought-after relative or friend hove into view, the new arrivals simultaneously breathed a sigh of relief and enjoyed a moment of jubilation. A firm hand guided the wide-eyed newcomer into the unknown.
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For many, the new world was as different from what they had known in the South as was frontier Alabama from their ancestors' Virginia or as low-country Carolina was from their forebears' Angola. The giant brick buildings, screeching streetcars, and neon lights were larger, louder, and brighter than anything they had known. Men and women scurried in all directions, seemingly heedless of one another and oblivious to the carefully choreographed racial protocols that governed every aspect of Southern life. Black men did not tip their hats to white men or scramble off the sidewalk to avoid a passing white woman. The previously ubiquitous COLORED ONLY signs were nowhere to be found.
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To be sure, the grand hopes for a better future were tempered by a deep understanding of the historic realities of race relations in the United States. The migrants were not surprised to learn that racial subordination would be as much a part of life in the North as it was in the South, although they would be shocked by the intensity, persistence, and novel forms it took. Eventually, some would conclude that the journey north changed nothing but the weather. But, upon arrival, the migrants looked forward to freedoms they had never known, from the simple act of taking their seat of choice in a public conveyance or having their vote courted. The promise of steady work, reasonable pay, and equal treatment seemed so utterly different from the ritual condescension and gross exploitation that they had known that it provided reason to celebrate.

Wonder at the marvels and possibilities of life in the North soon gave way to first purposes: to find regular, remunerative employment. While some migrants had jobs waiting, most began their stay in the North by searching for work. As they did, they entered into new terrain. For nearly a century, black men and women had been denied a place in the North's industrial revolution, except in the occasional role as strikebreakers. Barred from factories by an unholy alliance of white employers who disparaged their abilities and white employees (and their unions) who disparaged their persons, the vast majority—fully two-thirds in most Northern cities at the turn of the twentieth century—labored irregularly either as menials, shouldering a shovel or pushing a broom, or as domestics, cooking, cleaning, driving coaches, and minding the children of white Northerners. As W. E. B. DuBois noted in his 1899 study of Philadelphia, “[n]o matter how well trained a Negro may be... he cannot in the ordinary course of competition hope to be much more than a menial servant.” Since they had been barred from apprenticeship programs, they rarely had a chance to compete. Occupational patterns of black life in other cities confirm DuBois's observation. In 1910, nearly half of black men in Chicago worked in four occupations—janitor, porter, servant, or waiter—and some two-thirds of employed black women labored as cooks, laundresses, maids, and other domestic servants. Everywhere in the North black workers were confined to hard, unremunerative, and often demeaning jobs—when they could find work in the first place.
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A small number of black people escaped the servility and insecurity of what was politely called “negro work.” As a proportion of the population, the black men and women working as professionals, proprietors, or skilled workers never amounted to more than 3 percent of the black workforce. Although their claim to status often rested as much upon their tawny color and assertions of respectability as upon their occupation or wealth, this select few had established lucrative niches within the service trades as barbers, caterers, and waiters. An even smaller number practiced medicine and law, held elective and appointive office, or ministered the Gospel. Except for the clergy, the customers and constituents of these black entrepreneurs, professionals, and politicians were almost always white, as the North's black population was too small and too poor to support a black business and professional class.
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But even as immigrants arrived from the South, the elite's always-precarious position within Northern society was collapsing. New technologies and changing styles accounted for some of the decline, as when the advent of the safety razor eroded the standing barbers and new family-style restaurant service reduced the need for waiters. But the entrepreneurs who operated the palatial barbershops in the best hotels, catered the grand soirees, and directed small armies of servers and busboys in the poshest restaurants did not succumb merely to changes in technology and style. Everywhere black trades-men and professionals found their historic businesses shriveling before the force of racial exclusion. “Between 1895 and 1905,” according to one black leader, “colored people of Chicago have lost nearly every occupation they once had almost a monopoly.” Those same forces barred the entry of black men and women into the new white-collar occupations as stenographers and typewriters, confining them to the most menial work. Disappearing along with their occupational niches were the small shards of patronage black politicians once enjoyed, as lily white Republicans had surrendered an earlier generation's egalitarian commitments.
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