Learning Targets

1877- The End of Reconstruction

Republicans (abolitionists) were losing their enthusiasm for black rights.

President Hayes ordered withdrawal of federal troops in the South

Democrats gained strength and Jim Crow laws resulted in legal segregation.

The Failure of Reconstruction Reviewed What was put in place to protect and enhance the lives of freedmen?

How did these efforts fail in reality?

13th Amendment – bans slavery

• Practice of sharecropping keeps African Americans poor and tied to the same land

Freedmen's Bureau –Agency to support basic needs

• Bureau workers harassed, not long term (provided food, not jobs)

• White Terrorism – KKK, lynching

14th Amendment –citizenship and due process

• Not given equal protection• Jim Crow Laws - separated transportation, schools,

libraries, drinking fountains, morgues/funeral parlors

• Plessy v. Ferguson - Legalized Jim Crow Segregation until “separate but equal”

15th Amendment – voting for black males

• Limited Voting - Poll Taxes, Literacy Tests, grandfather clause

The Great Migration 6 million A.A. Chose to flee the harsh conditions of

the South and move to the North and West.

"Migrants came north in thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands - from the docks of Norfolk, Savannah, Jacksonville, Tampa, Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston: from the cotton fields of Mississippi, and the coal mines and steel-mills of Alabama and Tennessee; from workshops and wash-tubs and brickyards and kitchens they came, until the number, by conservative estimate, went well over the million and a half mark."

- James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan.

Diving in – Historical Research Use the materials to identify at least TWO SPECIFIC FACTS

OR EXAMPLES for each category: Why they left the South: Jobs they had in the North How they were treated in the North How they responded to discrimination:

If you have both time and space on your paper, you may paste 1-3 photos onto your notes to help create a visual representation of the information.

Print the following info slides for each table(can print 2 slides per page)

Many in the younger generations still lived in slavery-like conditions as sharecroppers tied down to white plantations.

Why They Left - Sharecropping

The Southwestern Christian Advocate, an African-American newspaper, wrote on April 26, 1917: "[S]ome months ago Anthony Crawford, a highly respectable, honest and industrious Negro, with a good farm and holdings estimated to be worth $300,000, was lynched in Abbeville, South Carolina. He was guilty of no crime. He would not be cheated out of his cotton. That was insolence. . . . [The mob] overpowered him and brutally lynched him. Is any one surprised that Negroes are leaving South Carolina by the thousands? The wonder is that any of them remain."

Why They Left –Lynching/Violence

On April 2, 1918, one Mrs. J. H. Adams, from Macon, Georgia, wrote a letter to the Bethlehem Baptist Association of Chicago. She had read about the group in the Chicago Defender and hoped its members could help her "get out there as I am anxious to leave here and everything so hard here." Black newspapers were a lifeline for the potential migrants who not only found encouragement to leave the South and information on jobs and housing, but could also try to get assistance from the migrant and religious networks already established in the North.

Why They Left – Northern black newspapers encouraged it

The occupations of the migrants were varied. Although many had worked in agriculture, a large percentage had held other jobs. Miners from Alabama, for example, headed for the coal mines of Pennsylvania. According to surveys done in Chicago and Pittsburgh, only about one-quarter of the migrants came from the agricultural sector.

What They Did - Mining

It was not rare for skilled southern workers to become laborers in the North. A former coal miner was a janitor in Chicago, a tinsmith and a clergyman worked as laborers in the stockyards, the owner of a café was an elevator man, a plasterer labored in the steel mills, and a blacksmith became a janitor. This trend was common to other cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York.

What They Did –Laborers

Throughout the North prior to 1915, 80 percent of black working women were in domestic or personal service. In World War I and later in World War II, women were used to fill the posts vacated by men who went off to fight. They could make $3 a day at this packinghouse, as opposed to 50¢ picking cotton in the South.

What They Did

The automobile factories in Detroit started to hire black men in 1916. By 1926, eleven thousand African Americans were employed at the assembly lines. The Ford plant at River Rouge provided work for six thousand of them, or 11 percent of its fifty-five thousand employees. About four thousand other black workers were employed by the Ford Highland Park plant. Only two were skilled.

What They Did –Auto Factories

Before the migration, there were an estimated five thousand black businesses on record in the U.S., mainly grocery stores, barbershops, funeral homes, saloons, hotels, catering businesses, and building and loan associations.

By 1920 there were about seventy thousand black-owned businesses. Added by the migration were businesses specializing in tailoring and pressing, and in coal and ice, as well as employment agencies, moving companies like this one in Cleveland, Ohio, and pool halls. Smaller entrepreneurs also sprung up, among them truck farmers, peddlers, butchers, and junk dealers.

What They Did – Started Businesses

Southern migrants found segregation in the North as well. Separate facilities were a humiliation as well as a source of economic strength in the community, because they enabled black-owned stores and other services to flourish. Schools, hospitals, restaurants, and other places that catered exclusively to African Americans provided skilled and professional jobs that were barred to blacks in white facilities. These nurses at the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia were able to work as professionals in a segregated hospital, whereas they would probably have found only domestic work in a white hospital.

Challenges They Faced - Segregation

Large influxes of migrants brought escalating housing prices in every city. Overcrowding was common. In some cities, finding affordable housing was not possible. In Cleveland, Ohio, as in other cities, landlords took advantage of the migrants' need for housing and of their limited possibilities caused by segregation. One report stated, "At present, with little relief in sight, Negroes are living in cramped unsanitary quarters two or three families per suite. Rents have increased far out of proportion, ranging from 50 to 75 cent higher than for white tenants. Instances are on record here of rents jumping from $25 to $45, from $16 to $35."

Challenges They Faced – Overcrowding

In 1919, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations found that, in terms of black housing, "The ordinary conveniences, considered necessities by the average white citizen, are often lacking. Bathrooms are often missing. Gas lighting is common, and electric lighting is a rarity. Heating is commonly done by wood or coal stoves, and furnaces are rather exceptional." In Chicago, about 60 percent of the migrant families rented rooms to lodgers in order to pay the rent. The overcrowding led to rapid deterioration of already dilapidated apartments.

Challenges They Faced – Crowded housing that was falling apart

Tensions grew between the black newcomers and the area's whites-only labor unions, and in 1917 a race riot erupted that lasted several days. "The East St-Louis massacres [were] a riot in which four hundred thousand dollars' worth of property was destroyed, nearly six thousand Negroes driven from their homes, hundreds of them killed; some burned in the houses set afire over their heads," explained poet and novelist James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) in his autobiography Along This Way. In a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People to discuss plans to register a protest, Johnson suggested a silent parade.

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A riot began in Chicago in 1919 when black and white bathers battled over a section of beach on Lake Michigan tacitly reserved for whites. In the confusion, a black youth drowned. Rumors spread that stone-throwing whites had hit him. Tensions between the races, which had been growing throughout the summer, erupted into violence that lasted thirteen days. Most of the rioting was confined to the South Side of the city; however, clashes also occurred in other areas where African Americans lived. In this picture, two white men, part of a group, stoned an African American to death.

Challenges They Faced – Chicago Race Riot

On the night of May 31, 1921, thousands of whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma, demanded the lynching of Dick Rowland, a black shoe shiner, after learning of reports that he had assaulted a white woman in downtown Tulsa. Racial tension and false accusations led to the Tulsa Race Riot, which included the murder of hundreds of blacks and the annihilation of thirty-five square blocks of the African-American community in Tulsa. Truckloads of whites set fires and shot blacks on sight. More than fourteen hundred homes and businesses in Tulsa's Greenwood district, a prosperous area known as the "black Wall Street," were destroyed. The official death toll, which underestimated the loss, was over one hundred dead, most of them black.

Challenges They Faced –Tulsa Race Riot

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909, with local branches throughout the country. The association's journal, The Crisis, launched by W. E. B. Du Bois, introduced a wide audience to critical analyses by black scholars and the literary prowess of black writers. The journal published many articles on the migration north. It defined the role of the organization as follows: "The first job of this organization was the awakening, a quickening, a prickling of the American conscience, of public opinion and we have begun with the only weapon which we had at hand and that weapon was intelligent and persistent agitation about the right and the wrong."

How They Reacted – Civil Rights Groups (NAACP)

The Universal Negro Improvement Association became the largest mass movement in African-American history. Its membership was hardly confined to these shores; Garvey had followers throughout the Caribbean, Africa, South America, and Great Britain. UNIA parades in Harlem attracted thousands of marchers and spectators who took pride in the strength, discipline, and display of power of "the New Negro."

How They Reacted – Civil Rights Groups (UNIA)

Harlem at the time of the migration was home to many people of the African Diaspora; they had come from the American South, several Caribbean islands, South America, and Africa. Movements to reclaim their African heritage and bring unity to the disparate groups had great appeal.

How They Reacted –Civil Rights Groups (African Heritage)

James Weldon Johnson, who launched the idea of the parade, wrote: "The streets of New York witnessed many strange sights but, I judge, never one more impressive. The parade moved in silence and was watched in silence."

NAACP's Silent Protest Parade from New York City's Fifth Avenue to Harlem. James Weldon Johnson, who launched the idea of the parade, wrote: "The streets of New York witnessed many strange sights but, I judge, never one more impressive. The parade moved in silence and was watched in silence."

How They Reacted – NAACP Silent Protest Parade in NY

Organizations such as the Chicago Urban League took great pains to educate newcomers on correct decorum in public. Old-time residents feared a backlash on the whole community from any indiscretions by the migrants. They urged them to forget their "rural ways." The Chicago Defender declared, "It is evident that some of the people coming to this city have seriously erred in their conduct in public places, much to the humiliation of all respectable classes of our citizens." The paper urged strict observation of laws and customs and printed a list of twenty-six don'ts.

How They Reacted – Educating New Arrivals