How Southern Landowners Tried to Restrict the Great Migration - HISTORY - 0 views
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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 agricultural labor force in the South. This decades-long, multi-generational movement of Black Americans, known as the Great Migration, impacted southern labor to such a degree that white landowners resorted to coercive tactics to keep African Americans from leaving.
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After Reconstruction ended in 1877, Jim Crow segregation became the law across the South, restricting political, economic and social mobility of African Americans. According to The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, a comprehensive history of the migration by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson, in 1900, nine out of every 10 Black Americans lived in the South, and three out of every four lived on farms. Despite a concerted effort by white southern landowners to make them stay, by 1970, nearly half of all African Americans, about 47 percent, would be living outside of the South.
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But the fate of southern Black Americans changed in 1916 when news of better jobs and conditions up North started spreading in rural communities. Black newspapers, like The Chicago Defender, ran stories about opportunities for African Americans in steels mills and factories and encouraged them to leave the South.
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"They actually interfered with the U.S. Mail to prevent the Defender from being distributed,” says James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association and author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration.
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“They believed, incorrectly, that what was really happening was Black people were being stirred up by labor agents from northern industries coming South to round up Black workers.
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Black Americans who fled racial oppression either returned to retrieve the rest of their family or sent train tickets back home. In response, as white southerners observed train platforms packed with African Americans, several cities passed ordinances that made it illegal for trains to accept pre-paid tickets.
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“Police literally went up to the platforms and rounded people up,” says Grossman, to dissuade Black people from traveling. And the intimidation tactic worked.
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A common belief among white southerners was that Black people were intellectually inferior and would not think to move to the North in search of better opportunities.
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African American field workers waiting to be paid near Homestead, Florida, 1939.Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Image
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Although there were instances of African Americans being recruited to work as Pullman porters on railways and seasonally on tobacco farms in Connecticut, the true northern labor agents were African Americans themselves, says Grossman.
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Still, the Great Migration powered on. With a promise of a better life, more dignity and employment, African Americans began to leave from a train station further away, so they wouldn’t be recognized by locals or police officers.
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White southerners, anticipating more labor shortages, utilized the mechanical cotton picker more in the 1940s, often evicting Black sharecroppers from their land, who in turn migrated elsewhere in search of work. These developments cemented the African American pilgrimage from the South until the 1970s.