THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE “PROMISED LAND”

Nonetheless, the war unleashed social changes that altered the contours of American race relations. The combination of increased wartime production and a drastic falloff in immigration from Europe once war broke out opened thousands of industrial jobs to black laborers for the first time, inspiring a large-scale migration from South to North. On the eve of World War I, 90 percent of the African-American population still lived in the South. Most northern cities had tiny black populations, and domestic and service work still predominated among both black men and women in the North. But between 1910 and 1920, half a million blacks left the South. The black population of Chicago more than doubled, New York City’s rose 66 percent, and smaller industrial cities like Akron, Buffalo, and Trenton showed similar gains.

A 1918 poster celebrates black soldiers in World War I as “True Sons of Freedom.” At the upper right, Abraham Lincoln looks on, with a somewhat modified quotation from the Gettysburg Address.

Many motives sustained the Great Migration—higher wages in northern factories than were available in the South (even if blacks remained confined to menial and unskilled positions), opportunities for educating their children, escape from the threat of lynching, and the prospect of exercising the right to vote. Migrants spoke of a Second Emancipation, of “crossing over Jordan,” and of leaving the realm of pharaoh for the Promised Land. One group from Mississippi stopped to sing, “I am bound for the land of Canaan,” after their train crossed the Ohio River into the North.

Table 19.1 THE GREAT MIGRATION

The black migrants, mostly young men and women, carried with them “a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom,” as Alain Locke explained in the preface to his influential book, The New Negro (1925). Yet the migrants encountered vast disappointments—severely restricted employment opportunities, exclusion from unions, rigid housing segregation, and outbreaks of violence that made it clear that no region of the country was free from racial hostility. More white southerners than blacks moved north during the war, often with similar economic aspirations. But the new black presence, coupled with demands for change inspired by the war, created a racial tinderbox that needed only an incident to trigger an explosion.