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Writing African American Migrations1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2011

Jack S. Blocker
Affiliation:
Huron University College, University of Western Ontario

Abstract

Efforts to write the history of the African American migrations of the Civil War era, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era began soon after the start of these historically significant movements. Early scholarship labored to surmount the same methodological obstacles faced by modern scholars, notably scarce documentation, but still produced pathbreaking studies such as W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro, Carter Woodson's A Century of Negro Migration, and Clyde Kiser's Sea Island to City. Modern scholarship since the 1950s falls into eight distinct genres. An assessment of representative works in each genre reveals a variety of configurations of strengths and weaknesses, while offering guidelines for future research.

Type
2010 SHGAPE Presidential Address
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2011

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References

2 Among studies of the westward movement based on migrant memoirs, see Unruh, John D. Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1860 (Urbana, 1979)Google Scholar; Faragher, John Mack, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, 1979)Google Scholar; and Jeffrey, Julie Roy, Frontier Women: “Civilizing” the West? 1840–1880 (1979; New York, 1998)Google Scholar.

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4 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 506–10.

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14 Nancy J. Weiss, “Political Realignment,” in Encyclopedia of the Great Black Migration, 2:686–89.

15 In this historians are not alone. Stewart Tolnay points out that “of the traditional trinity of demographic processes (fertility, mortality, and migration), migration is probably the least studied by sociologists.” “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 209.

16 Sociologist Charles Tilly has noted that “for a country that has done so famously in the collection and storage of other kinds of data, the United States has pitifully little reliable information on migration.” Tilly, , “Race and Migration to the American City” in The Metropolitan Enigma, ed. Wilson, James Q. (New York, 1970), 156Google Scholar.

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18 Thernstrom, Stephan and Knights, Peter R., “Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations about Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1(Autumn 1970): 735CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One sociological study of African American migration does provide interview-based data on the backgrounds and motivations of migrants to Chicago from various southern states, as well as information on non-migrants living in Mississippi: Goodwin, E. Marvin, Black Migration in America from 1915 to 1960: An Uneasy Exodus (Lewiston, NY, 1990)Google Scholar. However, Goodwin lumps together migrants from the First and Second Great Migrations and provides no comparative analysis of his migrant/non-migrant data.

19 Maloney, Thomas N., “African American Migration to the North: New Evidence for the 1910s,” Economic Inquiry 40 (Jan. 2002): 111Google Scholar, compares migrants and non-migrants in 1910 and 1920 according to sex, age, literacy, and marital status; Maloney, , “Migration and Economic Opportunity in the 1910s: New Evidence on African-American Occupational Mobility in the North,” Explorations in Economic History 38 (Jan. 2001): 147–65Google Scholar, compares the status of southern- and northern-born in the North, as does Tolnay, Stewart E., “The Great Migration Gets Underway: A Comparison of Black Southern Migrants and Nonmigrants in the North, 1920,” Social Science Quarterly 82 (June 2001): 235–52Google Scholar. This approach provides more information about conditions in places than about motivation. See also Gregory, James N., “The Southern Diaspora and the Urban Dispossessed: Demonstrating the Census Public Use Microdata Samples,” Journal of American History 82 (June 1995): 111–34Google Scholar; Jason C. Digman, “Which Way to the Promised Land? Changing Patterns in Southern Migration, 1865–1920” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2001); Hall, Patricia Kelly and Ruggles, Steven, “‘Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity’: New Evidence on the Internal Migration of Americans, 1850–2000,” Journal of American History 91 (Dec. 2004): 829–46Google Scholar.

20 Interview, Versia Ashley, no date, Black Middletown Project, Special Collections, Bracken Library, Ball State University, Muncie, IN.

21 Interview, Daniel Bonds, no date, Black Oral History of Canton, Ohio, Stark County District Library, Canton. For further examples of multiple, zigzag moves, see Blocker, Jack S. Jr., “Black Migration to Muncie, 1860–1930,” Indiana Magazine of History 92 (Dec. 1996): 312Google Scholar.

22 Sewell, William H. Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Emphasis was in original.

23 A pioneering effort to trace the sequence of railway construction and relate it to migration is found in Gabaccia, Donna R., “Constructing North America: Railroad Building and the Rise of Continental Migrations, 1850–1914” in Repositioning North American Migration History: New Directions in Modern Continental Migration, Citizenship, and Community, ed. Rodriguez, Marc S. (Rochester, NY, 2004), 2753Google Scholar.

24 A notable exception is the remarkable set of letters from would-be migrants to Chicago published in Scott, Emmett J., comp., “Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–18,” Journal of Negro History 4 (July 1919): 290340Google Scholar, and Additional Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–18,” Journal of Negro History 4 (Oct. 1919): 412–65Google Scholar.

25 Interview, Kelley, Alexander, no date, in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement, Series 1, ed. Rawick, George P. (Westport, CT, 1972–79)Google Scholar; Ibid., Vol. V, 106.

26 For the public debate over the Exodus, see Painter, Nell Irvin, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1977; Lawrence, KS, 1986), chs. 16, 17, 19Google Scholar; Athearn, Robert G., In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879–80 (Lawrence, KS, 1978)Google Scholar.

27 Douglass, Frederick, “The Negro Exodus from the Gulf States,” Journal of Social Science 11 (May 1880): 121Google Scholar (quotation 15). Douglass did not attend the conference but sent his paper to be read by another.

28 McFeely, William S., Frederick Douglass (New York, 1991), 301–04Google Scholar.

29 Greener, Richard T., “The Emigration of Colored Citizens from the Southern States,” Journal of Social Science 11 (May 1880): 2235Google Scholar (quotation 26).

30 The principal exception was a symposium in the North American Review in 1884 on “The Future of the Negro,” in which Douglass and Greener participated. Most of the ten contributors agreed that most African Americans would not emigrate from the South.

31 Bois, W. E. B. Du, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; Philadelphia, 1996)Google Scholar. The discussion of migration is on pages 73–82. The making of The Philadelphia Negro is discussed in Lewis, David Levering, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York, 1993), ch. 8Google Scholar. See also Katz, Michael B. and Sugrue, Thomas J., eds., W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy (Philadelphia, 1998)Google Scholar.

32 The rivalry between Woodson and Du Bois is described in Meier, August and Rudwick, Elliott, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–1980 (Urbana, 1986), 1015Google Scholar.

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34 Epstein, Abraham, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, 1917)Google Scholar.

35 Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration, 119–20. Woodward, C. Vann, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge, 1986), 24Google Scholar, points out that this interpretation “preceded Dunning and was more the product of a regional white consensus than of a school or a scholar.”

36 Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration, 126–34, 167–92.

37 Ibid., 169–73.

38 Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 73–97.

39 Wright, R. R. Jr., “Migration of Negroes to the North,” Annals of the American Academy 27 (May 1906): 559–78Google Scholar; Johnson, Charles S., “How Much Is the Migration a Flight from Persecution?” Opportunity 1 (Sept. 1923): 272–74Google Scholar, and Johnson, “The Negro Migration: An Economic Interpretation,” The Modern Quarterly 2 (July 1925): 314–26Google Scholar; Haynes, George Edmund, “The Migration of Negroes from Country to City,” Southern Workman 47 (Apr. 1913): 230–36Google Scholar; Haynes, , “Conditions among Negroes in the Cities,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 49 (Sept. 1913): 105–19Google Scholar; Haynes, , “Migration of Negroes into Northern Cities,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work 49 (1917): 494–96Google Scholar; Haynes, , “Negroes Move North: I. Their Departure from the South,” Survey 40 (May 4, 1918): 115–22Google Scholar; Haynes, , “Negroes Move North: II,” Survey 41 (Jan. 4, 1919): 455–61Google Scholar; U. S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics, Negro Migration in 1916–17, ed. Haynes, George Edmunds (Washington, 1919)Google Scholar; Scott, comp., “Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–18,” and Scott, “Additional Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–18”; Scott, , Negro Migration during the War (New York, 1920)Google Scholar. Johnson also played a major role in researching and writing the report of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago (Chicago, 1922), which includes an examination of migration. See also Robbins, Richard, Sidelines Activist: Charles S. Johnson and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Jackson, MS, 1996)Google Scholar. An important article by a later sociologist is Florant, Lyonel C., “Negro Internal Migration,” American Sociological Review 7 (Dec. 1942): 782–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Kiser, Clyde Vernon, Sea Island to City: A Study of St. Helena Islanders in Harlem and Other Urban Centers (1932; New York, 1967)Google Scholar.

41 Ibid., 93.

42 Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, chs. 2–3.

43 See the review of Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration in America, by economic historian Wright, Gavin, Journal of Economic History 41 (Dec. 1981): 927–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also, Black Migration in America does not compare black and white migrations.

44 Vickery, William Edward, Economics of the Negro Migration, 1900–1960 (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Fligstein, Neil, Going North: Migration of Blacks and Whites from the South, 1900–1950 (New York, 1981)Google Scholar. The year 1900 also serves as a starting point for an otherwise fine comparative synthesis on the effects of twentieth-century black and white migrations from the South: Gregory, James N., The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill, 2005)Google Scholar.

45 Painter, Exodusters, 146–47. The point is further supported in Cohen, William, At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861–1915 (Baton Rouge, 1991), app. BGoogle Scholar.

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47 Trotter, Joe William Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45 (Urbana, 1985), app.7, 264–82Google Scholar.

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49 Ibid., 176. A study that tries to identify the urban origins of Great Migration migrants to Pittsburgh, using marriage-license applications, is Alexander, J. Trent, “The Great Migration in Comparative Perspective: Interpreting the Urban Origins of Southern Black Migrants to Depression-Era Pittsburgh,” Social Science History 22 (Fall 1998): 349–76Google Scholar.

50 Grossman, Land of Hope, probably the most useful study of the First Great Migration, is nonetheless limited both spatially and temporally by its focus on the migration of 1916–19 to Chicago. Another major monograph, Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land, addresses a different set of issues, the meaning of the First Great Migration for African American religion, rather than the who, what, when, where, how, and why of migration.

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52 Wharton, Vernon L., The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1900 (1947; New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Thornbrough, Emma L., The Negro in Indiana before 1900: A Study of a Minority (1957; Bloomington, IN, 1993)Google Scholar; Gerber, David A., Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1865–1915 (Urbana, 1976)Google Scholar; Dittmer, John, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (Urbana, 1977)Google Scholar; Lamon, Lester C., Blacks in Tennessee, 1791–1970 (Knoxville, 1981)Google Scholar; McMillen, Neil R., Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana, 1989)Google Scholar; Thornbrough, Emma Lou, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century, ed. and completed by Reugamer, Lana (Bloomington, IN, 2000)Google Scholar; Ortiz, Paul, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley, 2005)Google Scholar; Giffin, William W., African Americans and the Color Line in Ohio, 1915–1930 (Columbus, 2005)Google Scholar.

53 Tuttle, William M. Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (1970; Urbana, 1996), 74107Google Scholar.

54 Tolnay, Stewart E. and Beck, E. M., A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana, 1995), 231–32Google Scholar.

55 Wright, George C., Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings” (Baton Rouge, 1990), chs. 5–6Google Scholar, explores various African American responses to racial violence, but not migration. Among other modern violence studies, neither Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana, 1993)Google Scholar, nor Pfeifer, Michael J., Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana, 2004)Google Scholar, investigates African American responses to lynching, although Brundage does this in The Darien ‘Insurrection’ of 1899: Black Protest During the Nadir of Race Relations,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 74 (Summer 1990): 234–53Google Scholar.

56 Loewen, James W., Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York, 2005), 47Google Scholar.

57 Among many examples, one classic is Barton, Josef, Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Romanians, and Slovaks in an American City, 1890–1950 (Cambridge, MA, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Donna R. Gabaccia and James R. Grossman, “From U. S. Immigration History to a History of Continental Journeys” in Rodriguez, ed., Repositioning North American Migration History, 388–401 (quotations 390). See also Marc S. Rodriguez, “Introduction: Reconsidering Modern Continental Migration, Community, and Citizenship” in Rodriguez, ed., Repositioning North American Migration History, ix–xxiii. Historians of the Civil War, Gilded Age, and Progressive Era migrations will also benefit from the considerable research in progress on the Second Great Migration, a good recent example of which is Gregory, Southern Diaspora.

59 For examples, see Blocker, Jack S. Jr., “Wages of Migration: Jobs and Homeownership among Black and White Workers in Muncie, Indiana, 1920” in The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, eds. Okpewho, Isidore, Davies, Carole Boyce, and Mazrui, Ali A. (Bloomington, IN, 1999), 115–38Google Scholar; Maloney, “African American Migration to the North” and “Migration and Economic Opportunity in the 1910s”; Tolnay, Stewart E., “Educational Selection in the Migration of Southern Blacks, 1880–1990,” Social Forces 75 (Dec. 1998): 487514Google Scholar; Tolnay, “The Great Migration Gets Underway”; Digman, “Which Way to the Promised Land?”

60 Blocker, A Little More Freedom. Other regional studies of migration include Johnson, “Out of Egypt,” and Schwalm, Leslie A., “‘Overrun with Free Negroes’: Emancipation and Wartime Migration in the Upper Midwest,” Civil War History 50 (June 2004): 145–74Google Scholar. Regional studies do seem to be gaining credence in the writing of African American history; see Trotter, River Jordan, and Bigham, Darrel E., On Jordan's Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (Lexington, KY, 2006)Google Scholar.

61 Schwalm, Emancipation's Diaspora.

62 Kyriakoudes, Louis, The Social Origins of the Urban South: Race, Gender, and Migration in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, 1890–1930 (Chapel Hill, 2003)Google Scholar.

63 Blocker, Jack S. Jr., “Home Videos in Words: African-American Oral History Collections in Indiana Archives,” Black History News and Notes 62 (Nov. 1995): 14Google Scholar; Blocker, , “Grassroots Sources on African-American Migration and Life in the Lower Midwest,” SHGAPE Newsletter 10 (Spring 2000): 89Google Scholar; Blocker, A Little More Freedom, app. C, 247–51. An outstanding collection of First Great Migration oral histories is Black, Timuel D. Jr., Bridges of Memory: Chicago's First Wave of Black Migration, An Oral History (Evanston, IL, 2003)Google Scholar.