Jim Crow's Counterculture

by Lawson, R. A.

  5. Big Bill Broonzy and Yannick Bruynoghe, Big Bill Blues: Big Bill Broonzy’s Story (London: Cassell and Co., 1955), 30.

  6. Wald, Escaping the Delta, 41. A concise biography of Broonzy may be found in R. A. Lawson, “William ‘Big Bill’ Broonzy,” in Reich, ed., Encyclopedia of the Great Black Migration, vol. 1, 143-45.

  7. Mark A. Humphrey, “Urban Blues,” in Cohn, Nothing But the Blues, 167-68, quote p. 167.

  8. The Great Migration is generally defined two ways. Some scholars focus on the early, war economy-driven migration of blacks to the North around and during World War I; see Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900-1920 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press / Double-day, 1975). Others consider cotton farm mechanization and economic opportunities brought on by World War II as prime factors, so that the Great Migration becomes a phenomenon of the 1940s; see Lemann, The Promised Land, 1-45. More inclusive treatments mark the beginning of the migration around 1900 and cover black migration during and between both world wars; see Daniel Johnson and Rex Campbell, Black Migration in America: A Demographic History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1981). More generally, see Joe William Trotter Jr., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Neil Fligstein, Going North: Migration of Blacks and Whites from the South, 1900-1950 (New York: Academic Press, 1981); and Rupert B. Vance and Nadia Danilevsky, All These People: The Nation’s Human Resources in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945). Black migration out of the South to “western” states such as Kansas and Oklahoma between Reconstruction and 1900 is usually considered as a separate movement.

  9. The 3.5 million figure represents net migration out of the South between 1910 and 1950; William Collins, “When the Tide Turned: Immigration and the Delay of the Great Migration,” Journal of Economic History 57 (September 1997): 607.

  10. Meridian Star, March 16 and 17, June 18, 1917, quoted in McMillen, Dark Journey, 262; poem quoted in the Chicago Defender, May 28, 1917.

  11. Carter G. Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration (Washington, D.C.: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1918; citations are to repr. ed., New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), 192; later came Edward E. Lewis, The Mobility of the Negro: A Study in the American Labor Supply (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931).

  12. Emmett J. Scott, “Additional Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916-1918,” Journal of Negro History 4 (October 1919): 439. Excerpts of migrants’ letters can also be found in Robert Grant, The Black Man Comes to the City: A Documentary Account from the Great Migration to the Great Depression, 1915-1930 (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1972).

  13. Emmett J. Scott, ed., “Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916-1918,” Journal of Negro History 4 (July 1919): 290. See also Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration during the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920).

  14. Baraka, Blues People, 96.

  15. Several historians and economists have explained that class, race, education, family support, and occupation shaped many migrants’ motives and chances for success; see Stewart Tolnay, “The Great Migration Gets Underway: A Comparison of Black Southern Migrants and Nonmigrants in the North, 1920,” Social Science Quarterly 82 (June 2001): 235-52; Trent Alexander, “The Great Migration in Comparative Perspective: Interpreting the Urban Origins of Southern Black Migrants to Depression-Era Pittsburgh,” Social Science History 22 (Fall 1998): 349-70; Collins, “When the Tide Turned,” 611; and Louis Kyriakoudes, “Southern Black Rural-Urban Migration: Nashville and Middle Tennessee, 1890-1930,” Agricultural History 72 (Spring 1998): 341-51.

  16. Many authors approach the Great Migration by focusing on the African American communities established within northern urban neighborhoods; a good example is Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967). Some authors highlight the rise of racial and class solidarity among migrating blacks in northern manufacturing communities, as in Lillian Serece Williams, Strangers in the Land of Paradise: The Creation of an African American Community, Buffalo, New York, 1900-1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Dennis C. Dickerson, Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (New York: Arno Press, 1969); and Kim Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Still other authors stressed the paramount importance of kinship networks to black community formation in northern cities; see Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987) ; and James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

  17. Charles “Specks” McFadden, “Harvest Moon Blues,” Brunswick 7146 (Chicago, 1929).

  18. Tommy McClennan, “Cotton Patch Blues,” Bluebird B-8408-B (Chicago, 1939).

  19. Tommy McClennan, “Bottle It Up and Go,” Bluebird B-8373 (Chicago, 1939).

  20. Wolfe and Lornell, Life and Legend of Leadbelly, 33-35.

  21. Bukka White, interview by Jack Hurley, December 5, 1967 (Oral History series 2, Special Collections, McWherter Library, University of Memphis), 4. Notable composer Perry Bradford explained the spread of the “shimmy” in the 1910s in Marshall Winslow Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo, 1994), 105.

  22. White, interview, 3-4.

  23. King and Ritz, Blues All Around Me, 74-75, 94-100.

  24. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 3-6; and James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 1930), 156-59. See also Huggins, Voices from the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

  25. Theodore G. Vincent, Black Power and the Garvey Movement (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1972), 16. Vincent was inspired by Amy Jacques Garvey’s Garvey and Garveyism (Kingston, Jamaica: pub. by author, 1963 [reissued New York: Macmillan, 1970]), an attempt to explain Garveyism’s rational approach to social, economic, and political change. With the aid of Leon Litwack, Vincent wrote Black Power and the Garvey Movement to rebut the widely accepted interpretation of Garveyites as “dupes of a demagogue” presented in Edmund David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955).

  26. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 346-54.

  27. Powdermaker, After Freedom, 333.

  28. The song was observed in North Carolina after the Johnson victory and was quoted in J. Mason Brewer, Worser Days and Better Times: The Folklore of the North Carolina Negro (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 178. Johnson’s victory resulted in widespread racial violence as whites assaulted blacks throughout the South, and in some urban northern communities; see Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1975), chapter 3. On Jack Johnson’s career in general, see Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson in the Era of White Hopes (London: Collier Macmillan, 1983), a more recent biography than Finis Farr, Black Champion: The Life and Times of Jack Johnson (New York: Scribner, 1964). Both Roberts and Farr emphasize the meaning of Johnson’s career to blacks seeking wider racial pride, but Johnson’s autobiographical account focuses on his personal aspirations and achievements; see Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson—In the Ring—And Out (Chicago: National Sports Publishing, 1927).

  29. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 5-6.

  30. Robert Johnson, “Hellhound on My Trail,” Vocalion 3623 (Dallas, 1937).

  31. Johnny Shines quoted in McCulloch and Pearson, Robert Johnson, 12-13.

  32. Son House, “Dry Spell Blues (part one),” Paramount 12990 (Grafton, Wisc., 1930).

  33. Verse quoted in
McMillen, Dark Journey, 271.

  34. See Baker, Turning South Again, 1-19.

  35. Songs quoted in Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 51, 32.

  36. See Carter Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration, 1-60.

  37. On post-Emancipation mobility among freedmen, see Litwack, Been In the Storm So Long, chapter 6, “The Feel of Freedom: Moving About,” 292-335; Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1977); and Murray R. Wickett, Contested Territory: Whites, Native Americans, and African Americans in Oklahoma, 1865-1907 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).

  38. These numbers are based on census analysis. “South” here includes Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, and Oklahoma; see Hope T. Eldridge and Dorothy Swain Thomas, Population Redistribution and Economic Growth, United States, 1870-1950 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1964), table 1.27.

  39. Richard Sherman, ed., The Negro and the City (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 5.

  40. Cash, Mind of the South, 105. On turn-of-the-century vagrancy laws in the South, see Dewey Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 137-38; and William Cohen, “Negro Involuntary Servitude in the South, 1865-1940: A Preliminary Analysis,” Journal of Southern History 42 (February 1976): 50.

  41. Baker, Turning South Again, 60.

  42. Kirby, Countercultural South, 19-20.

  43. Handy, Father of the Blues, 74; Bessie Smith, “Yellow Dog Blues,” Columbia 14075D (New York, 1925); Charley Patton, “Green River Blues,” Paramount 12972 (Grafton, Wisc., 1929); Big Bill Broonzy, “The Southern Blues,” Bluebird B-5998 (Chicago, 1935).

  44. Collins, “When the Tide Turned,” 607-10; Sherman, The Negro and the City, 5; McMillen, Dark Journey, 259, 267.

  45. T. J. Woofter, Negro Migration: Changes in Rural Organization and Population of the Cotton Belt (New York: W. D. Gray, 1920), 14.

  46. See Alexander, “The Great Migration in Comparative Perspective,” 350. A quantitative analysis of the economic forces behind black migration may be found in Flora Gill, Economics and the Black Exodus (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979). See also Everett S. Lee, “A Theory of Migration,” Demography 3 (1966): 47-57; and William Stinner and Gordon DeJong, “Southern Negro Migration: Social and Economic Components of an Ecological Model,” Demography 6 (November 1969): 455-57.

  47. Woody Guthrie, “Goin’ Down The Road,” Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., 1940).

  48. Blind Blake Arthur, “Detroit Bound Blues,” Paramount Records 12657 (Chicago, 1928). “Detroit Bound Blues” was not autobiographical. Following up on a record deal with Paramount Records, Blake settled in Chicago, not Detroit; see “Blind Blake,” in Gérard Herzhaft, Encyclopedia of the Blues (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), 20-23.

  49. The history of racial discrimination in the American workforce has enjoyed heightened attention recently. In addition to Bruno Cartosio, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Proletariat in Black Reconstruction,” in Dirk Hoerder, ed., American Labor and Immigration History, 1877-1920s: Recent European Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); see Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), a study of longshoremen and steelworkers; Patrick Mason, ed., African Americans, Labor, and Society: Organizing for a New Agenda (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001); and the constitutional legal history, David Bernstein, Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).

  50. Here, “West” includes California, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Washington, and Oregon; “Industrial North” includes Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. See Eldridge and Thomas, Population Redistribution and Economic Growth, table 1.27. The figure of 3.5 million European immigrants is found in Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998), 130.

  51. Frederick Douglass quoted in Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Bros., 1944), 291. Blues historian Giles Oakley pointed out that in 1914, the peak year of immigration from Europe, the United States received 1,200,000 European immigrants; that number fell to 326,000 in 1915, and dwindled to a trickle— 110,000—in 1918; see Oakley, The Devil’s Music, 83. The hypothesis that European immigration delayed the Great Migration of blacks out of the South was forwarded first in the 1950s by economist Brinley Thomas and has seen continued scholarly interest; see Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1954); Thomas, Migration and Urban Development (London: Methuen, 1972); Michael Todaro, “A Model of Labor Migration and Urban Unemployment in Less Developed Countries,” American Economic Review 59 (1969): 138-48; and Collins, “When the Tide Turned.”

  52. Scott, “Letters of Negro Migrants,” 290.

  53. Michael Piore has argued that, among the variables associated with migration, the decision by employers to hire blacks was the most important factor “pulling” blacks out of the South: “It is the employers, not the workers, and the jobs, not the incomes, that are strategic”; Michael Piore, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 19. See also Thomas Maloney, “Migration and Economic Opportunity in the 1910s: New Evidence on African American Occupational Mobility in the North,” Explorations in Economic History 38 (January 2001): 147-65.

  54. Dwight Farnham, “Negroes as a Source of Industrial Labor,” Industrial Management 56 (1918): 123-29. On the role of labor scouts as motivators to migrating blacks in Carole Marks, Farewell, We’re Good and Gone: The Great Migration (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). On Henry Ford, Detroit’s automobile industry, and black workers and unions, see August Meier and Elliot M. Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

  55. Lemann, The Promised Land, 15.

  56. “Jim Crow Blues” is included here as evidence of “Cow Cow” Davenport’s awareness that he and other migrating southern blacks—Davenport was born in Alabama—were leaving a racialized way of life as well as poor farm yields and poverty. It should be noted, however, that Davenport viewed migration as a reversible action; if opportunities in the North were elusive, he sang that he would return “to my Jim Crow Town”; see “Jim Crow Blues,” Paramount 12439 (Chicago, 1929).

  57. Anonymous letter, in Emmett Scott, “Letters of Negro Migrants,” 304.

  58. Lynching of southern African Americans had reached its high point in the racially charged 1890s, when approximately 1,689 people were reported victims of lynchings. The number of unrecorded and misidentified lynchings in this era remains unknown; see Moses, Lynching and Vigilan-tism in the United States, xii-xiv; and Williams, “The Lynching Records at Tuskegee Institute,” 6-11.

  59. Lynching figures are disputed. William Cooper and Tom Terrill gave eighty-five as the number of African Americans lynched in 1919; Jack Foner—the source on veteran lynchings—cited seventy-seven deaths in that year; see Cooper and Terrill, The American South, 601; and Jack Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History (New York: Praeger, 1974), 126.

  60. Scott, “Additional Letters of Negro Migrants,” 442-43. On racial violence as migration stimulus, see Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, “Black Flight: Lethal Violence and the Great Migration,” Social Science History 14 (Fall 1990): 347-70.

  61. T. Arnold Hill quoted in Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 168.

  62. See, particul
arly, W. E. B. Du Bois, “Brothers, Come North,” in David Levering, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995), 529-30. See also Foner, The Story of American Freedom, 172-75.

  63. Editorial quoted in Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 87-90, 92.

  64. Scott, Negro Migration, 34-35.

  65. Powdermaker, After Freedom, 23. White dependence on black labor became clear when the owners of the King and Anderson plantation—one of the Delta’s largest—sent agents to Chicago in the early 1940s in hopes of enticing former sharecroppers back south; see Cohn, Where I Was Born and Raised, 340-45.

  66. Scott, “Additional Letters,” 435. See McMillen, Dark Journey, 272-73.

  67. David Evans, “From Bumblebee Slim to Black Boy Shine: Nicknames of Blues Singers,” in Evans, ed., Ramblin On My Mind, 188-89, 197-88.

  68. Dave Moore, album notes to Carl Martin and Willie “61” Blackwell: Complete Recordings (Document DOCD 5229). See Fred McDowell, “Highway 61,” Prestige Records 25010 (Como, Miss., 1959); Curtis Jones, “Highway 51” Vocalion 03990 (Chicago, 1938); Tommy McClennan, “New Highway 51,” Bluebird B-8499 (Chicago, 1940); and Big Joe Williams, “Highway 49,” Bluebird 5996 (Chicago, 1935).

  69. Tampa Red (Hudson Whittaker), accompanied by Georgia Tom Dorsey and Jenny Pope, “I. C. Moan,” Melotone 70373 (Chicago, 1930). Tampa Red was nicknamed the “Guitar Wizard” and was one of the first black musicians to make use of the Hawaiian guitar. In the late 1920s, Tampa Red began to record with Bluebird, affording him the opportunity to play with blues piano legends, Georgia Tom Dorsey, Big Maceo, and Little Johnny Jones. A great composer, Tampa Red was attributed as having written later rock and roll favorites such as “Susie Q.”

  70. Dolan, “Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads,” 112, 109.

  71. Walter Davis, “Cotton Farm Blues,” Bluebird B-8393 (Chicago, 1939).