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The Black Migration to Philadelphia a 1924 Profile

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The Black Migration to Philadelphia a 1924 Profile The Black Migration to Philadelphia A 1924 Profile "The city Negro is only now in evolution"— Charles S. Johnson, Survey, March 1, 19251 A PROMINENT BLACK SOCIOLOGIST, Charles Johnson was well aware that there had been blacks living in American cities A> since the seventeenth century. Yet his proclamation in Survey's famous issue on Harlem and the "New Negro" of the 1920s remains accurate, for he was referring to the emergence of large, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan communities of people fully committed to city life. The massive racial transformation of urban America through black migration was concentrated in the half century framed by the First World War and the riots of the late 1960s. Perhaps because of the racial unrest which soon followed, the exceptional circumstances surrounding the start of the mass movement from the South around 1916 have been fairly well chronicled. The post-World War II movements are more exhaustively documented. But the crucial years of the early 1920s—the real onset of a self-sustaining migration—have been relatively unex- plored. This article analyzes responses to an unusually comprehensive survey conducted in Philadelphia in 1924 of over 500 recently arrived black migrants.2 At the time, Philadelphia still had the nation's second largest urban black population. Thus, the survey illuminates an im- portant part of the process which changed not just Philadelphia, but most of America's great industrial cities. The picture which emerges is richly textured, providing us with extraordinary detail about the experiences of people too often lost to history. This article will examine the migrants in the South, before they came to Philadelphia, and study who they were, where and how they lived, and what kinds of jobs they held. It shall then investigate the 1 Charles S. Johnson, "Black Workers and the City," The Survey 53 (March 1, 1925), 642. 2 The ten original worksheets onto which the data from individual houses were transcribed came to Temple University's Urban Archives in 1969 as part of the records of the Housing Association of Delaware Valley, formerly the Philadelphia Housing Association. Related cor- respondence and minutes, and a typescript of the final survey report were also deposited. 3 1 6 FREDRIC MILLER July process of migration, including the reasons people gave for coming North, and which families came together. In Philadelphia itself, the survey allows us to study the migrants' housing conditions, neighbor- hoods, occupations, individual and family incomes, church member- ship, and attitudes towards life in the northern city. A statistical analysis will also reveal a number of intriguing patterns, both within the black migrant community and in comparison with the community develop- ment of contemporary European immigrants. The Philadelphia survey recorded one of the most striking devel- opments in America's modern social history. In 1915, the nation's black people were overwhelmingly rural and southern. The 1910 census had shown that 73% lived in rural areas and, more strikingly, that 89% (down little from 91.5% in 1870) still lived in the South.3 There had been considerably greater black migration in those four decades to the trans-Mississippi South and West than to the Midwest and the Northeast. That pattern was reversed abruptly by the northern demand for labor during World War I and the simultaneous boll weevil epi- demic in southern cotton fields. Northward migration then continued as a result of the post-war industrial boom of the twenties, the virtual end of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and the southern agricultural constrictions. Both blacks and poor whites streamed out of the South, with the black migration proportionately larger. Between 1910 and 1920, the net outmigration of blacks from the eleven states of the Southeast was about 554,000, nearly 7% of the area's total black population. In the 1920s the net outmigration rose to about 902,000, a little over 10% of the remaining blacks and three times the white rate.4 While the 1916-18 migration was primarily a response to World War I, the renewed migration after 1921, concentrated in the early twenties, clearly grew out of long-term trends in both the southern and northern economies. According to the Department of Labor, during the height of the migration between September 1922 and September 1923 nearly half a million blacks left the South.5 By 1930, the proportion of 3 Marcus Jones, Black Migration in the United States with Special Emphasis on Selected Central Cities, (Saratoga, Calif., 1980), 137; Reynolds Farley, "The Urbanization of Negroes in the United States," Journal ofSocial History 1 (Spring 1968), 250. 4 William Vickery, The Economics of the Negro Migration 1900-1960, Ph.D. Dissertation (Univ. of Chicago, 1969), 15. 5 Louise Venable Kennedy, The Negro Peasant Turns Cityward(New York, 1930), 35. 1984 A BLACK MIGRATION TO PHILADELPHIA 3 1 7 America's 12 million black people in the South had fallen to 7 8.7%, and there were over two million blacks in the metropolitan areas of the northeast and the midwest.6 Though Philadelphia had previously had a large black population, this new "Great Migration" affected the city profoundly. As of 1910 the 84,459 black Philadelphians comprised 5.5% of the population. This was more than the slightly under 4% which had prevailed from the 1860s to the 1890s, but it was below the range of 7.4-9.5% found in the first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1910 and 1920 the black population rose to 134,224, or 7.4% of the city's total, with most of the increase coming between 1916 and 1919.7 The rise of the 1920s was considerably greater, with migration peaking between 1922 and 1924 at more than 10,000 per year.8 A net increase of just over 85,000 raised the city's black population to 219,599, or 11.3%, by 1930. Thus, it was only in the 1920s that a new level was reached by Philadelphia's black community in terms of both absolute numbers and proportion of the city's population. In fact, the growth rate for the 1920s was 63.5%, compared to 58.9% on a much smaller base for the 1910s. By 1930, only 30% of the city's black people were Pennsylvania-born; while Virginia, the traditional leader in out-of-state origin, had 18.9%, South Carolina 13%, and Georgia 10.6%.9 Migrants from these three Southern states made up most of the respondents in the 1924 survey. There had been several earlier surveys of black migrants to Phila- delphia in the twentieth century. The Philadelphia Housing Associa- tion, the Armstrong Association (local affiliate of the Urban League), and the Traveler's Aid Society investigated the World War I migra- tion, primarily in terms of housing and overcrowding.10 In 1921, Sadie T. Mossell (later Alexander) of the University of Pennsylvania became the first black woman in America to earn a doctorate for her survey of the living standards of 100 migrant families.n Contemporary 6 Jones, 50 7 Vincent Franklin, The Education of Black Philadelphia The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900-1950 (Philadelphia, 1979), 8 8 Committee on Negro Migration, July 1923 report, in Negro Migration Study collection, Urban Archives, Temple University 9 U S Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the UnitedStates, v 2 (Population), 219 10 Records of the wartime activities are in the Housing Association collection, Series II, (1917-20), folders 120-126 11 Sadie T Mossell, "The Standard of Living Among 100 Negro Migrant Families in Philadelphia," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 98 (November, 1921), 173-222 3 1 8 FREDRIC MILLER July surveys were also taken of black migrants to other cities, and in 1930 Louise Venable Kennedy based her classic The Negro Peasant Turns Cityward on nineteen surveys done since 1917 of urban social and economic conditions.12 Yet there are several unique features of the 1924 Philadelphia sur- vey. First, the original worksheets have survived, whereas for almost all the other surveys only the summaries remain. The individual an- swers to the dozens of questions asked in 1924 can be studied, analyzed, and compared in detail. Second, the survey covered a very wide range of issues about migration and about life in both the South and Phila- delphia. Few studies of black migration deal with the particulars of either the southern background or the migration itself, usually because the data have been unavailable. Many of the surveys used by Kennedy described northern housing and employment in detail, but discussed an almost undifferentiated "South." Third, modern scholars have given relatively little attention to the 192 0s in comparison to the World War I migration, perhaps assuming that by 1920 the foundations of the northern ghettos were firmly in place. The 1924 survey therefore offers a detailed profile of the whole process of migration at a crucial yet underreported moment in time. The origins of the survey were complex. As migration to Pennsyl- vania increased sharply in 1922 and 1923, various public and private agencies began to conduct research and to hold discussions as they had during the war. In August 1923 the Philadelphia Housing Association, a fourteen-year-old private reform group, issued a report on "Housing Negro Migrants" which grew out of the work of an interagency Com- mittee on Negro Migration. That fall, work began on a statewide plan, and on January 3, 1924 the state convened a "Conference of the Needs of the Negro Population in Pennsylvania" with Governor Gifford Pinchot as the keynote speaker.
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