Its beginning is traced to the winter of 1916, when The Chicago Defender made note in a single paragraph that that February, several hundred Black families had quietly departed Selma, Alabama, declaring, according to the newspaper’s brief citation, that the “treatment doesn’t warrant staying.”
This was the start of what would become a leaderless revolution, one of the largest mass relocations in American history. It would come to dwarf in size and scope the California gold rush of the 1850s, with its 100,000 participants, and the 1930s Dust Bowl migration of some 300,000 people from Oklahoma and Arkansas to California. But more remarkably, it reshaped the racial makeup of the country as we know it, and it was the first mass act of independence for a people who were in bondage in this country far longer than they have been free.
The families from Selma, and the millions who followed, carried the same hopes as anyone who ever crossed the Atlantic or the Rio Grande. Over the decades of the Great Migration, a good portion of all Black Americans alive picked up and left the tobacco farms of Virginia, the rice plantations of South Carolina, the cotton fields in East Texas and Mississippi, and the villages and backwoods of the remaining Southern states. They set out for cities they had whispered of or had seen in a mail-order catalog.
They followed three major streams, paralleling the railroad lines that carried them to what they hoped would be freedom. Those in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia went up the East Coast to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Those in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas went to Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and elsewhere in the Midwest. Those in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma went to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and elsewhere on the West Coast.
They were seeking political asylum within their own country, not unlike refugees in other parts of the world fleeing famine, war, and pestilence, only they were fleeing Southern terror. In May 1916, just months into the migration, fifteen thousand men, women, and children gathered to watch eighteen-year-old Jesse Washington be burned alive in Waco, Texas. The crowd, one of the largest ever gathered to witness a lynching, chanted, “Burn, burn, burn,” as Washington was lowered into the flames. It was a reminder to those contemplating the migration that, however heartbroken they were to leave the loved ones who chose to stay, the region of their birth was not changing anytime soon.
“Oftentimes, just to go away,” wrote John Dollard, a Yale anthropologist who would later study the rural South, “is one of the most aggressive things that another person can do, and if the means of expressing discontent are limited, as in this case, it is one of the few ways in which pressure can be put.”
As it was, in the early years of the Great Migration, the South did everything it could to keep the people from leaving. Southern authorities resorted to coercion to keep their cheap labor in place. In Albany, Georgia, the police came and tore up the tickets of colored passengers waiting to board. A minister in South Carolina, having seen his parishioners off, was arrested at the station on the charge of helping colored people get out. In Savannah, the police arrested every colored person at the station regardless of where he or she was going. In Summit, Mississippi, authorities closed the ticket office and did not let northbound trains stop when there were large groups of colored people waiting to get on.
Instead of stemming the tide, the blockades and arrests “served to intensify the desire to leave,” wrote the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, “and to provide further reasons for going.”
The refugees could not know what was in store for them and for their descendants at their destinations or what effect their exodus would have on the country. In the receiving stations of the North and West, they faced a headwind of resistance and hostility. Redlining and restrictive covenants would keep them trapped in segregated colonies in the cities to which they fled. Many unions would deny them membership, keeping their wages lower than those of their white immigrant counterparts. And after the war, during the Red Summer of 1919, racial tensions and resentments boiled over as race riots erupted in cities across the country.
The riot in Chicago began on July 27, 1919, when a seventeen-year-old Black boy named Eugene Williams, swimming along the shore of Lake Michigan, drifted past an invisible line in the water into the white side of the Twenty-ninth Street beach. He drowned after someone hurled a rock at him. Within hours, a riot was in full cry, coursing through the South and Southwest Sides of the city for thirteen days, killing 38 people (23 Blacks and 15 whites) and injuring 537 others (342 Blacks, 178 whites, the rest unrecorded), and not ending until a state militia subdued it.
And yet despite outbreaks such as these, 6 million Black Southerners chose to seek the relative freedoms of the North and West, where they built churches and civic clubs, made enough money to send some back home to their loved ones in the South, could send their children to schools open for full semesters rather than tied to the schedule of the cotton field, and sent a message to the South that African Americans had options and were willing to take them.
“I went to the station to see a friend who was leaving,” a person quoted by Emmett J. Scott observed shortly after the migration began. “I could not get in the station. There were so many people turning like bees in a hive.”
The Great Migration grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War, and the sheer weight of it helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s. It would proceed in waves in the following decades, not ending until the 1970s, and it would set in motion changes in the North and South that no one, not even the people doing the leaving, could have imagined at the start of it or dreamed would take nearly a lifetime to play out. When the migration began, 90 percent of all African Americans were living in the South. By the time it was over, 47 percent of all African Americans were living in the North and West. A rural people had become urban, and a Southern people had spread themselves all over the nation. They fled north and west as they did during slavery.
It was a “folk movement of inestimable moment,” the Mississippi historian Neil McMillen said.
And more than that, it was the second big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.
1919–1924
RED SUMMER
Michelle Duster
I came of age on the South Side of Chicago in the wake of the 1968 urban rebellions. Too young to remember the mass destruction, violence, and tensions of the actual rebellions, I knew only that the South and West Sides of the city did not have the same prosperous look and opportunities as downtown Chicago and the North Side. The sharp racial division between white, Black, Asian, and Hispanic neighborhoods within the city was normal to me.
The magnet high school I attended was located on the other side of the city, so every day I commuted for an hour and a half each way through various Black neighborhoods on the South Side, crossed through the racially diverse downtown area, then over to another Black section on the Near West Side. Public transportation ran with varying efficiency depending on the part of the city in which I traveled. Boarded-up buildings, vacant lots, concentrated high-rise public housing units, fast-food places, barbershops, nail salons, bars, liquor stores, factories, and steel mills were prevalent in Black neighborhoods. The racial concentration also produced many Black-owned companies such as Soft Sheen, Johnson Publishing Company, Parker House Sausage, Army & Lou’s Soul Food Restaurant, The Chicago Defender, and Seaway Bank. The racial concentration was similar to what my great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells, saw as a Chicago resident all those years ago.