II. The Migration of Negroes from the South
During the period 1916-18 approximately 500,000 Negroes moved from southern to northern states. Some cities of the North received increases in Negro population of 10 per cent to 300 per cent. The Negro population of Gary, Indiana, increased from 383 in 1910 to 5,299 in 1920, an increase of 1,283 per cent.
Chicago was in direct line for migrants from the South, especially along the Mississippi Valley, and received approximately 65,000, who constituted a large proportion of the increase of 148.5 per cent in its Negro population in the last decade. These migrants definitely accentuated existing problems of race contact and brought new problems of adjustment and assimilation. Southern Negroes with southern manners, habits, and traditions, and mostly from rural districts, became part of a northern urban community. Knowledge of the causes of this movement of Negroes will make easier an understanding of the difficulties following it. These causes were economic as well as sentimental.
The South was paying to Negroes wages which varied from 75 cents a day on a farm to $1.75 a day in certain city jobs. For two seasons the boll weevil, a destructive pest, had been making heavy ravages upon the cotton crops, ruining thousands of farms and throwing out of employment many thousands of Negro workers. Lack of capital to carry labor through a period of poor crops and over the normal intervals between planting and harvesting largely increased Negro unemployment. Unsatisfactory living conditions, on plantations and in segregated quarters of southern cities, stimulated unrest. School facilities for Negro children, described as lamentably poor even by southerners, increased dissatisfaction with conditions in the South. The Negro illiteracy in fifteen southern states was 33.3 per cent as compared with 7.7 per cent for whites. The appropriations for teachers in the schools of these states on a per capita basis was $10.32 for each white child, and $2.89 for each Negro child.
On the other hand, the North was for the first time on a large scale opening up opportunities for Negroes to earn a livelihood. The cessation of immigration due to the war and the drawing of workers into military service created a great demand for labor; and the opening of new industries and the extension of old ones to meet the demands of the war provided still greater opportunities. At the same time, these industries were paying laborers from $3 to $8 per day, and offering shorter hours and the opportunity for overtime work and bonuses. The North also offered living accommodations which, although below standard for city dwellers, were a vast improvement over most of the plantation cabins and frail frame dwellings of the South. There are no segregated schools in the North, and Negro children are offered identical school privileges with white children.
Other causes of the migration, as stated by the migrants and otherwise confirmed, were: lack of protection from mob violence, injustice in the courts, inferior transportation facilities, deprivation of the right to vote, "rough-handed and unfair competition of 'poor whites,'" "persecution by petty officers of the law," and "persecution by the press."
Between 1895 and 1918, 2,881 Negroes were lynched in the United States, and more than 85 per cent of these lynchings occurred in the South. The Atlanta Constitution declared that the heaviest migration of Negroes was from those counties in which there had been the worst outbreaks against Negroes.
How the migration began.—The migration began early in 1916. Hard-pressed industries in the East, principally in Pennsylvania, imported Negroes from Georgia and Florida. During July of that year, 13,000 were carried to Pennsylvania by one railroad company alone.[104] They wrote back for their families and friends. Reports of high wages and good treatment, aided by the hysteria of a mass movement, accomplished the rest.
The migration was first noted in Chicago in 1917. It had been rumored in the South that the Stock Yards needed 50,000 men; the city had been regarded by Negroes as a future home since the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893; it was the great city of mail-order houses, the home of the Chicago Defender, a widely circulated Negro newspaper, the "end of the railroad line," and the "top of the world" for Negroes. Negro newspapers gave up their columns to migration news and urged southern Negroes to go North. The movement soon became a mass movement; with standards, songs, and watchwords the migrants began arriving in the city faster than they could be absorbed into the population.
The arrival in Chicago.—Prior to the migration, the majority of Negroes in Chicago lived in a fairly limited area on the South Side, principally between Twenty-second and Thirty-ninth streets, Wentworth Avenue and State Street, and in scattered groups east of State Street to Cottage Grove Avenue. This area adjoined the old vice area, and many houses of the vicinity had been abandoned by older Chicago Negroes. Shortly after the migrants began to arrive, practically all available houses had been taken and filled to overcrowding. On a single day the Chicago Urban League found 664 Negro applicants for houses with only fifty-five dwellings actually available for use by Negroes. At the same time rents for Negroes were increased by from 5 to 50 per cent.
Meeting actual conditions of life in Chicago brought both exaltation and disillusionment to the migrants. These were reflected in the schools, in public amusement places, in industry, and in the street cars. The Chicago Urban League and the various Negro churches and newspapers assumed the task of making the newcomers "city folk." The difficulty of adjustment showed itself in the great differences in habits of life and employment. Craftsmen had to relearn their trades when thrown amid the highly specialized processes of northern industries; domestic servants went into industry; professional men had to re-establish themselves in a new community.
Many Negroes sold their homes in the South and brought their furniture with them. Reinvesting in property frequently meant a loss; the furniture brought was often found to be unsuited to the tiny apartments or the large abandoned dwellings that they were able to rent or buy.
Change of residence carried with it in many cases change of status. The "leader" in a small southern community when he came to Chicago was immediately absorbed into the great, struggling mass of unnoticed workers. School teachers, male and female, whose positions in the South held commendable prestige, had to go to work in factories and plants because the disparity in educational standards would not permit a continuation of their profession in Chicago.
The migrants visited by the Commission investigators, however, for the most part gave evidence of satisfaction with their change of home, and were pleased with the opportunity of voting, of sending their children to schools, and of higher wages, and with the privilege of participation in community life. Others felt the pressure of high rents and bad living accommodations and complained against certain discriminations.
The fact is, however, that few Negroes have returned to the South, even in response to insistent invitations and offers of free transportation and better home conditions made by southern states that were left badly in need of laborers as a result of the migration.