Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents

by Eric Arnesen

Overview

Black Protest and the Great Migration chronicles the move of Southern African Americans into the urban North during World War I and into the 1920s, using a unique collection of articles from a variety of northern, southern, black, and white newspapers, magazines, and books to explore the impact of the Great Migration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312391294
Publisher:	Bedford/St. Martin's
Publication date:	11/06/2002
Series:	Bedford Cultural Editions Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.15(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Eric Arnesen is professor of history and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A specialist in African American labor history and issues of race and labor, he is the author of Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (2001), which received the Wesley-Logan Prize in Diaspora History from the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, won Distinguished Honors from the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Committee, and was selected as an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice. His book Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (1991) received the John H. Dunning Prize in American History from the American Historical Association. He is also coeditor of Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience (1998). His numerous articles have appeared in journals such as the American Historical Review, International Labor and Working-Class History, International Review of Social History, Labor History, and the Radical History Review. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Illinois at Chicagos Institute for the Humanities and Great Cities Institute.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Preface

PART ONE
Introduction: The Great American Protest
Origins of the Great Migration
Wartime Opportunities in the North
The Promised Land?
Wartime Black Leaders, the New Negro, and Grassroots Politics
Racial Violence and the Postwar Reaction to Black Activism
Consequences of the Migration

PART TWO
The Documents

1. The Great Migration Begins
Why They Left: Conditions in the South
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Migration of Negroes, June 1917
Mary DeBardeleben, The Negro Exodus: A Southern Woman’s View, March 18, 1917
Charles S. Johnson, How Much Is the Migration a Flight from Persecution? September 1923

White Southerners Respond to the Migration
McDowell Times, 1100 Negroes Desert Savannah, Georgia, August 11, 1916
New Orleans Times-Picayune, Luring Labor North, August 22, 1916

Southern Blacks’ Warnings about Migration
J. A. Martin, Negroes Urged to Remain in South, November 25, 1916
Percy H. Stone, Negro Migration, August 1, 1917

Letters from Migrants
Documents: Letters of Negro Migrants, 1916–1918 64

2. The Promised Land?

The Truth about the North

Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Arrival in Chicago, 1922

Southwestern Christian Advocate, Read This Before You Move North, April 5, 1917

Dwight Thompson Farnham, Negroes a Source of Industrial Labor, August 1918

The East St. Louis Riot 78

New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Negro in the North, June 4, 1917

Crisis, The Massacre of East St. Louis, September 1917

Chicago Defender, Thousands March in Silent Protest, August 4, 1917

3. The Evolution of Black Politics

Patriotism and Military Service

The Reverend J. Edward Pryor, The Patriotism of the Negro, May 4, 1917

W. E. B. Du Bois, Close Ranks, July 1918

The New Republic, Negro Conscription, October 20, 1917

Leon A. Smith, Protest to Boston Herald, April 20, 1918

Martha Gruening, Houston: An NAACP Investigation, November 1917

Savannah Tribune, Racial Clashes, July 26, 1919

The Emergence of the New Negro during and after the War

Cleveland Gazette, League Asks Full Manhood Rights, May 19, 1917

Crisis, The Heart of the South, May 1917

Mary White Ovington, Reconstruction and the Negro, February 1919

The Messenger, Migration and Political Power, July 1918

Marcus Garvey, What We Believe, January 1, 1924, and The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association,November 25, 1922

The Messenger, New Leadership for the Negro, May –June 1919

The Messenger, If We Must Die, September 1919

Geroid Robinson, The New Negro, June 2, 1920

Black Women, Protest, and the Suffrage

Colored Federated Clubs of Augusta, Letter to President Woodrow Wilson, May 29, 1918

New York Age, Campaign for Women Nearing Its Close, November 1, 1917

Savannah Morning News, Negro Women Seek Permission to Vote, November 3, 1920 126

4. Black Workers and the Wartime Home Front Black Men and the Labor Question Crisis, Trades Unions, March 1918

United Mine Workers Journal, From Alabama: Colored Miners Anxious for Organization, June 1, 1916

Raymond Swing, The Birmingham Case, 1918

New Orleans Times-Picayune, Negro Organizer Tarred, June 14, 1918

Birmingham Ledger, Negro Strikers Return to Work, October 3, 1918

Black Women and the War

Houston Labor Journal, Colored Women of Houston Organize, May 6, 1916

Tampa Morning Tribune, Negro Washerwomen to Have Union Wage Scale, October 10, 1918

Mobile Register, Workers Strike in Laundries to Get Higher Pay, April 23, 1918

Mobile News-Item, Negro Women Are Under Arrest in Laundry Strike, April 25, 1918

Tampa Morning Tribune, Negro Women Living in Idleness Must Go to Work or to Jail, October 17, 1918

Savannah Tribune, Negroes to Demand Work at Charleston Navy Yard, May 19, 1917

5. Opportunities and Obstacles in the Postwar Era

An Uncertain Future

James W. Johnson, Views and Reviews: Now Comes the Test, November 23, 1918

Forrester B. Washington, Reconstruction and the Colored Woman, January 1919

George E. Haynes, William B. Wilson, and Sidney J. Catts, Letters from the U.S. Department of Labor Case Files, 1919

Mary White Ovington, Bogalusa, January 1920

Chicago Whip, Colored Labor Delegation Demands Rights in Alabama, February 28, 1920

George Schuyler, Negroes in the Unions, August 1925


1919 Riots

Washington Bee, The Rights of the Black Man, August 2, 1919

Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News, Race Riots in Chicago, July 28, 1919

Graham Taylor, Chicago in the Nation’s Race Strife, August 9, 1919

The Elaine Massacre

Newport News Times-Herald, Slowly Restore Order Today in Riot Districts, October 3, 1919

Walter F. White, The Race Conflict in Arkansas, December 13, 1919

Pittsburgh Courier, How the Arkansas Peons Were Freed, July 28, 1923

6. Postwar Migration

Heading South? or Coming North?

Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News, Chi Negroes Ask to Return to Mississippi, August 1, 1919

Tampa Morning Tribune, Negroes Who Come to South Are Better Off, August 24, 1919, and Find the Southern Negro Prosperous, October 5, 1919

T. Arnold Hill, Why Southern Negroes Don’t Go South, November 29, 1919

Buffalo American, Mighty Exodus Continues; Cause Not Economic, July 22, 1920

Building a New Life in the North

Charles S. Johnson, These Colored United States, December 1923

George E. Haynes, Negro Migration: Its Effect on Family and Community Life in the North, October 1924

and the Harlem Renaissance

Alain Locke, The New Negro, 1925

APPENDIXES

Chronology of Events Related to the Great Migration (1865–1925)

Questions for Consideration

Selected Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Black Protest and the Great Migration is outstanding. Its strengths are several, including its scope, the richness of the documents, and Arnesen's superb introduction and editorial interventions."

"This is a well-conceived, important, and highly original volume that will allow instructors to seriously address issues of African American resistance and agency, the reproduction of white racism, and the origins not only of the modern civil rights movement but also of institutionalized racism."

From the Publisher