Book Reviews

BOOK REVIEWS EDITED BY MICHAEL P. WEBER CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY Black Migration:Movement North, 1900-1920. By Florette Henri. (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1975. Pp. xi, 419. $9.95.) From Frederick Jackson Turner to Oscar Handlin, American historians have repeatedly documented the central role of migration to the develop- ment of the United States. Blacks no less than whites participated in that experience and moved in every direction since they were brought to America from Africa. This book tells the story of the initial period of one of those black migrations, the large-scale movement of people from the South to the North and West that has yet to run its course. For the historian of Afro-American history, the study of the first twenty years of this century has certain advantages. Not only did the northward movement get underway on a major scale in these years. But significantly for the scholar, the secondary literature on black history for this period is perhaps richer than for any other period, save possibly Reconstruction. Hardly a facet of black life in the period 1890 to 1930 has not been examined in monograph or article. An increasing number of northern cities have been studied; many of the social disturbances of the time have been analyzed; the major black figures have been the subjects of biography. Social movements and institutions such as the Urban League, the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the UNIA as well as fraternities, lodges, and churches have been studied. Clearly, one of the tasks Florette Henri, the autnor of this volume, has in mind is to effect a synthesis of much of this growing body of historical literature. The book is largely descriptive. It is not devoid of interpretations, however, and there are numerous worthwhile insights scattered through the book. The major theme, and a sound and worthy one, is as author Henri states in her preface, that "black Americans in the early decades of the century had far more of a hand in shaping their future than historians of the period tend to perceive, or at least to convey." This has of course been true of all periods of Afro-American history, even slavery, and it cannot too often be iterated. Blacks have indeed more often played active rather than passive roles in the determination of their fate. Mrs. Henri is not at all shy about reiterating her theme, even when the proof is skimpy and she has to call upon surmise and informed guessing. Early in the book, for example, she advances several plausible explanations for the drive for complete segregation and disfranchisement in the South at the end of the nineteenth century. If not exactly contrary to accepted historical opinion, at least an extension of it, she contends that disfranchisement and Jim Crow were not simply reactions to Populist defeat. They were as well, white reactions to black self-assertion in voting and an action such as Plessy's in suing the federal courts in 1896. The greatest act of black 89 90 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY self-assertion, obviously, was the mass migration itself. Hundreds of thousands of poor, defenseless peasant-laborers left the security of the known in their southern homes, even though filled with poverty and despair, to journey to the promised land of the North. Here, surely, was a movement no less fraught with danger and uncertainty than the more highly lauded westward movement of largely white pioneers decades earlier. The early chapters dealing with the exodus from the South and the deplorable living and working conditions the newcomers faced in the North are among the best in the book. In page after page, relying on statistics as well as the statements of informed observers, the author depicts the horrors of poverty and ignorance, bringing alive the squalor and suffering endured by blacks who came seeking a better life and wound up in vice-ridden ghettoes enclosed by people hostile to their very presence in the city. Henri sums up their predicament well: "In their ignorance and helpless- ness they were materials for exploitation by greedy landlords and business- men, and by vicious characters, both black and white; they were victims of indifference in the schools and city departments, of a corrupt police force and discriminatory judges; and they bore the sicknesses visited on them by poverty, ignorance, and filth with an almost complete absence of health and medical services. Most of all, they were victims of poverty, of unfulfilled needs so broad and deep that the wonder is they survived." Such a con- clusion makes it harder though not impossible to swallow her rather op- timistic view that the good resulting from the movement outweighed the evil. Here is a case where one has to balance long-range benefits, or the hope therefor, against short-range difficulties. The latter part of the book seems somehow less satisfactory. Perhaps the fault lies in the very nature of description, when after a time the reader simply becomes overwhelmed by facts even though a structure exists. Some chapters seem to embrace too much material to fit comfortably on the scaffolding. In other places the author raises interesting points and simply does not carry the analysis far enough. She could surely have done more with the migrants' reaction to the city and the emergence of an urban black ethos. At one point she declares: ". they brought the old religion with them, changing in this way the Northern cities that were so profoundly changing them. And here .. [as] in other areas of life, black consciousness was asserting itself." However, what might have been an informative discussion of the evolution of rural black religion in an urban setting is not forthcoming. At another point the author perceptively notes the impact of black athletes like Jack Johnson on a later generation of ghetto youth. Again, the reader yearns for more than a simple description of so potentially significant a cultural phenomenon. In the author's discussion of racism we see examples of both the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Her treatment of ideological racism reads like a shopping list of racist thinkers and ideas. In a sense, however, she rescues what is on the verge of becoming sheer puerility by pointing out in a few well-conceived pages how such thought seeped down to the man in the street through such movies as "The Birth of a Nation." And after noting a few of the early efforts to counter such racist propaganda, she poses the simple, indisputable question, "But how could printed words and still pic- tures compete with Griffith's mob movements and Dixon's hate acted out BOOK REVIEWS 91 by live people?" Possibly the best section of the book is the chapter dealing with blacks in the military in World War I. Since the author has written at length on the subject before, this is not surprising. By using as a literary device the treatment of black officers, she effectively makes her point that black people were treated worse than shabbily by an army that viewed them more as beasts of burden than as men. Instead of listing the battles in which blacks distinguished themselves or were left our of, Henri traces with a sure hand the World War I career of the black man as officer. In the process she strengthens one of her central arguments: that white prejudice was no- where more overt and vicious than when blacks through word and deed proved themselves capable of being more than hewers of wood and drawers of water. One comes away from such a discussion wondering why any black man who went through all that humiliation and degradation would ever again want to fight in such an army. But some there were, like this reviewer's father, who though merely a non-commissioned officer in World War I volunteered for service at the beginning of World War II. As in the case of the northward migration itself, one can only conclude that people are forever running away from something as well as running to something else. The book ends on a rather fanciful note of optimism. For in Henri's view out of the evils of war and post-war race riots emerged the New Negro, a not altogether novel concept. As depicted by the author, the New Negro is the product of a complex mixture of the less passive, self-reliant migrant, the ex-G.I. with a no-nonsense attitude toward race prejudice, Marcus Garvey's paeans to blackness, and the cultural effusions of the Negro Renaissance. Contrary to the seminal work of recent scholars like Nathan Huggins (whom she does not mention in her bibliography), her New Negro is a far cry from the "old line abolitionists" (Although not exactly clear, the reference seems to be to the "old settlers" of the northern cities.). The New Negro, Mrs. Henri avers, is the old with the burnt cork washed off (which if one follows Huggins' marvelous tour de force in Harlem Renais- sance would make it difficult to determine precisely what color her New Negro would wind up being). In any event, as she concludes, "In two decades of dramatic change he had become used to doing his own thinking, talking, organizing, and fighting, and would from then on defend himself personally, industrially, and politically. He was marching to meet the millennium half-way." Hyperbole and overdrawn rhetoric aside, though a good deal of the factual information in the book might tend to support such faith, other facts presented might lead one to question such optimism.

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