Between 1910 and 1920, some 330,000 Afro-Americans moved from the South into the North and West. By 1940, the number of those who had left the South since 1910 had soared to 1,750,000. Between 1940 and 1950, there were another 1,597,000, and between 1950 and 1960, there were 1,457,000 more who left the South. The percentage of the Afro-American community living still in the South had dropped from 89.7 percent in 1900 to 59 percent and for the first time, more than half of them lived outside of the Deep South.
Another indication of the northward migration which had occured was that a Northern state, New York, had acquired an Afro-American community which was larger than that of any of the Southern states. Much of this migration was also a move from the country to the city. In the South, 58 percent of the Afro-Americans lived in cities. In the West, there are 93 percent who live in the cities, and in the North, there are 96 percent. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Afro-American community had been transformed from a rural and regional group into a national one.
Harlem: "The Promised Land"
Alain Locke edited a volume of critical essays and literature entitled The New Negro. In it, Locke heralded a spiritual awakening within the Afro-American community. It was manifested by a creative outburst of art, music and literature as well as by a new mood of self-confidence and self-consciousness within that community. The center of this explosion was located in Harlem. Famous personalities such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, James Weldon Johnson, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong either moved to Harlem or visited it frequently in order to participate in the vigorous cultural exchange which took place there. The artists of the "Negro Renaissance", as important as they might be themselves, were merely symbolic of the new life which was electrifying the Afro-American community. This new life was also evident in the large urban centers of the North and particularly in Harlem.
Locke pointed out the significance of the great northward migration when he said that the Negro "in the very process of being transplanted," was also being "transformed." This migration was usually explained either in economic terms--jobs pulling Negroes northward--or in social terms--discrimination pushing them out. In both cases, the Afro-American was represented as the passive victim of external socioeconomic forces. Locke insisted that, to the contrary, it was more accurate to understand this migration as a result of a decision made by the Negro himself. For the first time in history, thousands upon thousands of individual Afro-Americans had made a basic choice concerning their own existence. They refused to remain victims of an impersonal and oppressive system, and, as the result, they deliberately pulled up their roots, left their friends and neighbors and moved north to what they hoped would be "the promised land."
From this decision emerged the new Negro. If he was less polite and more aggressive than before, he was also more self-reliant and less dependent on pity and charity. This change, however, did not occur suddenly. The passive, well-behaved Negro, content to stay in his place, had largely been a myth. In part, he, had been the product of a guilt-ridden white stereotype which found this myth comforting. The Negro himself had also contributed to this fiction by his custom of social mimicry, his habit of appearing to fill the role which whites expected of him. By the end of slavery, however, a spirit of individuality had been growing within the Negro consciousness. The opportunity for industrial employment in the North which had resulted from war and from the slowdown in European immigration along with the increase of racism and segregation in the South combined to open the way for the development of the growing spirit of determination.
The new Negro was doing more than asserting his own individuality; the entire Afro-American community was developing a new sense of solidarity. The racist attitudes of mainstream America, both North and South, made it almost impossible for a Negro to conceive of himself purely in individualistic terms. Any Negro who thought of himself as an exceptional or unique individual was brought sharply back to reality by this racism which relentlessly and mercilessly depicted him as nothing more than a "nigger."
In spite of the individualism which was preached as a basic part of the American creed, the Afro-American community was forced to develop a strong sense of group cooperation. In the face of growing racism and segregation, the idealism of the new Negro was still based on the American ideal of democracy, and his goal was still to share fully, some day, in American life and institutions. The Afro-American's heightened sense of racial consciousness was not an end in itself. This racial self-consciousness gave him strength to withstand the daily injustices which confronted him, and it provided him with faith in himself and hope in the future. Locke believed that the new Negro was taking the racism which had been forced upon him by white society and was turning it to positive uses, transforming obstacles to his progress into "dams of social energy and power."
The factor which prevented this new, energetic Afro-American from becoming alienated from America was that its goals were identical with the expressed ideals of the country. The racial discrimination and injustice from which Afro-Americans suffered, though deeply entrenched in national institutions, were themselves a contradiction to the American democratic philosophy. The Afro-American, besides having justice on his side, was comforted knowing that his goals were sanctioned and hallowed by the nation's ideals. As Locke put it, "We cannot be undone without America's undoing".