Records in this topic cover migratory information and trends captured by various branches and agencies of the government, including employment and housing.
There are also records reflecting cultural and social aspects of the lives of those who participated and were impacted by the Great Migration.
Search the Catalog for Records relating to the Great Migration Is it best to go in great numbers or only in several families? These and many other things are discussed over and over. The door of escape opened during World War I, when slowing immigration from Europe created a labor shortage in the North.
To fill the assembly lines, companies began recruiting black Southerners to work the steel mills, railroads and factories. Resistance in the South to the loss of its cheap black labor meant that recruiters often had to act in secret or face fines and imprisonment. But word soon spread among black Southerners that the North had opened up, and people began devising ways to get out on their own.
And still they left. On one of the early trains out of the South was a sharecropper named Mallie Robinson, whose husband had left her to care for their young family under the rule of a harsh plantation owner in Cairo, Georgia.
They settled in Pasadena. When the family moved into an all-white neighborhood, a cross was burned on their front lawn. The youngest, the one she had carried in her arms on the train out of Georgia, was named Jackie, who would go on to earn four letters in athletics in a single year at UCLA.
Had Mallie not persevered in the face of hostility, raising a family of six alone in the new world she had traveled to, we might not have ever known his name. Mallie was extraordinary in another way. Most people, when they left the South, followed three main tributaries: the first was up the East Coast from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia to Washington, D.
But Mallie took one of the farthest routes in the continental U. The trains that spirited the people away, and set the course for those who would come by bus or car or foot, acquired names and legends of their own. Perhaps the most celebrated were those that rumbled along the Illinois Central Railroad, for which Abraham Lincoln had worked as a lawyer before his election to the White House, and from which Pullman porters distributed copies of the Chicago Defender in secret to black Southerners hungry for information about the North.
In Chicago, Wright worked washing dishes and sweeping streets before landing a job at the post office and pursuing his dream as a writer. He began to visit the library: a right and pleasure that would have been unthinkable in his home state of Mississippi. In , having made it to New York, he published Native Son to national acclaim, and, through this and other works, became a kind of poet laureate of the Great Migration.
He seemed never to have forgotten the heartbreak of leaving his homeland and the courage he mustered to step into the unknown.
Zora Neale Hurston arrived in the North along the East Coast stream from Florida, although, as was her way, she broke convention in how she got there.
She had grown up as the willful younger daughter of an exacting preacher and his long-suffering wife in the all-black town of Eatonville. After her mother died, when she was 13, Hurston bounced between siblings and neighbors until she was hired as a maid with a traveling theater troupe that got her north, dropping her off in Baltimore in From there, she made her way to Howard University in Washington, where she got her first story published in the literary magazine Stylus while working odd jobs as a waitress, maid and manicurist.
She would become the first black student known to graduate from Barnard College. There, she majored in English and studied anthropology, but was barred from living in the dormitories.
She never complained. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? She arrived in New York when the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and cultural flowering in the early years of the Great Migration, was in full bloom.
From Aiken, South Carolina, and Bladenboro, North Carolina, the migration drew the parents of Diahann Carroll, who would become the first black woman to win a Tony Award for best actress and, in , to star in her own television show in a role other than a domestic.
Once there, to keep teenage Jacob safe from the streets, she enrolled her eldest son in an after-school arts program that would set the course of his life. The paintings would become not only the best-known images of the Great Migration but among the most recognizable images of African-Americans in the 20th century.
Yet throughout the migration, wherever black Southerners went, the hostility and hierarchies that fed the Southern caste system seemed to carry over into the receiving stations in the New World, as the cities of the North and West erected barriers to black mobility.
The constitution of Oregon explicitly prohibited black people from entering the state until ; whites-only signs could still be seen in store windows into the s. Even in the places where they were permitted, blacks were relegated to the lowest-paying, most dangerous jobs, barred from many unions and, at some companies, hired only as strike breakers, which served to further divide black workers from white.
They were confined to the most dilapidated housing in the least desirable sections of the cities to which they fled. In densely populated destinations like Pittsburgh and Harlem, housing was so scarce that some black workers had to share the same single bed in shifts. When African-Americans sought to move their families to more favorable conditions, they faced a hardening structure of policies and customs designed to maintain racial exclusion. Restrictive covenants, introduced as a response to the influx of black people during the Great Migration, were clauses written into deeds that outlawed African-Americans from buying, leasing or living in properties in white neighborhoods, with the exception, often explicitly spelled out, of servants.
By the s, the widespread use of restrictive covenants kept as much as 85 percent of Chicago off-limits to African-Americans. At the same time, redlining—the federal housing policy of refusing to approve or guarantee mortgages in areas where black people lived—served to deny them access to mortgages in their own neighborhoods.
In the s, another , blacks left the south, followed by , blacks in the s. Between and over 3,, blacks left the south for northern and western cities. The economic motivations for migration were a combination of the desire to escape oppressive economic conditions in the south and the promise of greater prosperity in the north. Since their Emancipation from slavery , southern rural blacks had suffered in a plantation economy that offered little chance of advancement.
While a few blacks were lucky enough to purchase land, most were sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or farm labors, barely subsiding from year to year. When World War I created a huge demand for workers in northern factories, many southern blacks took this opportunity to leave the oppressive economic conditions in the south.
Segregation was made law several times in 18th and 19th-century America as some believed that Black and white people were incapable of coexisting.
In the lead-up to the Among prominent figures are Madam C. Walker, who was the first U. Freedom Riders were groups of white and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides, bus trips through the American South in to protest segregated bus terminals.
Lasting from to , the Great Depression was the worst economic downtown in the industrialized world. While no group escaped the economic devastation of the Great Depression, few suffered more than African Americans. Du Bois, or William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was an African American writer, teacher, sociologist and activist whose work transformed the way that the lives of Black citizens were seen in American society.
Considered ahead of his time, Du Bois was an early champion of During the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred over 18 hours from May 31 to June 1, , a white mob attacked residents, homes and businesses in the predominantly Black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The event remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train near Scottsboro, Alabama, in The trials and repeated retrials of the Scottsboro Boys sparked an international uproar and produced two landmark U.
Supreme Court
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