The African- American Great Migration

 

In 1850, there were a little over 300 Africans in Chicago, Illinois. The number trebled in the next decade, and it reached as much as 3000 by 1900. Much of the population growth reflects returning black workers in the South who were released from the restrictions of the plantation system.

 

Moreover, from 1900 to 1920, 700,000 African-Americans moved from the southern farming villages to northern cities such as Chicago, New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Kansas City.

 

The number of southern black workers who settled in the northwest and the northeast became 1 million in next two decades and 2.5 million in the following two decades.

 

The increase in Black Codes and discriminatory laws accelerated the process in the 20th century.

 

The first World War and the Immigration Act of 1924 caused shortages of workers in the factories in the North.

That was covered by African-American laborers from the South. In 1940, there were 387,000 black people in Illinois and this had increased to 645,000 within ten years.

This movement was known as the “Great Migration”. There are several reasons for the massive migration.

 

First, African-Americans in the South left for the North to escape the racism of Jim Crow and discriminatory laws.

Second, because Southern cotton fields were in the grip of a major outbreak of boll weevils, sharecroppers and laborers were forced to give up farming and seek alternative job opportunities.

Third, southern agriculture was mechanized and many black workers who did cotton farming by hand lost their jobs, so they had to go to the North to seek employment chances.

Around the same time in the north, there was an enormous expansion of war industries that created job opening for blacks.

Thus, black neighborhoods appeared in each city of the North.

 

However, ever-increasing immigrants created racial tensions.

 

They were often harshest between European immigrants and black people.

In the summer of 1919, a racial conflict between ethnic Irish and African-American immigrants broke out on Chicago’s South Side.

The Irish had established the South Side first, however, thousands of black Americans settled there later with the Great Migration.

Irish people tried to defend their territory and political power against all latecomers.

 In the riot, 38 people died and 537 were injured and over 1,000 houses were destroyed.

A mastermind behind the conflict was Irish youth gangs of the South Side. 

Since the rebellion, the neighborhoods of the white and the black were separated and they had never lived together.

Then, black settlers were crowded into an African-American ghetto which was one of the poorest and most crime-ridden parts of the city.

By 1935, about half the black families in the North were living on relief, but still the city attracted African-Americans from the South.

From 1910 to 1940, a total of 1.6 million African-Americans immigrated from the South to the North, Midwest and West.

To Be Continued