ECONOMICHISTORY The Great Southern Migration BY BETTY JOYCE NASH Throughout much ames Macbeth moved to New Sometimes it’s a better job. Or both. York from Charleston, S.C., in the Migrations affect jobs, wages, of the 20th century, Jboom years of the Great geography, housing, education — all Migration. It was the 1950s, a decade economic activity. Migrations also people streamed when some 1.1 million blacks left the reveal how workers sort themselves out of the South, South. His father had departed many into jobs in different locations. years before, too many for him to “It’s a complex process in which rearranging the remember just which year it was. The workers and employers match up, and elder Macbeth worked for the postal it’s absolutely essential in an economy social, political, and service in New York City. By the time that changes rapidly over time,” Macbeth was ready for college, he says economist William Collins economic landscape moved to Pennsylvania and his mother of Vanderbilt University. “In other later joined his father in New York. words, migration — the movement of The elder Macbeths also worked at the workers from place to place — is a Carolina Chapel of Mickey Funeral key part of the story of how labor Service in Harlem, founded in 1932, far markets work.” from its original Charleston, S.C., The Great Migration ebbed and home base. Macbeth works there now. flowed with the world wars. The first Macbeth is but one of 8 million period dated from about 1915 to 1930 black and 20 million white — World War I and after — and Southerners who streamed to cities in slowed with the Depression. the North or West, with the heaviest Migration picked up again as military flows between about 1915 to 1970. production — steel and aluminum Blacks migrated in higher percentages plants, shipyards, aircraft plants, and than whites, and so this “Great military installations — for World War Migration” redistributed the racial II created jobs in the Great Lakes population. It changed job markets, corridor from New York to Chicago politics, and society. And culture. For as well as on both coasts. People kept The Great Migration brought families blacks, the exodus urbanized a former- moving even after the war, as the like this to Chicago and other industrial ly agricultural and dispersed people, economy grew. economic magnets in the Midwest and allowing them visibility in accomplish- While the migration north and Northeast. For blacks, the migration ing social goals. Effects of white west from Southern states began in promised not only job opportunities but migration were less dramatic and, earnest in the century’s first decade, also escape from the segregated South. in many cases, tempo- more than 40 years before Macbeth’s rary, coinciding with personal odyssey, the exodus was the wartime and post- growing even stronger at the time of war industrial boom. his departure. Macbeth, like most black immi- Migration: A grants, laughs when he says his father Sorting Mechanism headed north because “everybody said People migrate in the streets were paved with gold.” But search of better living the laughter subsides when he talks conditions. Sometimes about segregation, the “Jim Crow” freedom from war and laws that prevented blacks from voting oppression supplies and more. 4, 1920 , SEPT. the necessary energy In all former Confederate states, required to overcome less than 5 percent of eligible blacks CHICAGO DEFENDER the inertia inherent were registered to vote as late as 1940, in the status quo. according to historian David Kennedy. PHOTOGRAPHY: PHOTOGRAPHY: 36 Region Focus • Fall 2007 (Women, black and white, did not receive voting rights until 1920.) Regional Distribution of Black Population, 1900–2000 By 1900, Southern states had instituted racial separation: drinking fountains, 100 schools, waiting rooms. Few industrial South West Midwest Northeast jobs existed in the South, and Jim Crow 80 affected those too. For instance, in 1915, 60 South Carolina required segregated PERCENT 40 workrooms in textile mills. Infant mor- tality rates for blacks were nearly 20 double those for whites in 1930 (10 per- 0 cent and 6 percent, respectively). 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 Blacks could expect to live 15 fewer SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, Demographic Trends in the 20th Century, November 2002 years than whites, 45 compared with 60. Moving destinations varied. Southerners aimed for meccas like until mid-century, they did find lower- “The 1922 harvest season was followed Chicago or Detroit if they were from level jobs, according to Crew, who now by the largest wave of migration in the Mississippi or Alabama. But the goal directs the Underground Railroad history of black Carolina,” according was New York, Philadelphia, or Museum in Cincinnati. “In the North, to Black Carolinians: A History of Blacks Boston if they hailed from the because of the war, there was a real in South Carolina from 1895 to 1968 Carolinas and elsewhere along the shortage of labor, and as a conse- by I.A. Newby. Some 59,000 blacks Eastern Seaboard. Historian Spencer quence, opportunities for African left rural areas of 41 South Carolina Crew, who has studied the migration, Americans opened up, mostly in the counties between November 1922 and says that blacks in the early years fol- iron mills and slaughter houses.” Crew June 1923. lowed whatever rail routes crossed notes that the better-paid, higher- their towns. Trains pulled into skilled jobs were not available to blacks Migrant Characteristics Southern stations filled with goods until the post-World War II years — Blacks who migrated tended to be and pulled out filled with the people and even then, they were hard to get. more educated than those who stayed, who could afford to go. In 1920, for instance, 70 percent of while the reverse was true of whites, Economists have been curious Southern black men worked in according to Duke University econo- about why blacks waited some 50 years unskilled or service jobs compared to mist Jacob Vigdor. He has studied after the Civil War to exit the South in 22 percent of Southern white men. changes in migration patterns and significant numbers. By the early By 1970, according to historian James migrant characteristics. Before World 1900s, only a couple hundred thousand Gregory, that number had fallen to 35 War II, educated blacks were more blacks (and about 716,000 whites) were percent for Southern-born black men likely to migrate north because they leaving. The Great Migration peaked and a barely changed 24 percent for could better afford it. (Families who in the 1970s when some 1.5 million Southern-born white men. could afford the opportunity costs of blacks and 2.6 million whites left The agricultural depression of the sending their children to school, the South. 1920s, sparked by wartime overpro- he notes, could more likely pay for Theories have pointed to European duction and rock-bottom crop prices, a move.) immigration as a “deterrent” to black accelerated immigration even further Plus, they valued the educational migration, especially in those early during that decade. The cotton for opportunities they heard about up years. Data show that blacks “moved which the Southern states were North. It’s not that the North always at times and to places where foreign- famous was devastated by the boll turned out to be a “promised land” for born immigrants were less prevalent … weevil. In 1920, South Carolina farm- blacks, Crew says. But there was hope, the Great Migration would have got- ers produced 1.6 million bales, the the brightest of which was better edu- ten under way earlier than it did if biggest in the state’s history, but two cation. “People [were] bringing their strict immigration controls had been years later they counted 493,000, the kids with them in the hopes they adopted earlier,” Collins wrote in a fewest since the Civil War. Add to that [would] have a better future,” he says. paper on the subject. As World War I an agricultural deflation in which Vigdor reports median years of school- stifled that European flow, it simulta- peanut prices fell from $240 to $40 ing completed among black migrants neously created demand for workers to per ton in one season, corn from $1.50 from most Southern states as eight or fill industrial jobs previously available to 50 cents. nine in 1940 among those born from only to whites. That and mechanization forced 1913 to 1922. While blacks were not hired into many white and black agricultural Early migrants were, on average, skilled jobs in the Northern industries laborers off Southern fields for good. younger as well as better educated Fall 2007 • Region Focus 37 than non-migrants. They could read derided “hillbilly” and Southern in Chicago, Detroit, and Harlem, while newspapers, letters, or flyers that accents. Entire blocks of Chicago Ku Klux Klan terrorism and lynching described the migration. “In each age and Detroit were known as little marred life in the segregated South. cohort, highly educated blacks living Appalachia. There is still a faint legacy Black migrants tended to settle outside their state of birth were more of “Bronzeville,” a black district just together, and they organized them- likely to reside in the North than in now undergoing a renaissance of sorts, selves socially, according to Newby. the South,” Vigdor writes. “In the old- also in Chicago. “In every city where significant est cohort, highly educated black Early on, new migrants were often numbers of them settled, there were interstate migrants were 35 percent “portrayed in unflattering terms by Palmetto College Clubs or Palmetto more likely to reside in the North.” In contemporary observers,” according to state societies, which, in purely social 1940, educated blacks were likely to University of Washington sociologist matters at least, eased the transition to choose a Northern destination, but Stewart Tolnay.