AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY pt. 3 (from Takaki)

Southern blacks migrating northward by 10,000’s during early 20^th c. (cities Midwest&North)

1910 –1920  - black pop jumps from  5,000 to 40,800 – Detroit

                                                            8,400 to 34,4000 – Cleveland

                                                            44,000 to 109,400 – Chicago

                                                            91,700 to 152,400 in New York

Migration fever

After emancipation most southern blacks forced to become sharecroppers & tenant farmers (enslaved by debts) (insects – weevils – and floods destroyed farms)

+ WWI cut off flow of Erpn immigrants (1,200,000 in 1914 vs. only 110,000 in 1918)

            $1.25 or $1.50 a day vs. $2.75 a day in N.J. (w/rent free room & fare paid)

New generation of blacks coming of age & former old slaves passing away (didn’t want to be subordinated in the South):

W.E.B. DuBois: “The South laments today the slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of Negro – the faithful, courteous slave of other days, with his dignified … humility.” (see p. 345)

Want to get away from Jim Crow, lynchings, etc. – imagine new possibilities in North (see Toni Morrison & Richard Wright)

By 1930, 2,000,000 blacks had migrated to cities of the North & changed the course of history

            “flight out of Egypt” “bound for promised land” “going to Canaan”

BUT worry about being strangers, lonely (so move to cities, & regions w/in cities, like Southside Chicago) à schools & workplace as racial battlegrounds

1910 – 60% women in No. = domestic servants; ~50% men = porters, servants, waiters, janitors

WWI à demand for labor, by 1910, most black men employed in factories (& 15% women)

Stockyards & packhouses deliberately employed blacks to break white strikes à competition

1917 bombs destroyed homes of black families; white gangs (like Ragan’s Colts) attack blacks in streets & parks (esp. Washington Park in NYC)

à black solidarity & ethnic enterprise (establish own banks, insurance co, stores, churches, etc)

            Chicago = Black Metropolis; NYC – Harlem (“Negro Capital of the World” since 1790)

            White homeowners tried to block; but had no choice

Population density in Harlem quickly becomes congested; 1925 – 336 pers/acre vs 223 in Mnhtn 

New community = sense of power & purpose (broken chains of racial subordination). Harlem a

liminal place of possibility to begin anew in America

1916 – Marcus Garvey arrives in Harlem (from Carribean): “Up, you mighty race. You can

accomplish what you will.” = new vision of black pride (movement UNIA = Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica)

Booker T. Washington – died 1915 (book Up from Slavery inspired Garvey) UNIA in US pop

Message electrifies many blacks in Harlem and other Ghettos, i.e. color of skin = beautiful & Africa had a glorious past.  Self-help, independence (Black Start shipping Line); eventually Garvey accused of fraud and deported but his dream remained in Harlem

1920’s = “New Negro Renaissance” (Langston Hughes) “greatest Negro city in the world” = flight from Protestant ethic & materialism (embraced by white liberal intellectuals)

colorful, exotic, spontaneous, sensuous, lively

Also gathering place for black intellectuals; Hughes declares need to declare boldly: “I am a Negro – and beautiful!”; celebrate lives of common blacks: Langston Hughes:

            “I did not feel the rhythms of the primitive surging through me. I was only an American Negro – who had loved the surface of Africa and the rhythms of Africa – but I was not Africa. I was Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem.” Still, though the drums were “subdued and time-lost,” Hughes felt he could hear a song of Africa through “some vast mist of race.” (Takaki, p. 360 – see also poem “I’ve known rivers”)

Jean Toomer, young writer searching for his roots (many universities & cities), returns to South to teach in Georgia à powerful novel Cane (but evil of slavery haunts the land); Toomer doesn’t want to tackle “racial mountain” as Hughes had defined it; just human

Zora Neale Hurston also feels compelled to touch the “soil” of black folk culture in South (Eatonville, FL) after stint in Harlem, university including Barnard (Columbia) w/ Boas in 1927 she returns to South to research rural blacks (see Eyes Watching God 1937); less interested in race problem than in just being human (“what makes a man or a woman do such-and-so, regardless of . . . color”)

By 1920’s Harlem had become a slum, home of poor people; somewhat hidden by Harlem Renaissance cabarets & literary lights. Depression deepens poverty everywhere

1930 most blacks still live below Mason-Dixon Line, sharecroppers / tenant farmers

            unemployments rates soar among blacks (last hired / first fired) à hardship, hunger

New Deal fails blacks; WEB DeBois argues for separatist strategy – cooperative, socialistic state

By 1941 New Deal policymakers begin to address needs of blacks – PWA decrees no more “discrimination on account of race, creed or color”

Blacks becoming players in newly emerging Democratic coalition but advances in labor/politics soon swept into powerful international currents of WWII

African Ams hope WWII will lead to improved status, join war effort vs fascism abroad & racism at home “double victory”

1940 – 5,000 blacks in army of 230,000 By 1944 700,000 in Army; 165,000 Navy, 5,000 Coast Guard, 17,000 Marines (4,000 black women in army); 22 combat units on Erpn front

Defense industry still excludes blacks (0.2 % workers in aircraft indust in 1940); demand action

1941, Roosevelt signs exec order 8802 Committee on Fair Employment Practices à employment for 10,000s blacks (incl women); blacks 8% defense workers by 1945 à blacklashes, riots & violence by whites

After war (1945), future suddenly clouded again

BUT fighting as one people vs racism had united many ethnicities

DeBois: “War for Racial Equality – democracy not only for white folks but for yellow, brown, & black.”

CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION