1 Deepak Sela Matthew Friedman April 25, 2013

Heavy Negro Migration Pre-Great Depression Numerous Reasons to Pursue One Dream
Negros they were first brought to this continent during the settlement of the Virginia Colony in 1619. Ever since, they have been treated as slaves by white colonists, they have endured the hardships from generations to generations, even up until now. In the 1920s, it was their time. The time to let their culture expand; to break from the shackles of dominion and live freely, to have the opportunity that is offered to those who live in this land of the free and roam like white men. The Roaring Twenties, a decade of mass culture and wealth, introduced blacks from the agriculturally prevailing South to the capitalist North bountifully. There are several reasons for this Great Migration, as it is presently called, and will be discussed further through the course of this document. It will contain several hand-picked articles that pertain to this topic, such as Theodore Kornweibel Jrs An Economic Profile of Black Life in the Twenties, Stewart E. Tolnays Racial Violence and Black Migration in the American South, 1910-1930, and Jacob L. Vigdors The Pursuit of Opportunity: Explaining Selective Black Migration. Each of these scholarly articles offers not only different views on why the Great Migration took place but also different details as to their travel, tossing out the idea that it was just a coup dtat. The articles in the previous paragraph were written in different academic journals, consecutively, the Journal of Black Studies, American Sociological Review, and the Journal of Urban Economics thus offering varied views upon the same subject. Kornweibel argues that

2 blacks migrated to the North for capital since the Southern cotton farms were infested with boll weevils and profits were exponentially declining. For those that are unfamiliar, it is a miniature insect that feeds and breeds on cotton buds. Tolnay offers another suggestion the reason for blacks leaving the South was caused by lynching. Blacks were accused of crimes, though instead of going to court, they were publicly tortured and left there to die hardly! They were usually hanged or burned alive for spectators to look upon, quivering with fear. Vigdors theory was, by far, the least expected topic to suggest the relocation. He says that educated blacks were the ones seen traveling North in search of opulent opportunistic occupations, explaining that they were educated enough for the transition from a blue collar to a white collar job. These three historians come to the same summit by proposing different explanations; however, by the end of this narcissistic discussion, you the reader will come to understand that these three ideas will somehow have connections that will form into a single idea. An Economic Profile of Black Life in the Twenties, written by Theodore Kornweibel, Jr, describes the cause of the migration for several reasons, frequently referring to the capital that the North has been using to lure blacks from their homes in the South. The sufficient labor forces that industries relied on were sent as militants to fight in the war and have yet to return. This impacted the economy by lowering profits to such a degree that they needed the only individuals that were in the country at the time: Negroes and Women! This led masses of blacks to head north, towards the air of freedom and prosperity. However, even after they arrived from towns to cities, cities like Harlem, Detroit, and Chicago that housed slums of them, jobs were hard to come by. A quote from the article states, the vast majority of black citizens of a metropolis like Harlem were too busy scraping out a living and keeping a step ahead of the rent collector to be

3 drinking and dancing in Cabarets all night, which depicts their ordeals with such intense empathy (Kornweibel). They had to scrounge around in the workplace, if not the street, all day in order to be able to eat. The perils of prosperity were real? This was definitely true (Kornweibel). This was between the years of 1921-1924, the latter being the beginning of the first great recession that struck the United States, like getting rear ended by drunken college students on a Thursday night. Daily, they all worried that it may be their last day on the job, due to economic conditions that persisted over the course of many years to come. Kornweibel says, Black America would be affected by every rise and fall of the industry (Kornweibel). They did, however, have some success. Henry Fords production factories employed over 5000-plus blacks in the year of 1923. They were usually employed with certain fields such as metallurgy, automotive, meat-packing, roadwork, construction, and food-supply. Kornweibel argues that they did not have much skill for other works of compensation and thus attained these jobs based on their suggestive abilities. By 1930, 586,500 blacks were working in the industries mentioned above, and by ethnicity, over 50% in their mentioned occupations (table 6). (Kornweibel) The second article which suggested that lynching was the reason that blacks migrated in Stewart E. Tolnays Racial Violence and Black Migration in the American South, 1910-1930, to the North. Personally, I believe that the article makes it sound like they fled to the North. There is similarity between some ideas, such as the Boll Weevil Infestation that scoured the South by 1920 and the Norths greater wages to attract blacks. Other than that, he obstinately persists that lynching is the main cause of the Souths drastic decline of Negro population. There are several statistical analytics that stated the net # of deaths due to lynching 1,893 (Tolnay). A

4 great too many were accused of crimes they may not have even committed; they were wrongfully tortured and murdered among a public audience. This was the case with Jim Mcllherron, a fellow black man of Tennessee who was accused of the murder of two white men. He was taken from his home and surrounded by twenty men, most likely whites from the neighborhood, with black ski-masks and forced to take a beating. He was then tortured with smoldering irons, all in front of the towns fellow black community population 1500, and then chained to a nearby tree to burn: alive! (Tolnay) There were several other cases like this where fellow racist Batman-like vigilantes sought to punish blacks prior to a single court hearing. Tolnay records stats of net lynching occurring instead of a rate so he can have a net total per population. For this, he has created several tables and an equation that calculates this sum of death. Through this, Tolnay and his fellow researchers have found that areas of mob lynching that were the greatest had the fewest black residents as the clock ticked, they declare that this may have led to the Great Migration (Tolnay). The last and final article, Jacob L. Vigdors The Pursuit of Opportunity: Explaining Selective Black Migration, suggests an alternative explanation as to why blacks migrated north, thought, he still supports that wage had something to do with their travel. He proposes that well educated blacks traveled to the North rather than those who were lower on the educational ladder. He has depicted data tables that analyzed the intelligence of the black community; those who have an above average score higher than the median, were five times as likely to travel and settle down in the North. The birth year 1913-1922, pre-World War I and post-World War I, had the greatest quantity of high scores, taken as a ratio over those whose medians were lower.

5 This is referenced in Table 1(a) (Vigdor). He makes a valid point pertaining to education and the wages that they earned in Table 7, where those who were above the median earned almost double the salary that their counterparts could only dream of (Vigdor). He also assesses the situation with WWII, where the second wave of Negroes traveled north. The stats for the second great war were similar if not the same, though blacks already settled down in the Northern states by this point (Vigdor). Weve arrived at the end of this paper, where we can debate the similarities and differences of the details presented and come up with an assessment of why Negro communities migrated to the North. Kornweibel, Tolnay, and Vigdor each present a valid idea that proves their reasons as to why the migration occurred; whether it is opportunity, fear, or compensation, it is true that they left for a concrete reason. They could have left the South because the work yielded no money due to the Weevil infestation, the North offered jobs, and there were too many lynches that occurred purely as hate crimes. An opportunity presented itself and they all bundled and headed north, to the land of Freedom and Salvation spreading their culture in great cities that will forever house history. This paper cannot state this definitely, due to being researched with secondary sources, but you the reader, will come to have your own opinion after presented with the information.

Bibliography
"Boll Weevil Infestation." Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History. 1999. Encyclopedia.com. (April 25, 2013). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3406400108.html The Roaring Twenties, The History Channel website, http://www.history.com/topics/roaringtwenties (accessed Apr 25, 2013). Kornweibel, Theodore Jr. 1976. An Economic Profile of Black Life in the Twenties. Journal of Black Studies 6, no. 4:307-320. Jstor(accessed April 10, 2013). Tolnay, Stewart E., and E. M. Beck. 1992. "RACIAL VIOLENCE AND BLACK MIGRATION IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH, 1910 TO 1930." American Sociological Review 57, no. 1:103116. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 25, 2013). Vigdor, Jacob L. 2002. The Pursuit of Opportunity: Explaining Selective Black Migration. Journal of Urban Economics 51, no. 3:391-417. ScienceDirect (accessed April 25, 2013)