Allie
Groscost
Comparative
Literature 60ac
Professor
Masiello
Matt Gonzales' Discussion Friday 11-12
The Great Migration
The climate in America changed
dramatically during the last half of the nineteenth century. During the Civil
War, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a
statement that would free millions of black slaves in the South. Upon the War’s
closure, however, many of these free people would realize that their troubles
were far from over.
After Lincoln’s assassination and
closer to the end of 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified,
officially outlawing slavery. Reconstruction began – a series of federal measures
took hold in the South to divide up the former Confederacy and guarantee free
people their civil rights. In response to this, Southern states put in place
their own “black codes”, which allowed basic rights for blacks but severely
limited their opportunities and rights as now-paid workers.
In the coming years, the 14th
and 15th Amendments would be ratified, defining citizenship and
granting blacks the right to vote. Once again, these important attempts at
integrating freed slaves into society and giving them equal rights were foiled
by the failure and end of Reconstruction, as well as the creation of Jim Crowe
laws. These laws barred African Americans from mixing with whites everywhere
from the post office to playing checkers, creating a “separate but equal”
environment (which was not truly equal).
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| Caricature about Jim Crow Laws |
Once slavery was abolished, many people
looked forward to being rightfully given portions of the land they had worked
on previously, in a concept known as “forty acres and a mule”. Instead, the
land claimed by the government during the Civil War was mostly returned to the
white plantation owners, who began a system known as sharecropping, in which they
would allow newly freed slaves to work on an allotted portion of their land in
exchange for a significant portion of their profit. This system did not allow
for the economic freedom of African Americans, who struggled under these newly
accrued debts, becoming essentially indentured servants. A major event that contributed
to this struggle was a boll weevil epidemic in the year 1898, which destroyed a
vast majority of crops in the South. This meant that a majority of what little
crops sharecroppers could grow went to their landlords, putting them deep into
debt if they borrowed money to use the sharecropper’s tools or other resources
to grow these meager yields of cheap cotton.
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| Sharecroppers |
Another pressure looming over “free”
African Americans in the South in the late nineteenth century was the threat of
domestic terrorism. Although the Ku Klux
Klan was officially disbanded in 1869, its racist ideals still maintained a
solid grip on the South during this time period and lynchings, intimidation,
and violence haunted blacks. It is
important to realize that although this was a significant threat to African
Americans, it was not a new one, and ultimately not the main reason they
relocated during the Great Migration.
All of these issues continued into the
twentieth century and the beginning of World War I. During this time, immigration
had been halted into the U.S. and many working-age men were enlisted into the
army, so help was needed creating the weaponry and supplies for the war effort.
This labor shortage drew many African
Americans to the North in search of actual equality and decent working
conditions. Black newspapers published success stories of transplanted workers,
and northern companies sent recruiters to the South to persuade them to come
work in the North. For many, the ability to move from place to place was freedom
– something slaves could never have done without being hunted down and possibly
killed.
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Desperate economic conditions, unsafe
environments, and a labor shortage in the North began uprooting blacks from the
South, creating an enormous displacement of people across the United States.
Spanning from 1915 to 1970, The Great Migration was an exodus in which more
than six million African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban
North. At the beginning of this movement, over 90% of blacks lived in the South,
and by the end, almost half had settled in the North or West.
At the beginning of this movement, white
landholders were not happy to see their cheap labor leaving. In addition,
African Americans who had already established themselves in the North were less
than delighted to admit newcomers into their environment. Isabel Wilkerson, the
first black woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, discusses these points in
an NPR interview about her Great Migration book, The Warmth of Other Suns. She details how Southerners reenacted many of
the laws that had been previously been used to keep slaves in place to keep
African Americans in the South, as well as imposing fines and laws to keep
Northern recruiters out. She also explains the reinstatement of peonage laws,
which made it possible to be arrested for buying a train ticket and trying to
leave the horrible conditions there.
Wilkerson’s reasoning behind the lapse in support from African Americans
already in the North is that they were an extreme minority there and respected
in their professional roles in these communities. The influx of rural workers
posed a threat to their careers that were already difficult to maintain.
Once in the North, life was not
automatically a “piece of cake” for most African Americans. Although they
finally experienced the right to vote, they were met with hardships such as extreme
discrimination for job selection, exploitation, and low wages, and were the
first fired once soldiers returned home from World War I. Housing was a huge issue – competition for
houses and discrimination by white landlords led to a series of race riots in 1919.
In response to this, blacks often
created their own communities within these large cities, which led to important
cultural movements such as the Harlem Renaissance and the rise of jazz music.
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| Louis Armstrong |
The Great Migration significantly
impacted Zora Neale Hurston, as she took part in it. Growing up in Eatonville,
Florida, she moved to the North to attend school at Howard University and
Barnard College, joining the other writers of the Harlem Renaissance in New
York City. Although she later traveled all around the United States and around
the world, The Great Migration is an issue that directly impacted her heritage,
history, and ultimately her novel Their
Eyes Were Watching God. Without her experiences in Harlem, Zora Neale Hurston arguably would have never collaborated with other great writers such as Langston Hughes and would not have gotten mentorship from people such as Frank Boaz.
Questions for the Class:
1. Given your previous knowledge of African American history and the information presented in this post, how do you think Zora Neale Hurston's life would have been different if the Great Migration did not occur? Do you think she would have had the opportunity to create written works that were read if not respected? How would other Harlem Renaissance writers have been affected; would they all have eventually crossed paths or is the Great Migration essential to the nurture and celebration of black culture and rise of different movements?
2. How can you see the influence of the Great Migration in the Modernist movement and today? Many people do not realize that this exodus ended in 1970, which is much more recent than the time period we typically think about when discussing topics like the effects of slavery. What specific aspects of this movement have been brushed over in history and how has this affected U.S. history, specifically in regards to Modernism? Keep this in mind as we cover other Harlem Renaissance writers.
Works Cited
Giesen, James C. “Sharecropping”.
Georgiaencyclopedia.org, 2007. Web. 28 Sept. 2016.
“The Great Migration”. PBS.org, 2013. Web. 28
Sept. 2016.
"Great Migration: What Caused the Great
Migrations?" History in Dispute. Ed. Robert J.
Allison.
Vol. 3: American Social and Political Movements, 1900-1945: Pursuit of
Progress.
Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 70-77. U.S. History in Context.
Web. 29
Sept.
2016.
History.com
Staff. “Great Migration”. History.com.
A + E Networks, 2010. Web. 28
“Jim Crow Laws”.
Wikiwand.com, 2016. Web. 28 Sept. 2016.
<http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Jim_Crow_laws>
Molly. “The
Harlem Renaissance”. 2015. Web. 28 Sept. 2016.
<http://blogs.cofc.edu/american-novel/2015/04/02/the-harlem-renaissance/>
NPR.org Staff.
“Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North”. NPR.org, 2010.
Wilkerson,
Isabel. “The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration”.
Smithsonianmag.com,
2016. Web. 28 Sept. 2016.
“Zora Neale
Hurston”. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2016. Web. 28
Sept. 2016. <http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/jim-crow-and-great-
migration/timeline-terms/zora-neale-hurston>
