When more than six million African Americans left the South for better opportunities in the North and West, between 1916 and 1970, their relocation changed the demographic landscape of the United States and much of the workforce. agricultural work in the South. This decades-long multigenerational movement of black Americans known as the Great Migration had such an impact on the Southern workforce that white landowners resorted to coercive tactics to prevent African Americans leaving.
After Reconstruction ended in 1877, Jim Crow’s segregation became law throughout the South, limiting the political, economic, and social mobility of African Americans. According to The Heat of Other Suns: The Epic Tale of the Great American Migration, A Comprehensive History of Migration by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson, in 1900, nine in 10 black Americans lived in the South and three in four lived on farms. Despite a concerted effort by white southern landowners to keep them, by 1970 nearly half of all African Americans, about 47%, were believed to be living outside the South.
Restriction of wages and access to information
After slavery, white southerners still depended on blacks as their main labor force. From picking cotton, working in rice plantations and tobacco fields, logging or doing domestic work, African Americans performed the same grueling chores as when they were enslaved. And the options for upward mobility under Jim Crow were grim and dangerous. Black sharecroppers paid rent to live and work on the land of the white planters, who took a percentage of their harvest and billed for seeds, tools, and food, leaving black sharecroppers in crushing debt. By law, sharecroppers could not leave the land until the debt was paid, which forced them to stay.
But the plight of black South Americans changed in 1916 when news of better jobs and conditions in the North began to spread to rural communities. Black newspapers, like Chicago Defender, published articles on opportunities for African Americans in steel mills and factories and encouraged them to leave the South.
Because the white southerners could not afford to lose cheap and bonded labor, they attempted to cut off access to the Chicago Defender.
“They actually interfered with the US Mail to prevent the Defender from being distributed,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association and author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration.
Orders and intimidation
With a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 – largely linked to the release of the film “A Birth of a Nation” which portrayed black men as savages, and the economic gains of black entrepreneurs who threatened the social order of the nation. white supremacy, violence against African Americans has erupted across the United States. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, at least 4,075 African Americans were lynched in the South between 1870 and 1950.
African-American field workers wait to be paid near Homestead, Florida, 1939.
Photo 12 / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Black Americans who fled racial oppression either returned to pick up the rest of their families or sent train tickets home. In response, as white southerners watched the platforms of trains packed with African Americans, several cities passed ordinances prohibiting trains from accepting prepaid tickets. Orders were also put in place to prevent group travel if black families or groups of African Americans attempted to purchase group fares.
“The police literally walked up to the docks and rounded up the people,” says Grossman, to deter black people from traveling. And the bullying tactic worked.
“It was based on the concept of place, which was the word blacks and whites used to refer to where blacks often fell in the social order,” says Grossman. If African Americans left the South, then there was “a threat to both economic interests and the way of life of white people.”
Prevent recruitment
A common belief among white Southerners was that blacks were intellectually inferior and would not think of moving north in search of better opportunities.
“They mistakenly believed that what was really happening was that black people were being agitated by labor agents from northern industries coming from the south to round up black workers. This is partly because they genuinely believe in black lack of action and that black people cannot figure these things out on their own, ”says Grossman.
While there have been cases of African Americans recruited to work as Pullman porters on railways and seasonally on Connecticut tobacco farms, the real labor agents in the North were African Americans themselves, says Grossman. Black Americans who had migrated north and worked for better wages visited their families in the South and told them about available jobs. But white Southerners were trying to persuade black people that life wouldn’t be better in the North and that working conditions were terrible, even invoking a myth that African Americans couldn’t survive in cold weather.
Yet the Great Migration has ignited. With the promise of a better life, more dignity and more jobs, African Americans started from a station further away, so that they would not be recognized by locals or the police.
Although migration slowed during the Great Depression, due to lack of jobs, in 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, which prohibited federal agencies from discriminatory employment practices for war-related jobs , launched a massive wave of blacks leaving the rural South for defense jobs during World War II.
White Southerners, anticipating more labor shortages, made greater use of the mechanical cotton picker in the 1940s, often expelling black sharecroppers from their land, who in turn migrated elsewhere in search of work. These developments cemented the South African-American pilgrimage until the 1970s.
