The Great Migration (1915-1970) - the greatest underreported story of the 20th century

[pampango]

It was one of the most important population shifts of the 20th century — an exodus of nearly six million black Americans from the South to the cities of the Northeast, Midwest and West — yet few people have substantively studied the effects of what is now known as the Great Migration. Enter Isabel Wilkerson, who as the New York Times Chicago Bureau Chief in 1994 became the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Her debut book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, puts a human face on that experience, and has landed at No. 11 on the Times' Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Sellers list. Wilkerson spoke with TIME about her groundbreaking career and why the Great Migration is an important chapter of the American immigrant story.

How did your family's Southern roots inform the research for this book?
I grew up a daughter of the Great Migration, though no one really called it that. My mother migrated from Georgia to Washington, DC., and my father from Virginia. They met and married in D.C. and I was born and raised there. I wouldn't exist if they hadn't met there. That's a classic American story. Many Americans, and most African Americans in the North and West, owe their existence to the fact that the Great Migration occurred. My parents' friends and neighbors were all from the South. It was such a fact of life that no one ever talked about it. That's why the story hadn't been told.

You're presenting the exodus of Southern blacks as a form of immigration. That's difficult for most people to understand. Explain that further.
There are many comparisons between the Great Migration and immigrants to this country in the late 19th and early 20th Century. They were people of the land, from small towns and villages, Eastern and Southern Europe and parts of Asia or parts of South and Central America. They were seeking political asylum from a caste system that put restrictions on them that's hard to imagine now.

In researching The Warmth of Other Suns, you interviewed hundreds of people. How and why did you choose three core subjects?
I needed three who came from three different states, representing three different migration streams — from South to the North, from the South to the Midwest, from the South to the West. I needed people who left in three different decades to show the scope and breadth of the migration. I was looking for people who had distinctive voices of their own, people who you could identify with. People who wanted to share the good and bad, who weren't representing themselves as perfect.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2022243,00.html
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While the Great Migration helped educated African Americans obtain jobs, eventually enabling a measure of class mobility, the migrants encountered significant forms of discrimination. Because so many people migrated in a short period of time, the African American migrants were often resented by the European American working class, fearing their ability to negotiate rates of pay or secure employment, was threatened by the influx of new labor competition. Sometimes those who were most fearful or resentful were the last immigrants of the 19th and new immigrants of the 20th century. In many cities, working classes tried to defend what they saw as "their" territories.

In 1910, the African American population of Detroit was 6,000. By the start of the Great Depression in 1929, this figure had risen to 120,000.

In 1900 Chicago had a total population of 1,698,575. By 1920 the population had increased by more than 1 million residents. During the second wave of the Great Migration (from 1940–1960), the African American population in the city grew from 278,000 to 813,000. The South Side of Chicago was considered the black capital of America.

In the South, the departure of hundreds of thousands of African Americans caused the black percentage of the population in most Southern states to decrease. For example, in Mississippi, blacks decreased from about 56% of the population in 1910 to about 37% by 1970 and in South Carolina, blacks decreased from about 55% of the population in 1910 to about 30% by 1970.

Nonetheless, African Americans made substantial gains in industrial employment, particularly in the steel, automobile, shipbuilding, and meatpacking industries. Between 1910 and 1920, the number of blacks employed in industry nearly doubled from 500,000 to 901,000. After the Great Depression, more advances took place after workers in the steel and meatpacking industries were organized in labor unions in the 1930s and 1940s, under the interracial Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The unions ended segregation of many jobs, and African Americans began to advance into more skilled jobs and supervisory positions.

As African Americans migrated, they became increasingly integrated into society. As they lived and worked more closely with European Americans, the divide existing between them became increasingly stark. This period marked the transition for many African Americans from lifestyles as rural farmers to urban industrial workers.

Since African-American migrants sustained many Southern cultural and linguistic traits, such cultural differences created a sense of "otherness" in terms of their reception by others who were living in the cities before them. Stereotypes ascribed to "black" people during this period and ensuing generations often derived from African American migrants' rural cultural traditions, which were maintained in stark contrast to the urban environments in which the people resided.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_%28African_American%29
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Interesting to compare the reception and treatment of African Americans in the North, MidWest, and West resulting from the Great Migration to the reception and treatment of "real" immigrants today.

[Hannah Bell]

1. kr

[jaxx]

2. An important look at history, I can't wait to read the book.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

K&R