The 'Great Migration' Was About Racial Terror, Not Jobs

[thelakelander]

Jacksonville Terminal black waiting room in 1921.

"The North and the Congress basically gave up on equality for African Americans, and that set us on a course that we have not yet recovered from."

BRENTIN MOCK

The story of the "Great Migration" of African Americans throughout the 20th century is often framed as one of blacks heading North from the South seeking jobs and better wages. In Michael Goldfield's book 1997 The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics, he writes:

There is, to be sure, some dispute over the degree to which conditions in the South pushed African Americans away from the South—these conditions being the decline of the cotton economy, mechanization, boll weevils, the AAA policies of the 1930s, and the general suppression of African-American rights—and the degree to which it was mostly a product of the pull caused by the calculated potential gains from the higher-paying northern labor market.

For Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the legal nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Alabama, there is no dispute. As he told told The Marshall Project Wednesday, African-American migration was and is premised more accurately on racial terror: 

There are very few people who have an awareness of how widespread this terrorism and violence was, and the way it now shapes the geography of the United States. We've got majority black cities in Detroit, Chicago, large black populations in Oakland and Cleveland and Los Angeles and Boston, and other cities in the Northeast. And the African Americans in these communities did not come as immigrants looking for economic opportunities, they came as refugees, exiles from lands in the South where they were being terrorized. And those communities have particular needs we've never addressed, we've never talked about. We've got generational poverty in these cities and marginalization within black communities, and you cannot understand these present-day challenges without understanding the Great Migration, and the terror and violence that sent the African Americans to these cities where they've never really been afforded the care and assistance they needed to recover from the terror and trauma that were there.

This framing can't be emphasized enough. His organization has been leading an effort to map where the close to 4,000 lynchings of African Americans happened in America between 1880 and 1940.

Racial disparities seen today, including housing segregation and the ways we continue to fail black youth, can be explained in no small part by how cities received African Americans during those "Great Migration" periods. Stevenson ties the "generational poverty" suffered today by African Americans to cities not providing "the care and assistance needed to recover" for black migrants escaping the plagues of lynchings, burned black churches, burned black towns, rapes of black women, and other racialized atrocities throughout the 20th century.

Full article: http://www.citylab.com/crime/2015/06/the-great-migration-was-about-racial-terror-not-jobs/396722/