In September 1895, Booker T. Washington, the head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, stepped to the podium at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition and implored white employers to “cast down your bucket where you are” and hire African Americans who had proven their loyalty even throughout the South’s darkest hours. In return, Washington declared, southerners would be able to enjoy the fruits of a docile work force that would not agitate for full civil rights. Instead, blacks would be “In all things that are purely social . . . as separate as the fingers.”
Washington called for an accommodation to southern practices of racial segregation in the hope that blacks would be allowed a measure of economic freedom and then, eventually, social and political equality. For other prominent blacks, like W. E. B. Du Bois who had just received his PhD from Harvard, this was an unacceptable strategy since the only way they felt that blacks would be able to improve their social standing would be to assimilate and demand full citizenship rights immediately.
Regardless of which strategy one selected, it was clear that the stakes were extremely high. In the thirty years since the Civil War ended African Americans had experienced startling changes to their life opportunities. Emancipation was celebrated, of course, but that was followed by an intense debate about the terms of black freedom: who could buy or sell property, get married, own firearms, vote, set the terms of employment, receive an education, travel freely, etc. Just as quickly as real opportunities seemed to appear with the arrival of Reconstruction, when black men secured unprecedented political rights in the South, they were gone when northern armies left in 1877 and the era of Redemption began. These were the years when white Southerners returned to political and economic power, vowing to “redeem” themselves and the South they felt had been lost. Part of the logic of Redemption revolved around controlling black bodies and black social, economic, and political opportunities. Much of this control took the form of so-called Jim Crow laws—a wide-ranging set of local and state statutes that, collectively, declared that the races must be segregated.
In 1896, the year after Washington’s Atlanta Cotton Exposition speech, the Supreme Court declared in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation was constitutional. It would take fifty-eight years for that decision to be reversed (in Brown v. Board of Education). In the meantime, African Americans had to negotiate the terms of their existence through political agitation, group organizing, cultural celebration, and small acts of resistance. Much of this negotiation can be seen in the history of the Great Migration, that period when blacks began to move, generally speaking, from the rural South to the urban North. In the process, African Americans changed the terms upon which they exercised their claims to citizenship and rights as citizens.
There are at least two factual aspects of the Great Migration that are important to know from the start: 1) the black migration generally occurred between 1905 and 1930 although it has no concrete beginning or end and 2) from the standpoint of sheer numbers, the Great Migration was dwarfed by a second migration in the 1940s and early 1950s, when blacks became a majority urban population for the first time in history. Despite these caveats, the Great Migration remains important in part because it marked a fundamental shift in African American consciousness. As such, the Great Migration needs to be understood as a deeply political act.
Migration was political in that it often reflected African American refusal to abide by southern social practices any longer. Opportunities for southern blacks to vote or hold office essentially disappeared with the rise of Redemption, job instability only increased in the early twentieth century, the quality of housing and education remained poor at best, and there remained the ever-looming threat of lynch law if a black person failed to abide by local social conventions. Lacking even the most basic ability to protect their own or their children’s bodies, blacks simply left.
