THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

Migration and Disappointment

Antisegregation race riots in Chicago, Knoxville, Omaha, and Washington, D.C., in 1919 indicated the emergence of a more militant "New Negro" who would dare to pursue economic opportunities and a better life. During the 1920s one million African Americans left the South for northern cities to follow the promise of better jobs. They continued to be disappointed: only the most precarious, dirtiest industrial jobs were opened to black men, and black women were excluded entirely from industrial work and left with only traditional domestic labor.

New Black Communities

Migration north was traumatic, but black families developed ways to cope with their difficulties. Blacks, like immigrant groups, used chain migration: one member of a family moving alone to a new location, getting a job, and then helping others of his family to join him. In northern cities blacks quickly , re-created their own communities, establishing churches, southern-style restaurants, and businesses run by former neighbors down south. But not only did African Americans face job discrimination once they came north, they also confronted severe housing discrimination. Blacks were forced to live in severely crowded segregated neighborhoods where rents were exorbitant. Their migration to northern cities resulted not in an end to Jim Crow segregation but rather in the establishment of new forms of de facto urban segregation in schools, Swimmingpools, restaurants, and theaters.

First Black Mass Movement

The New Negro contributed to urban culture in the 1920s through the flourishing in jazz, art, and literature known as the Harlem Renaissance; this increasingly militant figure also became part of the first black mass movement of the twentieth century, the Back to Africa Movement led by Marcus Garvey. Garvey, who had established the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica in 1914 to "draw the peoples of the race together," delivered a message of pride that attracted urban blacks in the United States. He hoped to establish in Africa a strong black nation that would offer protection and opportunity to blacks everywhere. Garvey's movement lost steam after his conviction for mail fraud in 1925, but it continued to stimulate positive racial identity and militancy in many African Americans of the 1920s and later.

Sources:

James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989);

Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971);

Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).