Great Migration: An Interpretation

Since the arrival of Africans on slave ships in the early seventeenth century, migration has been an enduring theme in African-American history. The advent of World War I, moreover, inspired blacks to make a fundamental break with their rural past and move to cities in increasing numbers. Since the early twentieth century, the nature, causes, and consequences of that momentous population movement have engaged the labors of scholars from a variety of disciplines. This essay explores the diverse and changing modes of treating the mass migration of blacks to American cities between the two World Wars.

The literature on black migration during the early twentieth century unfolded within the larger context of three distinct but interrelated conceptual orientations in black urban history. The first of these, the race relations model, emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, peaked during the early 1930s, and persisted in varying degrees through the 1950s. Mainly sociological and anthropological in approach, the race relations model took a variety of forms, including urban community studies, special case studies, and general syntheses of existing knowledge. It elaborated on the socioeconomic push-pull explanation of black population movement and analyzed black migration as a pivotal element in changing race relations. Although such studies examined black migration within the larger context of preceding patterns, black migration as a historical phenomenon was a secondary, rather than a primary, theme in most of the race relations literature.

The ghetto model of black urban history emerged during the early 1960s and dominated scholarship on the subject through the late 1970s. Primarily the work of historians employing interdisciplinary techniques, the ghetto model treated the black migration as a historical process, incorporated the push-pull explanation of the pattern, and, most of all, analyzed its impact on the process of ghetto formation, i.e., the rise of largely segregated black housing and community life in the urban environment. While the ghetto framework moved the dynamics of historical change to the fore of research on black migration and urban community development, it paid insufficient attention to the role of blacks in shaping their own migration, underplayed the impact of migration on the black class structure, and paved the way for the emergence of an alternative class analysis of black migration during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Building upon the ghetto model, the proletarian approach analyzes the black migration as a historical process. It also assesses a range of forces undergirding the phenomenon. Unlike the ghetto and race relations approaches, however, it examines the impact of migration on class formation, paying particular attention to the rise of the urban industrial working class. Much like earlier models, however, the proletarian framework, as employed by some writers, gives inadequate attention the to the roots of black migration in the southern black experience, including the role of black kin and friendship networks.

Thus, despite its importance in a variety of approaches to black urban history, until recently few scholars explored the historical dynamics of black migration itself. This essay examines the various scholarly traditions, highlights the strengths and weaknesses therein, and suggests the gradual emergence of black migration studies as a new scholarly subfield.

Before World War I

Studies of black migration from rural to urban America had roots in the pre-World War I era. In his pioneering study The Philadelphia Negro (1899), W. E. B. Du Bois emphasized migration as a key element in black population growth and community development. Focusing on the late nineteenth-century migration of blacks to Philadelphia, a series of questions guided his research. “Whence came these people?” he asked; and “How far are they native Philadelphians, and how far immigrants, and if the latter, how long have they been here?” No questions concerning the effects of northern city conditions on blacks, he said, “can be intelligently answered until we know how long these people have been under the influence of given conditions, and how they were trained before they came.”

Du Bois noted the predominance of young black women, the prevalence of blacks from the Upper South states of Virginia and Maryland, and the often circuitous and indirect nature of black migration to the city. “Much of the immigration to Philadelphia is indirect; Negroes come from country districts to small towns; then go to larger towns; eventually they drift to Norfolk, Va., or to Richmond. Next they come to Washington, and finally settle in Baltimore or Philadelphia. Although Du Bois included little data on the causes of black migration in the study itself, he studied blacks in rural Virginia for two months during the summer of 1897 in order to gain a greater appreciation for the southern background of Philadelphia blacks. This resulted in the publication of the essay “The Negroes in Farmville, Virginia” (1898).

Commissioned by the Sociology Department of the University of Pennsylvania, The Philadelphia Negro aimed first and foremost to help solve contemporary problems in race relations. It used research as a tool for social reform. Thus, despite the highly empirical nature of his research and his penetrating insights into the nature of black migration as a process of step-by-step movement from rural and small town America to the big city, Du Bois perceived the black migrant in largely pathological terms as a social problem. His research on the southern background notwithstanding, the migratory movement of blacks from country district to small town and finally to the big city resulted in training for what he called the “criminal class” in the “slums of Seventh and Lombard streets.” To be sure, Du Bois modified his viewpoint by noting many exceptions to the rule. He also emphasized the role of racial discrimination in limiting the opportunities of black migrants. Yet he failed to probe deeply the positive character and impact of black southern rural life on migrants. The Philadelphia Negro leaves the impression that the southern African American culture and experiences had little to offer blacks in the move from country to city.

Moreover, although Du Bois offered substantial historical discussion of the black migration from the seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries, his interest in the issue was mainly as background for the elucidation of conditions in 1896 and 1897. He was not interested in a detailed historical analysis of black migration. Indeed, as the imperatives of problem solving gained sway over the research agenda, the dynamics of historical change received correspondingly less attention.

Like Du Bois, in his study of blacks in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Boston, John Daniels placed his treatment of black migration within a race relations framework. In Freedom's Birthplace: A Study of the Boston Negro (1914) grew out of Daniels's involvement with a black branch of the South End Settlement House for European immigrants. It shifted the attention of white reformers from blacks in the South to blacks in the North. In his original introduction to the book, Robert A. Woods, the pioneer Boston Settlement leader, noted that “large sums of money were annually contributed to … improvement among colored people in the South, while practically no specific attention was paid to the serious problem of the steadily increasing Negro population in Boston.”

Daniels, like Du Bois, viewed the black migration into and out of Boston in largely negative terms. Most migrants, he said, were “ignorant, deficient in practical ability, and almost entirely lacking in any training” above unskilled labor and menial service. He noted that black population movement was affected by the same forces that caused shifting “among any element of the population.” Yet, unlike Du Bois, Daniels believed that black geographic mobility and the poor economic status of the migrant was “inherent in the negro character.”

Daniels' study was not only racist, it was also less rigorous in methodology and more descriptive, rather than analytical, in presentation than The Philadelphia Negro. While In Freedom's Birthplace reflected the race relations approach to black migration, it had little influence over subsequent research on the topic. More influential in the scholarly discourse on the subject was a series of essays in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Charities: A Review of Local and General Philanthropy, The New York Age, The Nation, The Southern Workman, and a limited number of other newspaper and journal outlets.

In charting and explaining prewar patterns of black migration, some of the essays not only complemented but also exceeded the monographs of Du Bois and Daniels. R. R. Wright, a research fellow in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, identified, for example, the precise geographical origins and destination of early migrants. He observed that blacks from the southern Atlantic states traveled up the seaboard to the northern Atlantic states, while blacks from the south central division moved up the Mississippi Valley to the north central states. Others from both southern divisions migrated west; some traveled up the Mississippi and then crossed over through Missouri and Kansas, whereas others migrated to the West Coast “around the Southwest through Texas.” Moreover, using the economist's push-pull model, Wright emphasized the comparative economic, social, and political developments in the North and South, acknowledged the importance of black kin, friend, and community networks, and warned his counterparts against overemphasis on pathology in research on urban blacks.

For Wright and other prewar analysts, however, the reform goal remained paramount. Bending to the imperatives of racial reform, Wright concluded that the migrants were not “the best negroes,” but the “ill-adjusted.” Without an emphasis on the pathological dimensions of black life in cities, Wright and his contemporaries feared, as did George Edmund Haynes of the New York Urban League, that the black's “economic and social difficulties may be less generally known; his migrations and concentrations in cities, North and South … given less attention.” Despite important shortcomings, prewar research nonetheless helped to shape black migration studies during World War I and its aftermath.

World War I to Early 1930s

Beginning with Negro Migration in 1916–1917 (published in 1919 by the U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics), studies of the Great Migration proliferated between World War I and the early 1930s. They included Carter G. Woodson, A Century Of Negro Migration (1918); Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration during the War (1920); Thomas J. Woofter, Negro Migration: Changes in Rural Organization and Population of the Cotton Belt (1920); Charles S. Johnson (for the Chicago Commission on Race Relations), Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (1922); Louise V. Kennedy, The Negro Peasant Turns Cityward: Effects of Recent Migrations to Northern Cities (1930); Edward E. Lewis, The Mobility of the Negro (1931); and Clyde V. Kiser, Sea Island to City: A Study of St. Helena Islanders in Harlem and Other Urban Centers (1932). These studies pinpointed the changing characteristics of black migration, emphasized the push and pull of economic factors, and, compared to their prewar counterparts, de-emphasized the pathological dimensions of the process. Much as in the prewar era, however, the race relations imperative (and, during the war years, the national security imperative) retained its sway over wartime and postwar scholarship. Thus, black migration as a historical process, including the dynamic role of black kin, friend, and communal networks, received inadequate attention.

To be sure, contemporary scholars placed black migration within a larger historical context. Francis D. Tyson, T. J. Woofter, and other Labor Department analysts, for example, acknowledged the relationship between black population movements from the underground railway before the Civil War to the widespread migration of 1916–1917. In their research on the subject, Charles S. Johnson, Emmett Scott, and Louise V. Kennedy reinforced the same point. The wartime and postwar studies documented the increase of southern black migration to the North from no more than 300,000 in 1910 to nearly 1 million during the war years. Whereas prewar studies had shown how the upper South and women dominated the spatial and gender sources of black migration, the newer studies illuminated the growing predominance of Deep South blacks and young men.

Yet, much like The Philadelphia Negro, the war and postwar studies did not explore the historical connection in substantial detail. Prewar developments served as a brief backdrop. They helped to analyze changes in the volume, sources, and direction of the movement during World War I. As Kennedy stated in her study, the movements during the war and postwar years “were especially significant because they revealed a decided increase in the volume of migration and a peculiar change in the major direction and the length of the moves which were made.”

While such studies failed as historical treatments, they succeeded quite well as cross-sectional analyses. They not only documented the growing predominance of young men from the lower South, they also identified the precise subregional and occupational dimensions of the process. Various studies of the states of Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana carefully pinpointed the specific sections of these states with the heaviest out-migration. According to T J. Woofter, for example, black farm laborers migrated from the Boll Weevil infested areas of southeastern Georgia while large numbers of common laborers left the cities and small towns of Macon, Waycross, Albany, and especially Savannah's turpentine and sawmill gangs.

As contemporary studies pinpointed the precise regional, subregional, and occupational characteristics of black migrants, they also clarified the issue of destinations, utilizing the notion of secondary migration. As R.H. Leavell stated in his study of black migration from Mississippi, the mere fact that a black “moved out of his former [southern] home” was no evidence “that he [had] moved to a northern city.” Southern cities like New Orleans, Birmingham, Jacksonville, Savannah, and Memphis, among others, “became concentration points.” Birmingham and Bessemer served as the major distribution points for blacks going north from Alabama. The Southern, Louisville, and Nashville, the St. Louis and San Francisco, and the Illinois Central Railroads all traveled northward from Birmingham and Bessemer. T. J. Woofter identified cities in Georgia like Columbus, Americus, and Albany as distribution points for blacks leaving from western Georgia and eastern Alabama, while Valdosta, Waycross, Brunswick, and Savannah served as distribution centers for blacks leaving the depressed agricultural counties of southern and southeastern Georgia. To blacks migrating from Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas, “Chicago was the logical destination,” while “the North” meant Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Boston, and other New England cities to blacks coming from Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia.”

On arrival in northern cities, black population movement often flowed into additional migratory streams. Wartime and postwar scholars of black population movement documented the process. “All of the arrivals here did not stay,” Emmett Scott observed of the black migration to Chicago. “They were only temporary guests awaiting the opportunity to proceed further and settle in surrounding cities and towns.” In Philadelphia, he also noted, black migration “broke bulk, scattering itself into the various industrial communities desiring labor.” Within about one hundred miles of Philadelphia, cities like Wilmington, Delaware, and Lancaster, Pottsville, York, Altoona, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, all received black migrants who first migrated to the City of Brotherly Love.

In his study of St. Helena, a South Carolina Sea Island, Clyde V. Kiser traced the movement of black migrants to what he called “the feverish and congested cities of the North.” He documented the Sea Islanders' movement to Philadelphia, Boston, and especially Harlem, New York, via southern cities like Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina. In the urban North, Kiser documented the migrants' intermetropolitan movement. Somewhat contrary to Du Bois, he also concluded that few St. Helenians reached the big cities through “intermediate residence in a village or a small town.” Blacks from St. Helena Island tended to leave their small rural surroundings for cities of substantial size, first in the South and then in the North.

Black migration studies of the wartime and postwar years included discussions of a range of precipitating push factors on the southern end, pull forces on the northern end, and, to some extent, the role of black family and kinship networks on both ends. Within this framework, however, contemporary studies stressed the primacy of economic forces. In his analysis of the black migration between 1919 and 1924, Edward E. Lewis noted fluctuations in black population movement over brief periods of time but he explained the pattern by the “‘pull’ of industrial demand for labor” in the North and the “‘push’ of agricultural disorganization in the Cotton Belt.” Writing during the late 1920s, Kennedy linked the Great Migration to prewar patterns, noted a brief postwar decline, and then specified a sharp resurgence during the mid-1920s. Emphasizing forces “which are ‘driving’ and those which are ‘beckoning,’” Kennedy nonetheless concluded that the latest movements possessed much the same characteristics observed from 1916 to 1920. In the U.S. Department of Labor study, James B. Dillard summarized the major components of the push-pull model as applied to black migration:

"That the lack of labor at the North, due mainly to the ceasing of immigration from Europe, was the occasion of the migration all agree. The causes assigned at the southern end are numerous: General dissatisfaction with conditions, ravages of boll weevil, floods, change of crop system, low wages, poor houses on plantations, poor school facilities, unsatisfactory crop settlements, rough treatment, cruelty of the law officers, unfairness in courts, lynching, desire for travel, labor agents, the Negro press, letters from friends in the North, and finally advice of white friends in the South where crops had failed. All of these causes have been mentioned, and doubtless each cause mentioned has had its influence in individual cases … However the influence came, and whatever concurrent causes may have operated all will agree … that ‘better wages offered by the North have been the immediate occasion for the exodus’.”"

By emphasizing the primacy of economic forces, the wartime and postwar studies also stressed the role of external forces like labor agents. During the war years they sometimes portrayed the migrants as irrational actors in a drama beyond their control. Northern labor agents entered southern communities offering work at higher wages. Migrants allegedly left hurriedly, giving little thought to employers, families, or friends. As the movement gained momentum, the most thoughtful of men were swept up into the migration “fever.” Emmett Scott's study offers perhaps the most extreme illustration of this viewpoint.

"In the first communities visited by the representatives of northern capital, their offers created unprecedented commotion. Drivers and teamsters left their wagons standing in the street. Workers, returning home, scrambled aboard the trains for the North without notifying their employers or their families."

Although the wartime and early postwar writers emphasized the primacy of external forces like labor agents, “migration fever,” most agreed, soon gave way to the thoughtful role of black kin, friend, and communal networks. Few of these scholars ignored the hand that blacks took in shaping their own migration experience. Despite his illustrations to the contrary, for example, Emmett Scott elevated the role of mass discussion to a prominent position among the list of forces stimulating the black migration. In the barber shops, grocery stores, and churches, blacks articulated their grievances, exchanged good news from the North, and formed migration clubs, pooling their resources in a communal approach to movement North. Deeply enmeshed in black kin and friendship networks, Scott suggested that black women played a conspicuous role in helping to organize the migration process.

In his study of St. Helena Islanders, Clyde V, Kiser elevated the role of kin and friendship networks to a key place, and sharply modified the usual emphasis on the role of socioeconomic push-pull forces. Kiser emphasized the persistence of important cultural linkages between life in the city and life at home.

Perhaps Kiser's emphasis on the role of black kin, friend, and communal networks was inevitable given the nature of his research project and the unique characteristics of the people he studied. Sea Island to City grew out of a larger project on St. Helena Island, initiated in 1928 under the direction of T. J. Woofter. Funded by the Social Science Research Council and the Institute for Research in Social Sciences at the University of North Carolina, a team of scholars spent months “studying various phases of the Island's culture.” The project resulted in the publication of Woofter's Black Yeomanry: Life on St. Helena Island (1930). Drawing heavily upon Black Yeomanry, Kiser expanded his analysis toward the urban destinations of the migrants.

Black life on St. Helena Island was unique: blacks on the Island were landowners, rather than landless sharecroppers, renters, or laborers; they lived in relatively isolated island communities; and they experienced relatively few face-to-face interactions with neighboring whites. Moreover, compared to blacks elsewhere in the South, the Sea Islanders' culture reflected high levels of social and cultural links to slavery and African backgrounds. Indeed, according to Kiser, many of the complaints of Islanders against whites developed after they left the Island. Life in the northern cities intensified the contrasting situation in the South and clarified the forces that had led them to move.

As suggested by the foregoing emphasis on the role of blacks in shaping their own migration experience, the wartime and postwar writers tended to view migratory black workers in more positive terms than had their prewar counterparts like Du Bois and Daniels. Driven by the labor demands of the national defense program, the Department of Labor studies viewed the black workers as a valuable asset. The United States confronted a labor shortage both in agriculture and industry. “On the whole,” historian Carter G. Woodson concluded, “these migrants are not lazy, shiftless and desperate as some predicted that they would be.” Likewise, despite the eruption of a violent race riot, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations concluded that black labor had “made a satisfactory record.” For her part, Louise Kennedy placed the black migration within a broader national and global context: “Their migration is linked with the trend from the open country, which has been characteristic of all peoples in recent decades.”

Even though the wartime and postwar analysts of black migration transcended the negative perspective of their prewar counterparts, the pathological interpretation retained a powerful grip on the new studies. In the pioneering work of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, the social disorganization framework gained its most prominent postwar expression. According to Frazier the Great Migration resulted in the uprooting of southern black rural folk from a moral (even if paternalistic and racist) order that ensured the stability of black families as viable mechanisms in the progress of the race. Massive black migration to cities like Chicago disrupted the old mores and brought in its wake a host of problems; black migrants swelled the crime, divorce, and illegitimate birth rates on the one hand, while deflating African-American urban social, cultural, and institutional affiliations on the other. While Frazier presented the most extreme view of the city as a corrosive agent in the lives of black migrants, much of the contemporary scholarship reinforced his viewpoint.

Indeed, as the research of E. Franklin Frazier suggests, although the studies established a basis for understanding the black migration as a social process, the treatment of these issues was limited, as in the prewar years, by insufficient attention to the role of blacks in their own movement, an attenuated historical perspective, and the larger race relations framework. While wartime and postwar scholars acknowledged the importance of black kin, friend, and communal networks (and in Kiser's case gave unusual attention to it), most emphasized the primacy of external forces. Such a framework, while useful, prevented a fuller explication of how the migration behavior of blacks reflected and influenced the impact of larger forces, including the impact of industrial capitalism. Black migration was indeed shaped by larger economic, social, and political changes in national and international capitalism, but black migrants were also active agents in their own movement into the industrial city. Thus, they were not merely reflectors of larger forces, as most of the contemporary scholarship suggested, but were shapers of such forces as well.

In helping us to understand the Great Migration as a dynamic historical process, the wartime and postwar studies were also hampered by their sociological approach. As suggested above, although scholars of the period connected contemporary and past patterns of black population movement, they were mainly concerned with changes in the volume, directions, and sources of black migration under the impact of World War I and its aftermath. They were not concerned with black migration as a historical phenomenon, with deep roots in southern black culture, family, and community life, nor were they interested in how this important process changed and took on new forms and meaning under the impact of World War I and the 1920s.

Finally, as in the prewar years, the treatment of black population movement during the era of the Great Migration was limited by the race relations framework. Efforts to illuminate and reform hostile patterns of black-white contact figured prominently in these studies. However, in its Negro Migration in 1916–1917, the Department of Labor subordinated the issue of race relations to the imperatives of national unity. The primary question was not one of how to resolve problems of black-white interactions as a means of creating a more just society, but rather one of how to resolve problems of race relations in the interest of national security. In his letter authorizing research on black migration during World War I, Secretary of Labor W. B. Wilson emphasized the national security issue.

If the imperatives of national defense helped to subordinate the race relations issue, in the aftermath of World War I race relations in the study of black migration reemerged in full force. Following the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, which resulted in the loss of thirty-eight lives, thousands of dollars worth of property damage, and over 500 injuries, the governor of Illinois appointed the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. The governor charged the commission to study the underlying causes of the racial violence and to suggest remedies to prevent a recurrence. Although The Negro in Chicago (the commission's report, authored by Charles S. Johnson) reinforced a variety of themes in research on black migration, it also analyzed black migration as a factor in the rise of racial violence. The studies of Carter G. Woodson, Emmett Scott, Louise V. Kennedy, and Clyde V. Kiser also emphasized the role of black migration in larger efforts to improve black-white contacts.

As in the cases of Du Bois, Daniels, and Wright before them, the wartime and postwar writers showed remarkable sensitivity to the impact of black migration on the nature of race contact in the industrial city. Unlike the prewar analysts, however, they treated the black migrant as a valuable asset in the interest of national security and continued economic development. By framing their research around the imperatives of interracial relations, however, they failed to explore in sufficient depth the intraracial dimensions of the black migration experience. Such new dimensions in our understanding of the black migration would have to await a later period. Unfortunately, that later period would not be the Great Depression and World War II.

Mid-1930s to 1950s

Framed by the race relations imperative, the war and postwar studies of black migration would influence the shape of black migration research through the 1950s. During the Great Depression, however, when the net migration of blacks from the South dropped by more than 50 percent, black migration studies took a different turn. Unlike the earlier race contact writers, a new generation of scholars turned increasingly toward the social anthropological caste-class approach to black urban life. They curtailed their interest in black migration as a phenomenon and thus added little to our understanding of black migration as a social process. Research on southern blacks especially neglected the migration theme. Between 1937 and 1941, for example, in a series of impressive studies on black life in southern towns, social anthropologists such as John Dollard, Hortense Powdermaker, Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner, and Mary Gardner paid little attention to the dynamics of black population movements.

Studies of black life in the North also utilized social and anthropological insights. Unlike studies of southern towns, however, they paid substantial attention to the migration theme. In their study of blacks in Chicago during the 1930s and early 1940s, for example, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton built upon Charles Johnson's The Negro in Chicago. They illuminated the push of poor conditions in southern agriculture, the lure of higher wages in Chicago industries, the role of the northern black community (especially as reported in the Chicago Defender), and the role of the black family and friend networks. Like The Negro in Chicago, however, Drake's and Cayton's Black Metropolis (1945) gave insufficient attention to the migration process as it developed and changed over time. While they noted the dramatic changes during World War I and the 1920s, they ignored the continuing influx of blacks into Chicago during the Great Depression. In his comprehensive study of blacks in America during the late 1930s and early 1940s, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and his associates gave significant attention to how and why black migration changed over time. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) helped to crystallize an explanation for why black migration took off after 1915, continued through the 1920s, and persisted, despite high levels of unemployment, during the Depression. Because mass migration “did not get a start and become a problem” before World War I, Myrdal suggested that black “migration potentialities” failed to gain full expression. However, a variety of factors coincided and “created a shock effect after 1915.” Once set in motion, black migration continued, although its volume and particular causal factors would change over time. Thus, despite high unemployment, nearly 300,000 blacks moved out of the South during the 1930s, partly because new public assistance programs helped to mitigate the impact of declining employment in the private sector.

Much like Black Metropolis, however, An American Dilemma (1944) only synthesized existing knowledge, though in more comprehensive terms than Drake and Cayton. Moreover, while the study offered a model of interdisciplinary social science research—economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, and history—the latter was the weakest link in the chain. Myrdal used history to illuminate “present situations and trends.” He also drew a sharp line between what he called the historian's interest in the “uniquely historical datum” and the social scientist's interest in “broad and general relations and main trends.”

Not all studies on the subject during the period, however, were equally ahistorical. Nor were all studies of the period equally deficient in thinking about the black migration in new ways. In his study The Negro Family in the United States (1939), sociologist E. Franklin Frazier illuminated important social and cultural dimensions of the black migration. Although briefly, he utilized the blues songs of the early twentieth century, the letters of World War I migrants, and the depression era study Twenty Thousand Homeless Men (1936). Frazier sketched a revealing portrait of black migrants from their own perspective. In a chapter titled “Flight from Feudal America,” he emphasized the rise of the black industrial proletariat as the “most significant element in the new social structure” of black life. This development, he believed, had affected “the whole outlook on life and the values” of the black masses. “Such phrases as ‘class struggle’ and ‘working-class solidarity,’ once foreign to the ears of black workers, are the terms in which some Negroes are beginning to voice their discontent with their present status.”

His valuable insights notwithstanding, Frazier emphasized its negative impact, at least in the short run. Like other race relations analysts, Frazier failed to appreciate the positive role of black family and communal networks in the migration and resettlement of blacks in cities. Building on his earlier study of the black family in Chicago, he believed that black migrants had left their cultural moorings behind in the small towns and rural districts of the South.

Despite the resurgence of black migration during World War II the new migration failed to capture the attention of scholars as had the Great Migration of World War I. In the post-World War II years, some scholars, such as Hylan Lewis in Blackways of Kent (1955), continued to pursue the caste and class mode of research on African Americans, paying little attention to the migration theme. At the same time, the Cold War undoubtedly deflected scholarly attention away from broad systemic issues such as massive black migration and its attendant impact on social relations in American society. By failing to analyze such important demographic and economic issues, however, scholars of the caste-class school of race relations helped to push black migration to the margins of scholarly concerns.

The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis (1959) both reflected and encouraged the renewal of scholarly interest in black migration. In this slim volume, immigration historian Oscar Handlin briefly analyzed black migration to the New York metropolitan region from the turn of the twentieth century through World War II. The Newcomers added little to our overall understanding of black migration, however, for Handlin treated black migrants much as Du Bois did at the turn of the century—in pathological terms. He offered the provocative conclusion, however, that the recent migrants “followed the general outline of the experience of earlier [white] immigrants.” Racial and ethnic barriers, he believed, were only temporary impediments to the full integration of the new groups into the American social order. While Handlin's study offered a useful target for the ghetto formation studies of the 1960s and 1970s, it came too late and was, at any rate, insufficient to pull black migration studies out of the doldrums during the 1950s.

Ghetto Model of the 60s and 70s

During the 1960s and 1970s the ghetto model gained a commanding sway over historical research on blacks in cities. Seeking to document the rise of nearly all black ghettos in American cities, historians pinpointed black migration as a critical factor. The sociological studies of the early twentieth century, they argued, overstated the significance of the Great Migration of World War I. Thus historians like Gilbert Osofsky, Allan Spear, David Katzman, and Kenneth Kusmer all turned the clock back to the prewar years. They treated the prewar migration as the “advance guard of the Great Migration,” which laid the foundations for the rapid spread of racially segregated communities in the urban North.

As the ghetto studies counteracted the chronological bias of the race relations tradition, they also attacked the Handlin thesis that blacks were the most recent of the immigrant groups. Partly for this reason, as well as the pull of the expanding Civil Rights Movement, the ghetto studies adopted a social disorganization perspective. Thus, like the race relations school, the ghetto historians failed to probe the content of southern black life, showing how the dynamics of black population movement were deeply rooted in prior patterns of rural to urban movement. In much of the ghetto literature, then, black migrants were frequently portrayed as passive objects of external forces beyond their control. By focusing primarily on patterns of urban housing and institutional segregation in northern cities, the ghetto scholars not only neglected black migration as a social process with deep southern roots, but also paid little attention to the interconnection between black migration and working-class formation.

Fortunately, even as the ghetto model gained increasing dominance, certain modifications in perspective gradually took shape. Historians William M. Tuttle, Elizabeth Pleck, Florette Henri, and James Borchert all produced studies that challenged aspects of the ghetto thesis. As such, they offered a somewhat different slant on the lives of black migrants. As early as 1970 Tuttle analyzed the Chicago Riot of 1919, emphasizing the perspective of working-class participants. Five years later in her synthesis on the subject, Florette Henri concluded that black migration represents “a tremendous feat of initiative, planning, courage, and perseverance … not by one or two ‘exceptional individuals’ but by at least five hundred thousand perfectly average southern Negroes.” Focusing on poverty in late nineteenth-century Boston and alley life in Washington D.C., respectively, Elizabeth Pleck and James Borchert also heightened interest in black urban life from the bottom up.

Taken together, Borchert, Pleck, Henri, and Tuttle heightened the connection between black migration, working-class life, and the role of blacks in shaping their own movement. By emphasizing racial violence, urban poverty, alley life, and the resultant militant race consciousness, however, these scholars also reinforced the relationship between black migration and ghetto formation. In other words, the connection between black migration and working-class formation was subordinated to a different agenda. Such limitations sparked vigorous new departures in research on black urban life during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The new studies would bring forth fresh opportunities to examine the black migration in historical perspective.

1980 and Beyond

The most explicit challenge to the ghetto synthesis slowly emerged in a series of Ph.D. dissertations completed between 1978 and the early 1980s. Richard Walter Thomas, “From Peasant to Proletarian: The Formation and Organization of the Black Industrial Working Class in Detroit, 1915–1945” (1976); Peter Gottlieb, “Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916–1930” (1977); Dennis C. Dickerson, “Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1915–1950” (1978); Joe William Trotter, Jr., “The Making of an Industrial Proletariat: Black Milwaukee, 1915–1945” (1980); James R. Grossman, “A Dream Deferred: Black Migration to Chicago, 1916–1921” (1982); and Earl Lewis, “At Work and At Home: Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1910–1945” (1984): these all wrestled quite explicitly with the connection between black migration and proletarianization, i.e., the rise of the black urban working class.

In her groundbreaking study Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976), social historian Nell Irvin Painter had helped pave the way for the new conceptualization of black population movement. She emphasized its class as well as its racial dimensions. According to Painter the Exodusters who left the lower Mississippi Valley for the freedom of Kansas “were ordinary, uneducated former slaves, who one of them called ‘a class of hard laboring people.’” Thus, Painter concluded that the class of these early post-Reconstruction black migrants was “practically as important as their race (although not in their eyes or in the eyes of their oppressors).”

From the mid-1980s, studies employing some variant of the race/class or proletarian approach rapidly reached print: Trotter (1985); Dickerson (1986); Gottlieb (1987); Grossman (1989); Lewis (1990), and Trotter (1990). Unfortunately, while Thomas, Dickerson, and Trotter (in “Black Milwaukee”) moved black workers to the center of their analyses, they were primarily interested in events within the city. Much like the ghettoization school, they paid insufficient attention to black migration as a dynamic process, deeply rooted in southern black kin, friend, and communal networks. As we will see in the following section, this was not true of Gottlieb, Grossman, Moore, Lewis, and Trotter in his recent book on black coal miners. Neither is it true of recent studies by Elizabeth R. Bethel and Allen B. Ballard.

New Subfield in Black Urban History

Collectively, the work of Joe Trotter, Peter Gottlieb, Shirley Ann Moore, James Grossman, Earl Lewis, Darlene Clark Hine, and others address the connection between migration, proletarianization, and southern black culture at a pivotal moment in black history. They aim to facilitate our understanding of black migration as a historical process. As such, they also suggest the slow emergence of black migration studies as a subfield within black urban history. Their work illuminates the complex interrelationship between changes in southern black rural life and subsequent patterns of community change in southern, northern, and western cities, as well as the southern Appalachian coalfields.

James Grossman begins in the South his investigation of black migration to Chicago. Unlike most studies of the black migration, Grossman documents the Great Migration as a grass- roots social movement, replete with its own indigenous leadership and channels of information for decision-making. “This ‘dynamic of migration,’” he argues, “not only affected how migrants reacted to what they found; it also informs our understanding of those reactions.”

Peter Gottlieb analyzes southern blacks' migration to Pittsburgh as “a process of self-transformation.” Through “seasonal migration and temporary industrial work within the South,” he demonstrates that African Americans “prepared themselves for geographic movements further afield.” Along with their participation in the emerging industries of the New South, Gottlieb reconstructs the premigration status of blacks in southern agriculture, as owners, as tenants, and as farm laborers.

Other studies not only address conceptual limitations in research on the black migration, but fill important regional and topical gaps in our understanding of the process. Earl Lewis investigates black migration, work, and community in the upper urban South—Norfolk, Virginia, between 1910 and 1945. He notes that “with few exceptions black life in Norfolk and other southern cities has been essentially ignored. Black migration to southern cities like Norfolk took a different turn than the literature suggests; the southern city represented the end of the migration line for many African Americans, who found jobs, put down roots, and built families there. Black kin and friendship networks sustained linkages between Norfolk blacks and the nearby countryside, other southern cities, and the urban north.”

Focusing on black coal miners in southern West Virginia, Trotter reinforces the study of black migration in the southern context. Unlike the study of Norfolk blacks, however, his work illuminates a dimension of black migration that was neither northern nor southern urban, but rather rural to industrial, drawing upon the insights of recent scholars such as Grossman, Gottlieb, and Lewis, as well as his earlier study of blacks in Milwaukee. He links the rise of the black coal-mining working class to “the social imperatives of black life in the rural South, as well as the dynamics of industrial capitalism.” Using their intricate network of family and friends, southern black coal miners helped to organize their own movement to the region, facilitated their own transition to the industrial labor force, and helped to transform the larger contours of Afro-American community life.

In her illuminating study of black migration to Richmond, California, during the interwar years, Shirley Ann Moore offers a close look at black population movement to a West Coast city. She not only highlights the small volume of black migration to the urban West before the 1940s but reveals an important variant on the black migration theme. For black Richmondites, entry into the urban industrial work force proved to be a process more prolonged than elsewhere: It began slowly before the 1930s and accelerated during World War II as blacks moved into the shipyards in growing numbers. Moore also emphasizes the role of southern black kin and friendship networks in stimulating and organizing the black migration to Richmond.

Not only are the race/class analysts bringing a different theoretical perspective to the study of black migration, they are also using a broader range of sources and different methodologies. Based upon the imaginative use of oral interviews, company records, newspapers, photo analyses, manuscript collections, and a variety of statistical accounts, recent scholars are carefully documenting the themes of black migration and working-class formation. Based upon the personnel files of the A. M. Byers Company, a Pittsburgh metal manufacturer, Gottlieb offers a unique analysis of black labor turnover in one company. In his study of black migration to Chicago, Grossman provides a detailed analysis of the Chicago Defender's “shipping list,” drawn from the records of the Military Intelligence Division of the U.S. Department of War. Based upon the extensive reports of the Universal Negro Improvement Association's Negro World and the black weekly Norfolk Journal and Guide, Earl Lewis provides fascinating profiles of Garveyites and statistical analyses of black visitation patterns.

For her part, through the lens of gender Darlene Clark Hine critiques and synthesizes the existing literature. She urges us to document the gender-specific causes of black migration as well as the class and racial ones. She notes, for example, that the movement of black men and women was often propelled by different factors. Based upon the interplay of class, race, and gender, Clark Hine also challenges us to reinterpret not just the African American migration experience but the larger American experience with migration.

Black migration was indeed a complex phenomenon. Its comprehension requires an appreciation of the established scholarship as well as a variety of new sources and approaches. New and recent scholarship represents the culmination of a century of black urban-migration research, unfolding within the successive but overlapping theoretical frameworks of race relations, ghetto formation, and proletarianization. Emphasizing the dynamic role of southern black migrants in their own movement, resettlement, and subsequent experiences in the city, these studies suggest that we need to rethink a number of issues in African American and American urban history.