by Ira Berlin
74 Quoted in Jay R. Mandle, The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy after the Civil War (Durham NC, 1978), 20.
75 Charles S. Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation (Chicago, 1934), 11; Wright, Old South, New South, 65, 98; Mandle, The Roots of Black Poverty, 20; Thomas J. Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities (Garden City NY, 1928), 88—89, 105.
76 Wright, Old South, New South, 119—20.
77 James R. Grossman, “A Chance to Make Good, 1900—1929” in Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, eds., To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (New York, 2000), 358.
78 C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham NC, 1994), chap. 5.
79 For the linkage between the blues and the commitment to migration in search of freedom that would transform the African landscape, see Waldo F. Martin, “The Sounds of Blackness: African-American Music” in William R. Scott and William G. Shade, eds., Upon These Shores: Themes in the African American Experience (New York, 2000), 260—61; Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 202—97; William Barlow, “Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia, 1989), chaps. 1—2; Jeff Todd Tilton, Early Down-home Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana IL, 1975); David Evans, “Blues: Chronological Overview” and Susan Oehler, “The Blues in Transcultural Context” both in Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby, eds., African American Music: An Introduction (New York, 2006), 97—126; Chase, America’s Music, chap. 27.
80 Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, esp. 221—22; Barlow, “Looking Up at Down,” chaps. 1—4; LeRoi Jones, Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed From It (New York, 1968), chap. 1; William Ferris, Jr., Blues from the Delta (London, 1970), 11—55.
81 http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/delta/2541/blflewis.htm.
82 Steckel, “The African American Population of the United States” in Haines and Steckel, eds., Population History of North America, 464; Wright, Old South, New South, 98, 200—5.
83 Leslie H. Fishel, Jr., “The Negro in Northern Politics, 1870—1900,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42 (1955), 466—89; Desmund King and Stephen Tuck, “De-Centering the South: America’s Nationwide White Supremacist Order After Reconstruction,” Past and Present 194 (2007), 213—53; Joe William Trotter, Jr., “Blacks in the Urban North: The ‘Underclass Question’ in Historical Perspective” in Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton NJ, 1993), 59—60; Edward Meeker and James Kau, “Racial Discrimination and Occupational Attainment at the Turn of the Century,” Explorations in Economic History 14 (1977), 250—76; Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty, 128, 134—36; quoted in Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915—1945(Urbana IL, 1985), 30—31.
84 Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation quoted in Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 169.
85 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (New York, 1897), 219; also see Washington, “The Rural Negro and the South,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections 41 (1914), 123; Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856—1901 (NewYork, 1972), 213-19; Grossman, Land of Hope, 81—82; Cohen, Freedom’s Edge, 249. Even after black people began to move north in large numbers, the presumption of their attachment to the South remained. In 1923, Atlantic Monthly summarized the conventional wisdom: “The Negro race was found almost entirely within the Southern states, and it was always assumed that it would probably remain there” in E. T. H. Shaffer, “A New South—The Negro Migration,” Atlantic Monthly 132 (Sept. 1923), 403.
86 Guido Van Rijn, “Coolidge’s Blue: African American Blues on Prohibition, Migration, Unemployment, and Jim Crow” in Robert Springer, ed., Nobody Knows Where The Blues Come From: Lyrics and History (Jackson MS, 2006), 151—63.
Chapter Four: The Passage to the North
1 U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington DC, 1975), 22; Richard Easterlin, ”The Population of the United States since 1920” in Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, eds., A Population History of North America (Cambridge UK, 2000), 642; J. Trent Alexander, “Demographic Patterns of the Great Migration (1915—1940)” and “Demographic Patterns of the Great Black Migration (1940—1970)” both in Steven A. Reich, ed., Encyclopedia of the Great Black Migration, 2 vols. (Westport CT, 2006), 1: 236—43.
2 My understanding of the third passage includes what has been called the “Great Migration”—the movement northward that accompanied World War I and extends through the Great Depression, World War II, and beyond, or roughly the years between 1910 and 1970, at which point the movement of black people between North and South reversed course.
3 Carole Marks, Farewell—We‘reGood and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington IN, 1989), 1; George A. Davis and O. Fred Donaldson, Blacks in the United States: A Geographic Perspective (Boston, 1975), 34—37; Hope Eldridge and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Population Redistribution and Economic Growth, 1870—1950 (Philadelphia, 1964), 90; James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill NC, 2005), 14; Thomas J. Woofter, Negro Migration: Changes in Rural Organization and the Population of the Cotton Belt (New York, 1920), 134. The counties which compose the Alabama black belt are: Autauga, Bullock, Dallas, Greene, Hale, Lowndes, Macon, Marengo, Montgomery, Perry, Russell, Sumter, and Wilcox.
4 Blaine Brownell and David Goldfield, Urban America: From Downtown to No Town (Boston, 1979), 259—63; Joe W. Trotter, Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington IN, 1991), 482; James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989), 48; Historical Statistics of the United States, pt. 1: 95. Because of the differences in origins, size, and direction between migrations that accompanied the first and second world wars, some historians and demographers have treated them as distinct events. See, for example, Alexander, “Demographic Patterns of the Great Black Migration (1915—1940)” and “Demographic Patterns of the Great Black Migration (1940—1970)” both in Reich, ed., Encyclopedia of the Great Black Migration, 1: 236—43.
5 Rex R. Campbell, Daniel M. Johnson, and Gary J. Strangler, “Return Migration of Black People to the South,” Rural Sociology 39 (1974), 514—28; Reynolds Farley and Walter R. Allen, The Color Line and the Quality ofLifein America (New York, 1989), 117—28; John Cromartie and Carol B. Stack, “Reinterpretation of Black Return and Nonreturn Migration to the South, 1975—1980,” Geographical Review 79 (1989), 300; Carol Stack, Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South (New York, 1996); Michael A. Stoll, “African Americans and the Color Line” in Reynolds Farley and John Hagga, eds., The American People: Census 2000 (New York, 2005), 402—3; Gregory, Southern Diaspora, 39—40; Gregory, “The Southern Diaspora and the Urban Dispossessed: Demonstrating the Census Public Use Microdata Samples,” Journal of American History 82 (1995), 130.
6 The six million total is a net migration rate and does not include those who migrated to the North and returned to the South. Many black Southerners migrated North, but returned to the South—thus participating in the northward migration.
7 Davis and Donaldson, Blacks in the United States, 30—31; Gregory, Southern Diaspora, 17—18; Steckel, “The African American Population of the United States” in Haines and Steckel, eds., A Population History of North America, 465; Reynolds Farley, Growth of the Black Population: A Study of Demographic Trends (Chicago, 1970), 50.
8 Brownell and Goldfield, Urban America, 260; Karl E. Taeuber “The Negro Population in the United States” in John P. Davis, ed., The American Negro Reference Book (Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1966), 116—34; Farley and Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America, 103—4; Gregory, “The Southern Diaspora and the Urban Dispossessed,” 117; Howard
Dodson and Sylviane A. Diouf, In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience (Washington DC, 2004), 136; Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916—1930 (Urbana IL, 1987), 1.
9 Brownell and Goldfield, Urban America, 260; Frank Hobbs and Nicole Stoops, Demographic Trends in the Twentieth Century (Washington DC, 2002), 260.
10 In analyzing the cause of the Great Migration, scholars have given different weight to the various pushes and pulls which set it in motion; my account is drawn from the following: Grossman, Land of Hope; Gregory, Southern Diaspora; Marks, Farewell; Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900—1920 (Garden City NY, 1975); Neil Fligstein, Going North: Migration of Blacks and Whites from the South, 1900—1950 (New York, 1981); Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way; Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915—45 (Urbana IL, 1999); Trotter, ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective.
11 Phillips, AlabamaNorth, 57; Roi Ottley, The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott (Chicago, 1955).
12 Davis and Donaldson, Blacks in the United States, 35; Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986), 95—96, 203—5.
13 Grossman, Land of Hope, 30; quoted in E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago, 1966), 210, and R. H. Leavell, “The Negro Migration from Mississippi” in Leavell et al., Negro Migration in 1916—17 (Washington DC, 1919), 17. Also see Marks, Farewell, chap. 3.
14 Wright, Old South, New South, 203—5; Marks, Farewell, chap. 3; quoted in Leavell, “The Negro Migration from Mississippi,” 17, and Marks, “In Search of the Promised Land: Black Migration and Urbanization, 1900—1940” in William R. Scott and William G. Slade, eds., Upon These Shores: Themes in the African American Experience, 1600 to the Present (New York, 2000), 188.
15 William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York, 1970), 74—107; Grossman, Land of Hope, chap. 2; Phillips, AlabamaNorth, 53.
16 Wright, Old South, New South, chap. 7, esp. 231—33; Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana IL, 1985); Historical Statistics of the United States, pt. 1, 109—153.
17 Wright, Old South, New South, 223—34.
18 Daniel, Breaking the Land, chaps. 2—4; Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865—1980(Lexington KY, 1984), chaps. 8—9; Neil Fligstein, “The Transformation of Southern Agriculture and the Migration of Blacks and Whites, 1930—1950,” International Migration Review 17 (1983), 273; Craig W. Heinicke, “African American Migration and the Mechanized Cotton Harvesting, 1950—1960,” Explorations in Economic History 31 (1994), 501—20; Historical Statistics of the United States, pt. 1, 109—153; Grossman, Land of Hope, 48; Brownell and Goldfield, Urban America, chaps. 10—11.
19 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York, 1993), chap. 6; Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana IL, 1989); Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age ofJimCrow (New York, 1998); Grossman, Land of Hope, 16—19; quoted in Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 225.
20 Quoted in Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York, 1974), 27.
21 Ira de A. Reid, “Special Problems of Negro Migration During the War” in Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, Postwar Problems of Migration (New York, 1947), 155; Gregory, Southern Diaspora, 37; quoted in Grossman, Land of Hope, 3.
22 Peter Gottlieb, “Rethinking the Great Migration: A Perspective from Pittsburgh” in Trotter, ed., The Great Migration, 74. For a similar development in Flint, Michigan, see Gregory, Southern Diaspora, 29. Also Trotter, eds., The Great Migration, 482.
23 Gregory, Southern Diaspora, 365, n. 27; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985), 153—60; Darlene Clark Hine, ”Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915—1945” in Trotter, ed., The Great Migration, 127—46; Leslie Brown, “African American Women and Migration” in S. Jay Kleinberg, Eileen Boris, and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds., The Practice of U.S. Women’s History: Narrative, Intersections, and Dialogues (New Brunswick NJ, 2007), 204; Beverly A. Bunch-Lyons, Contested Terrain: African American Women Migrate from the South to Cincinnati, 1900—1950 (New York, 2002), 23—42; quoted in Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, Promiseland: A Century ofLifein a Negro Community (Philadelphia, 1981), 122.
24 Taeuber “The Negro Population in the United States” in Davis, ed., American Negro Reference Book, 112—113; Wright, Old South, New South, 96—97; Clyde V. Kiser, Sea Island to City: A Study of St. Helena Islanders in Harlem and Other Urban Centers (New York, 1967), 117, 131, 144; Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 39, 149.
25 Marks, Farewell, 34—48; C. Horace Hamilton, “Educational Selectivity of Net Migration from the South,” Social Forces 38 (1959), 33—42; Stewart E. Tolnay, “Educational Selection in the Migration of Southern Blacks, 1880—1990,” Social Forces 77 (1998), 487—514; Gregory, Southern Diaspora, 28, 30-33; Wright, Old South, New South, 246—55; Elizabeth H. Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865—1900 (New York, 1979), chap. 3. On literacy of the first immigrants and decline over time see Stanley Lieberson, “Selective Black Migration from the South: A Historical View” in Frank D. Bean and W. Parker Frisbie, eds., The Demography of Racial and Ethnic Groups (New York, 1978), 122. For the migration of musicians, see Burton W. Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America (Urbana IL, 1992), 43—45.
26 Malaika Adero, ed., Up South: Stories, Studies, and Letters of this Century’s African-American Migrations (New York, 1993), xvii; also Dwayne E. Walls, The Chicken Bone Special (New York, 1970).
27 Grossman, Land of Hope, 112—13; quoted from Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (New York, 1954), 229—30.
28 Henri, Black Migration, 66; Marks, Farewell, 36—37; Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (New York, [1918] 1969), 35.
29 Grossman, Land of Hope, 2, 109—111; quoted in Richard Wright, Black Boy (Chicago, 1947), 181.
30 Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (New York, [1918] 1969), 27.
31 Marks, Farewell, chap. 2, esp. 20—21; Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way, 49—55; Phillips, AlabamaNorth, 54—55. For an explication of the theory of chain migrations, see John McDonald and Leatrice McDonald, “Chain Migration, Ethnic Neighborhood Formation, and Social Networks,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 42 (1964), 82—97, and for how migrating pioneers make movement more accessible and cheaper for those who follow, see Douglas Massey, “Why Does Immigration Occur?” in Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, eds., The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (New York, 1999), 45.
32 Grossman, Land of Hope, chap. 3; also see Henri, Black Migration, chap. 2.
33 Grossman, Land of Hope, chap. 3; Cromartie and Stack, “Reinterpretation of Black Return and Non Return Migration,” 299—309.
34 Phillips, AlabamaNorth, 62—63; Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 39—41, 160—62.
35 For a discussion of so-called stage or step migration, see J. Trent Alexander, “The Great Migration in Comparative Perspective: Interpreting the Urban Origins of Southern Black Migrants to Depression-Era Pittsburgh,” Social Science History 22 (1998), 349—37; Taeuber, “The Negro Population in the United States” in Davis, ed., American Negro Reference Book, 129—130; and for repeated migration, see Julie DaVanzo, “Repeat Migration in the United States: Who Moves Back and Who Moves On?,” Review of Economics and Statistics 65 (1983), 552—59; Wright, Black Boy, 221; Leslie Brown, “African American Women and Migration,” 204.
36 Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration during the War (New York, 1969), 106, 134; quoted in Dotson and Diouf, In Motion, 120; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “New Negroes, Migration, and Cultural Excha
nge” in Elizabeth Hutton Turner, ed., Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (Washington DC, 1993), 17—21; Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way, 3-45; Gerald D. Jaynes, “Blacks in the Economy from Reconstruction to World War I” in Scott and Slade, eds., Upon These Shores, 185. DuBois had noted the same phenomenon early in the twentieth century. Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue, W. E. B. DuBois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy (Philadelphia, 1998), 76.
37 Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way, 29—31; Kiser, Sea Island to City, 154; Walls, The Chicken Bone Special.
38 Emitt J. Scott, ed., “Letters from Negro Migrants of 1916—1918,” Journal of Negro History 4 (1919), 334.
39 Otis Hicks, Greyhound Blues, http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/delta/2541/bllslim.htm#Greyhound466.
40 Grossman, Land of Hope, 113—115; quoted in Richard Wright, American Hunger (New York, 1977), 307.
41 Grossman, Land of Hope, 113—17.
42 Walter Licht, Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840—1950(Cambridge MA, 1992), 32—33; Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890—1920 (Chicago, 1967), 29; Kusmer, Ghetto Takes Shape, chap. 4; Warren C. Whatley and Gavin Wright, “Race, Human Capital, and Labour Markets in American History” in George Grantham and Mary MacKinnon, eds., Labour Market Evolutions: The Economic History of Market Integration, Wage Flexibility, and Employment Relation (New York, 1994), 280—81; David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana IL 1973), 217—22; Pleck, Black Migration, chap. 2; Joe William Trotter, Jr., The African American Experience (Boston, 2001), 311; quoted in W. E. B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia, 1899), 323.
43 August Meier, “Negro Class Structure and Ideology in the Age of Booker T. Washington,” Phylon 23 (1962), 258—66; Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880—1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor MI, 1963), esp. chap. 9; DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro, 310—21, 340—51; Kusmer, Ghetto Takes Shape, chaps. 1, 5; Spear, Black Chicago, chap. 3; Marcy S. Sacks, Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I (Philadelphia, 2006); Katzman, Before the Ghetto, chaps. 4—6; Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley CA, 1987), 19—20.
