The Making of African America

by Ira Berlin

  While the wartime years and the postwar decade that followed were not the most propitious moment to enter Northern society, the pressing need for labor allowed the new arrivals—and many older residents—to break the industrial color line. Almost immediately the migrants took places on the assembly lines from which black workers had long been excluded. By the 1920s, more than two-thirds of Cleveland’s black men labored in factories and other industrial sites, whereas prior to World War I less than one-quarter had worked at such jobs. At the same time, the proportion engaged in domestic or service labor fell to 12 percent from a prewar total of almost one-third. A similar pattern could be found in other Northern cities, although the entry of black workers into industrial employment took a different course from city to city and even from industry to industry.

  Still, the new arrivals struggled against the traditional opposition of white employers who had long maintained that black workers were socially and psychologically unfit for any but the most menial tasks and white workers who deeply resented laboring alongside black men and women. In some places they made little headway, and the black unemployment rate remained higher than that of whites. But, as in Cleveland, the number of black men on factory assembly lines continued to climb, so that by the 1940s the industrial sector was the single largest employer of black men. Black women also made some advances, and they too began to find a place in Northern factories. Between 1910 and 1920, the proportion of women working in factories doubled, while the proportion laboring as domestics began a slow decline.47

  To be sure, black workers remained at the bottom of the industrial hierarchy, as white employers continued to shunt them into the meanest jobs and white workers barred them from their unions. The most skilled and lucrative industrial employment remained off limits, and the factories they entered—like slaughterhouses, foundries, brick-yards, and other heavy industry—relied largely on the application of brute force. Even within these factories, unorganized black workers were generally confined to the dirtiest, most dangerous, and least remunerative jobs. Black men might butcher animals, feed blast furnaces, and mold bricks while the most skilled trades remained the property of white men. The grim circumstances under which black workers labored placed them in harm’s way, and they subsequently suffered higher rates of injury and death than white workers. But the healthiest and strongest black men and women had no assurance of job security. Economic downturns continued to drive black workers from their jobs. When prosperity returned, the first fired were always the last hired. Those who found steady employment discovered the ladder of advancement—from worker to foreman, foreman to steward, and steward to supervisor—blocked. Only rarely did black workers supervise any but their own color.48

  Black women workers found it particularly difficult to break the industrial color line. Even when factory work became available, they continued to be funneled into domestic employment and other low-status, low-paying jobs with little chance of advancement. Instead of moving up the occupational ladder, many of the women who had left jobs as teachers in the South found themselves cleaning houses in the North. Northern racism—generally de facto rather than de jure—proved as durable as the Southern version. When industrial production plummeted in the 1930s, black men and women lost many of their earlier gains. Even those who maintained their toehold in the industrial sector faced cuts in wages and periodic layoffs. The lack of job security remained a constant in the lives of black workers. For all their striving, nearly nine of ten black families lived below the federal poverty line as late as 1940. On the eve of World War II, the economic standing of most Southern migrants had hardly improved.49

  The first arrivals in the North needed places to live, as well as jobs. Although they might lodge with a relative or friend for a while, the cramped quarters in which most black people resided hardly left space for permanent guests. During most of the nineteenth century, black people had lived scattered across Northern cities. Generally these were less desirable neighborhoods around docks, railroad yards, and factories, but these same neighborhoods also housed white families—usually of the same class as their black neighbors—with whom black people shared the same alleys, blocks, and even buildings. The movement of black people into the urban North during the late nineteenth century, although small in number when compared to what would follow, reshaped racial residential patterns, creating areas in which black people composed a large portion of the residents. While few cities had such a district, residential segregation was on the rise prior to the third great migration. The process that would eventually create the ghetto had begun prior to the Great Migration.

  In general black Southerners had no particular desire to live near white people, although they did hope to escape the segregation that had defined their lives. However, as they entered the North, they were funneled into areas that were composed disproportionately of African Americans. White residents hastily evacuated these areas, often at the behest of white real estate agents. The newcomers found themselves living in neighborhoods composed almost entirely of people of their own color. If they looked elsewhere for housing, they confronted formal and informal prohibitions—restrictive covenants, zoning regulations, and so-called civic associations—employed by white residents to halt the “invasion” of their homelands. This formidable phalanx, in league with bomb-planting vigilantes and often backed by legally constituted authorities, discouraged trespasses across what had become insuperable racial barriers. Residential segregation increased steadily during the twentieth century.50

  As the concentration of black people increased and the black areas of the city became blacker, ghettos emerged. By the third decade of the twentieth century—and sometimes even earlier—these well-defined enclaves could be found in every Northern city. During the next half century, the ghettos grew, expanding in paroxysms of violence—sometimes angry eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations and sometimes full-scale race riots—as growing black communities pressed against white neighborhoods. When unable to expand, satellite communities sometimes appeared, often in some distant and generally undesirable section of the city. But they too underwent the same process of expansion, increasing in density far beyond any other areas. In time, these satellite communities—which also became uniformly black—merged with the main area of black residence, as black arrivals filled the interstices.

  Black people could not live safely beyond the borders of these enclaves. Whatever their liabilities, ghettos became the destinations of thousands of black Southerners, many of whom knew little of Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, or New York but knew all about the South Side, Paradise Valley, Little Africa, or Harlem. If eighteenth-century observers thought the influx of Africans would transform portions of mainland North America into “New Guineas,” twentieth-century commentators, like the distinguished Howard University professor Kelly Miller, declared that Northern cities were becoming like “the heart of Hayti or Liberia.”51

  Ghettoization not only restructured relationships between white and black, but also among black people. The expanding ghettos swallowed all people of African descent. No matter what their lineage, deportment, education, wealth, or social standing, black men and women found it all but impossible to reside outside the areas that whites had designated for black people. The differences in wealth and status along with fine distinctions of color, hair, and other physiological features that the Old Settlers had employed to distinguish themselves from the mass of black people mattered less and less—at least to white people.

  Old residents and new arrivals, forced to create a city within a city, soon found excitement in the places where they could locate their own food, religion, and music. Ghettos hummed with familiar smells and sounds, as restaurants serving black-eyed peas and ham hocks, clubs and theaters featuring down-home music, and churches preaching the old-time gospel appeared everywhere. These places attracted ambitious black men and women, since businessmen, preachers, novelists, musicians, and artists of all sorts found comfort and dollars in the black a
udience. The most famous of these cultural enclaves—New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville—left a lasting mark on African American and American culture. But nearly every Northern city had a similar area. Like the explosions of cultural creativity that accompanied the movement of African peoples across the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and African American people across the continent in the nineteenth century, the renascences of the twentieth century generated a sense of pride which eventually was captured in the word soul, an indefinable quality that spoke to the essence of African American life. The swagger that could be found among the residents of the inner city revealed that black people had taken ownership. The inner city ceased to be a place of confinement but a familiar terrain and even a home turf.52

  By the 1930s—perhaps before—the inner city was also becoming a source of political power. Employing the suffrage which had been denied them in the South, migrants joined with the Old Settlers to create a new politics. To be sure, it built upon an old protest tradition that reached back to the Revolution and was reinforced by post-Civil War Republican ascendancy. But it also reflected the new assertive-ness of men and women Alain Locke captured in the name “New Negroes”: “self respecting, educated, prosperous, race-proud, self dependent, deserving and demanding full citizenship.” Emerging from churches, social service agencies, women’s clubs, labor unions, neighborhood organizations, the Communist and Socialist parties, as well as fuller participation in both the Republican and Democratic parties—the new politics was quick to seize the celebratory rhetoric of American democracy and turn it against the American apartheid system. Black men and women organized boycotts and rent strikes; they demanded equal pay for equal work and warred against exclusion and segregation in schools, restaurants, theaters, and the workplace. Their efforts were supported by a growing network of newspapers—numbering well over one hundred by the 1930s—that sprang up as black people filled Northern cities. Most were local sheets, but some, like Chicago’s Defender,New York’s Amsterdam News, and Pittsburgh’s Courier, enjoyed a larger reach, knitting local struggles into a national movement. Before long, black men began appearing in municipal and state legislatures. In 1928, Oscar De Priest took a seat in Congress as the representative from Chicago, and others would follow. With them came a growing political clout.

  Over time, black voters became an increasingly important part of the Northern electorate. Turning away from the party of Lincoln, they became an active element in the New Deal coalition. In many districts in the North, black voters—at least according to their advocates—held the balance of power, a claim at least some white politicians took seriously. Once in office, black officials and those white officials beholden to black voters pressed for new civil rights legislation and the enforcement of long-ignored laws. Perhaps more significant, political activism swelled beyond the boundaries of partisan politics, as a new, more militant civil rights movement demanded full equality.53

  In 1940, American mobilization for war provided new leverage for civil rights advocates. They demanded, among other things, a desegregation of the armed forces and equal access to employment in the expanding defense industries. When it became evident that those opportunities would not be forthcoming, protests began. Under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, militants threatened a massive march of black people on Washington, shaking the Roosevelt administration. Although Randolph’s March on Washington Movement eventually withdrew its demand for desegregation of the military, in June 1941 a reluctant President Roosevelt issued an executive order providing “full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries” and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission to root out discrimination. The success of the March on Washington Movement fueled political activism, confirming the notion that only mass action could end the policy of exclusion and separation. Activists launched the Double V campaign; the membership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People grew by a thousand percent; and new, even more militant organizations, like the Committee of Racial Equality, began to protest segregation in restaurants, theaters, and other public places.54

  While the larger structure of white supremacy hardly budged, the tremors were felt, not least in the workplace. Employers—pressured by the massive expansion of industrial production—opened their doors to black women as well as men. Aided by their incorporation into the new industrial labor unions, black men and women enlarged their toehold in industrial America. Between December 1941 and August 1942, the number of black men employed in manufacturing jumped from 500,000 to 1.2 million. Over the course of the decade, the share of black men working as “operatives”—the census designation for factory workers—doubled, making up over one-fifth of the black workforce. Representative of changes in other industrial cities, the proportion of black workers employed in Detroit’s auto industry increased from 4 to 15 percent between 1942 and the war’s end. Black men—particularly those who had put down roots in the North—at last began to climb the ladder of industrial employment, moving from unskilled to skilled labor, from a place on the line into the ranks of stewards and foremen. The number of black women operatives also increased, so that nearly one-fifth of employed black women worked in factories.55

  Still, advances in industrial employment were fitful and frustratingly slow. The Fair Employment Practices Commission sometimes successfully pressured obdurate corporate employers, particularly those dependent upon wartime contracts. But just as often the commission’s directives were ignored, and racially exclusive policies remained in place. The commission had even less success with smaller, proprietary firms that feared that the introduction of black workers would stir discord. Although usually just a pretext for maintaining a lily white labor force, the threat was real enough. Some of the largest and most powerful labor unions—especially in the building trades—continued to exclude black workers from membership, and the members themselves were more than willing to protect white privilege with force, as a rash of “hate strikes” confirmed. Long after major corporate employers and labor unions formally committed themselves to equal opportunity in the workplace, the familiar pattern of black workers being assigned to dangerous, dirty work remained much in evidence.

  By the 1940s, a full generation after the beginning of the third passage, the place of black men and women in the most dynamic sector of the American economy remained precarious. Unemployment among black men and women was at least twice as high for black as for white workers, and discrimination—indeed outright exclusion—was common. Entry into white-collar work was near impossible. The first arrivals could do little to bend the prejudices of Northern employers—no matter what their credentials. Prior to World War II, few black men and women—6 percent compared to 37 percent of whites—could be found behind an office desk or a department store counter earning wages as salespersons, bookkeepers, accountants, or clerks. Exploring American race relations in the 1940s, Gunnar Myrdal and his associates concluded, “the North is almost as strict as the South in excluding Negroes from middle class jobs....”56

  Again the war made a difference. The shortage of workers allowed black men and women to secure employment in jobs previously reserved for whites. Many—some of them the children of Southern immigrants—gained their positions as civil servants in expanding federal, state, and municipal bureaucracies, as teachers, postal workers, middle managers, and clerks of all sorts. Others secured employment in the private sector. While rank discrimination remained, the advances were real, particularly in the defense industry.57 An expanding cadre of black men and women exchanged their blue collars for white and enjoyed greater stability of employment, a chance for regular salary increases, access to health care, and pensions at retirement, all the while escaping from the exhausting labor of the assembly line. Their presence began to change African American life.58

  As the wages of black workers increased—growing to many times what they would have
been in the rural South—other opportunities arose. With money in their pockets, black men and women became eager consumers. Black entrepreneurs moved quickly to address their needs, opening beauty salons, barber shops, grocery stores, restaurants, dance halls, theaters, and—ultimately—funeral parlors to serve the greatly enlarged Northern black population. Some grew beyond these petty enterprises and began working in banking, insurance, publishing, and manufacturing. They fielded sports teams, manufactured cosmetics, produced records, and shot movies. Promoting the notion that benefits would accrue to all black people from the expansion of “race businesses,” they urged black customers to “buy black.” For their part, white storekeepers, eager to maintain the patronage of black customers, became susceptible to the pressure of “don’t shop where you can’t work” campaigns.59

  Wartime prosperity not only enlarged black communities but also made them more diverse. Like the plantation or cropper villages of earlier times, the inner city’s social geography housed a well-defined society that reflected the changes set in motion by the third great migration. Old Settlers faded—although hardly disappeared—pushed aside by a new, Southern-born elite, as some of the new arrivals, seizing the main chance, gained prominence as entrepreneurs, professionals, politicians, and preachers—sometimes all four at once.