Black Protest and the Great Migration A Brief History with Documents

by Arnesen, Eric

• ISBN13: 9780312391294
• ISBN10: 0312391293
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-11-06
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's

Summary

During World War I, as many as half a million southern African Americans permanently left the South to create new homes and lives in the urban North, and hundreds of thousands more would follow in the 1920s. This dramatic transformation in the lives of many black Americans involved more than geography: the increasingly visible "New Negro" and the intensification of grassroots black activism in the South as well as the North were the manifestations of a new challenge to racial subordination. Eric Arnesen's unique collection of articles from a variety of northern, southern, black, and white newspapers, magazines, and books explores the "Great Migration," focusing on the economic, social, and political conditions of the Jim Crow South, the meanings of race in general and on labor in particular in the urban North, the grassroots movements of social protest that flourished in the war years, and the postwar "racial counterrevolution." An introduction by the editor, headnotes to documents, a chronology, questions for consideration, a bibliography, and an index are included.

Author Biography

Eric Arnesen is professor of history and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A specialist in African American labor history and issues of race and labor, he is the author of Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (2001), which received the Wesley-Logan Prize in Diaspora History from the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, won Distinguished Honors from the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Committee, and was selected as an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice. His book Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (1991) received the John H. Dunning Prize in American History from the American Historical Association. He is also coeditor of Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience (1998). His numerous articles have appeared in journals such as the American Historical Review, International Labor and Working-Class History, International Review of Social History, Labor History, and the Radical History Review. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Illinois at Chicago's Institute for the Humanities and Great Cities Institute.

Table of Contents

Foreword	iii
Preface	v
PART ONE Introduction: ``The Great American Protest''	1	(44)
Origins of the Great Migration	1	(6)
Wartime Opportunities in the North	7	(4)
The Promised Land?	11	(7)
Wartime Black Leaders, the New Negro, and Grassroots Politics	18	(11)
Racial Violence and the Postwar Reaction to Black Activism	29	(6)
Consequences of the Migration	35	(10)
PART TWO The Documents	45	(168)
The Great Migration Begins	45	(22)
Why They Left: Conditions in the South	46	(12)
The Migration of Negroes, June 1917	46	(4)
W. E. B. Du Bois
The Negro Exodus: A Southern Woman's View, March 18, 1917	50	(4)
Mary DeBardeleben
How Much Is the Migration a Flight from Persecution? September 1923	54	(4)
Charles S. Johnson
White Southerners Respond to the Migration	58	(3)
1100 Negroes Desert Savannah, Georgia, August 11, 1916	58	(1)
McDowell Times
New Orleans Times-Picayune, Luring Labor North, August 22, 1916	59	(2)
Southern Blacks' Warnings about Migration	61	(3)
Negroes Urged to Remain in South, November 25, 1916	61	(1)
J. A. Martin
Negro Migration, August 1, 1917	62	(2)
Percy H. Stone
Letters from Migrants	64	(3)
Documents: Letters of Negro Migrants, 1916-1918	64	(3)
The Promised Land?	67	(20)
``The Truth about the North''	67	(11)
Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Arrival in Chicago, 1922	67	(5)
Southwestern Christian Advocate, Read This Before You Move North, April 5, 1917	72	(2)
Negroes a Source of Industrial Labor, August 1918	74	(4)
Dwight Thompson Farnham
The East St. Louis Riot	78	(9)
New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Negro in the North, June 4, 1917	78	(2)
Crisis, The Massacre of East St. Louis, September 1917	80	(5)
Thousands March in Silent Protest, August 4, 1917	85	(2)
Chicago Defender
The Evolution of Black Politics	87	(41)
Patriotism and Military Service	88	(10)
The Reverend J. Edward Pryor, The Patriotism of the Negro, May 4, 1917	88	(1)
Close Ranks, July 1918	89	(1)
W. E. B. Du Bois
The New Republic, Negro Conscription, October 20, 1917	90	(3)
Protest to Boston Herald, April 20, 1918	93	(1)
Leon A. Smith
Houston: An NAACP Investigation, November 1917	94	(2)
Martha Gruening
Racial Clashes, July 26, 1919	96	(2)
Savannah Tribune
The Emergence of the New Negro during and after the War	98	(25)
League Asks Full Manhood Rights, May 19, 1917	98	(1)
Cleveland Gazette
Crisis, The Heart of the South, May 1917	99	(4)
Reconstruction and the Negro, February 1919	103	(3)
Mary White Ovington
The Messenger, Migration and Political Power, July 1918	106	(1)
What We Believe, January 1, 1924, and The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, November 25, 1922	107	(6)
Marcus Garvey
The Messenger, New Leadership for the Negro, May--June 1919	113	(2)
The Messenger, If We Must Die, September 1919	115	(2)
The New Negro, June 2, 1920	117	(6)
Geroid Robinson
Black Women, Protest, and the Suffrage	123	(5)
Colored Federated Clubs of Augusta, Letter to President Woodrow Wilson, May 29, 1918	123	(1)
New York Age, Campaign for Women Nearing Its Close, November 1, 1917	124	(2)
Savannah Morning News, Negro Women Seek Permission to Vote, November 3, 1920	126	(2)
Black Workers and the Wartime Home Front	128	(19)
Black Men and the Labor Question	129	(11)
Crisis, Trades Unions, March 1918	129	(3)
United Mine Workers Journal, From Alabama: Colored Miners Anxious for Organization, June 1, 1916	132	(2)
The Birmingham Case, 1918	134	(4)
Raymond Swing
New Orleans Times-Picayune, Negro Organizer Tarred, June 14, 1918	138	(1)
Negro Strikers Return to Work, October 3, 1918	139	(1)
Birmingham Ledger
Black Women and the War	140	(7)
Houston Labor Journal, Colored Women of Houston Organize, May 6, 1916	140	(1)
Tampa Morning Tribune, Negro Washerwomen to Have Union Wage Scale, October 10, 1918	141	(1)
Mobile Register, Workers Strike in Laundries to Get Higher Pay, April 23, 1918	141	(2)
Mobile News-Item, Negro Women Are Under Arrest in Laundry Strike, April 25, 1918	143	(1)
Tampa Morning Tribune, Negro Women Living in Idleness Must Go to Work or to Jail, October 17, 1918	144	(1)
Savannah Tribune, Negroes to Demand Work at Charleston Navy Yard, May 19, 1917	145	(2)
Opportunities and Obstacles in the Postwar Era	147	(33)
An Uncertain Future	147	(19)
Views and Reviews: Now Comes the Test, November 23, 1918	147	(4)
James W. Johnson
Reconstruction and the Colored Woman, January 1919	151	(3)
Forrester B. Washington
Letters from the U.S. Department of Labor Case Files, 1919	154	(5)
George E. Haynes
William B. Wilson
Sidney J. Catts
Bogalusa, January 1920	159	(5)
Mary White Ovington
Colored Labor Delegation Demands Rights in Alabama, February 28, 1920	164	(1)
Chicago Whip
Negroes in the Unions, August 1925	165	(1)
George Schuyler
1919 Riots	166	(6)
The Rights of the Black Man, August 2, 1919	166	(2)
Washington Bee
Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News, Race Riots in Chicago, July 28, 1919	168	(1)
Chicago in the Nation's Race Strife, August 9, 1919	169	(3)
Graham Taylor
The Elaine Massacre	172	(8)
Newport News Times-Herald, Slowly Restore Order Today in Riot Districts, October 3, 1919	172	(1)
The Race Conflict in Arkansas, December 13, 1919	173	(4)
Walter F. White
Pittsburgh Courier, How the Arkansas Peons Were Freed, July 28, 1923	177	(3)
Postwar Migration	180	(33)
Heading South? or Coming North?	181	(9)
Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News, ``Chi'' Negroes Ask to Return to Mississippi, August 1, 1919	181	(1)
Tampa Morning Tribune, Negroes Who Come to South Are Better Off, August 24, 1919, and Find the Southern Negro Prosperous, October 5, 1919	182	(2)
Why Southern Negroes Don't Go South, November 29, 1919	184	(5)
T. Arnold Hill
Buffalo American, Mighty Exodus Continues; Cause Not Economic, July 22, 1920	189	(1)
Building a New Life in the North	190	(8)
These ``Colored'' United States, December 1923	190	(3)
Charles S. Johnson
Negro Migration: Its Effect on Family and Community Life in the North, October 1924	193	(5)
George E. Haynes
The New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance	198	(6)
The New Negro, 1925	198	(6)
Alain Locke
APPENDIXES
Chronology of Events Related to the Great Migration (1865--1925)	204	(2)
Questions for Consideration	206	(1)
Selected Bibliography	207	(6)
Index	213