Never Been a Time (11 page)

Then came the severe floods of 1916, and the migration from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta became an exodus. “They were selling out everything they had or in a manner giving it away; selling their homes, mules, horses, cows, and everything about them but their trunks,” said one black Southern observer.
¹⁰
There were jobs to be had in cities of the North, Southern blacks were told, and not just by the labor agents for employers who took trainloads of blacks north every week from Southern cities. Thousands of blacks who had already made the trek to Northern cities sent cards and letters to their relatives and friends down home telling them that life was better in the North. And the black newspaper the
Chicago Defender
, widely circulated in the South, regularly ran stories and advertisements promoting the opportunities for black workers in Chicago, Detroit, and other Northern cities, including St. Louis and East St. Louis.

The
Chicago Defender
was founded in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, a deceptively mild-mannered, Georgia-born preacher's stepson who, as a young man visiting the Chicago World's Fair, had been inspired by the fiery speeches of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells. Abbott's slogan was “American race prejudice must be destroyed.” He vowed that “education of the race is our job,” and he was not afraid to take strong and even comparatively radical editorial positions. He called for all trade unions to open their membership to blacks, for blacks to be represented in the presidential cabinet and in all police forces across America, and for all public schools to be open to African Americans. Like any number of black leaders before him—and long after him—he also called for federal antilynching legislation.
¹¹

As the
Defender
evolved and its circulation grew, the paper became a feisty mixture of heart-warmers about the accomplishments of blacks in the North and shockers about the mistreatment of blacks across the country, particularly
in the South. Stories on black heroes like boxer Jack Johnson and coverage of the black struggle for justice were mixed with such mainstays of commercial journalism as obituaries, want ads, comics, and cartoons. The paper really took off, not just in Chicago but nationally, in 1910 when Abbott brought aboard a flamboyant, alcoholic managing editor named J. Hockley Smiley who ran sensationalist stories with headlines in red ink, headlines like:

 

100 NEGROES MURDERED WEEKLY IN
UNITED STATES BY WHITE AMERICANS

 

There were many real atrocities to report, and Smiley splashed them across the front page after the white press ignored or downplayed them. On slow weeks, a former
Defender
reporter once recalled, Smiley relied on his imagination, which produced “lynchings, rapes, assaults, mayhems and sundry ‘crimes' against innocent Negroes in the hinterlands of the South, often in towns not to be found on any map extant.”
¹²

Abbott set up a distribution network in the South through Pullman car porters, dining car waiters, and touring black entertainers and ballplayers. And later, working through black ministers in the South, he established “agent-correspondents,” who both distributed the paper and reported local news in dozens and eventually hundreds of Southern cities and towns. The circulation rose dramatically. In 1915, the
Defender
, which had begun the size of a handbill, switched from a tabloid format and became an eight-column broadsheet. The
Defender
had become America's most successful black newspaper. By 1920 the paper's nationwide circulation had risen to more than two hundred thousand, and the paper claimed a readership of more than one million, probably not an inflated figure. The
Defender
was passed from hand to hand until it was worn and torn, and read aloud in barbershops and churches and other meeting places. Two thirds of the circulation was outside of the city limits of Chicago, and although the bulk of those readers were in the South, still home of almost nine out of ten black Americans, the paper's reach was truly nationwide. The
Defender
sold twenty-three thousand copies every week in New York City alone.

Abbott was a great admirer of Booker T. Washington—the entire front page of the November 14, 1915, edition was devoted to a giant headline
announcing Washington's death—but he disagreed with Washington's advice to Southern blacks to “cast down their buckets” where they stood. Abbott advised, with tempered optimism, the opposite, “Come North, where there is more humanity, some justice and fairness.”
¹³

The
Defender
became a powerful engine in the Great Migration that began in the years of the First World War. Carl Sandburg, in his
Chicago Daily News
column, wrote in 1919 that “the
Defender
more than any one agency was the big cause of the ‘northern fever' and the big exodus from the south.” Abbott relentlessly urged Southern blacks to move to the “Promised Land”—Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities of the North where underpaid, hungry Southern blacks “could get the wrinkles out of their bellies and live like men.” The
Defender
, and the black press in general, were very important in the black community and held considerable power to sway readers, particularly in the South, where, with the exception of the church, all the major institutions of life—the courts, the political system, the daily newspapers—were controlled by whites and almost inevitably were hostile or at best indifferent to blacks. After the
Defender
ran an ambitious series of stories detailing how much better blacks were treated in the North than in the South, the Chicago Urban League, which helped African Americans find jobs and places to live, received an extraordinary 940 letters from blacks who wanted to move North.
¹⁴

The power of the
Defender
in the black community did not go unnoticed by whites. In a cruel reminder of the Redemption period in the South, the Ku Klux Klan had been revived in 1915 and was riding through the South and the lower Midwest, flogging, branding, and lynching blacks and terrorizing whites who were insufficiently racist. These crimes were ignored or given minor play in most white newspapers, while the
Defender
reported them in detail. Alarmed, white public officials across the South declared the
Defender
a menace to public order and confiscated copies as soon as they appeared in town. In response, the paper encouraged readers to subscribe and receive the paper by mail. In some areas of the Deep South, the
Defender
set up an underground distribution network, shipping the paper into town hidden in other merchandise.

Distributors were assaulted by members of the Klan and other racist groups and their papers were destroyed. In one incident that was far from unique, Klansmen told a black woman in Yazoo City, Mississippi, they would kill her if she didn't stop distributing the paper. She was forced to leave town.
Such threats and assaults were duly reported in the
Defender
, and in the long run only added to the reasons for blacks to leave the South.
¹⁵

As crowds of migrants headed North, daily newspapers in the South tried to counter the influence of the
Defender
by running reports from Northern cities about mobs of ill-clad blacks, shoeless and hungry, shivering on the icy sidewalks and begging for money for train fare back to the Land of Cotton. The
Defender
responded that it was cold in the South too—particularly for people too poor to afford winter heat—and ran a series of stories about blacks literally dying of the cold in Southern winters, stories with headlines like the one on a report out of Atlanta in February:

 

NEGRO WOMAN FROZE TO DEATH MONDAY

 

The
Defender
concluded that report by saying, “If you can freeze to death in the North and be free, why freeze to death in the South and be a slave, where your mother, sister and daughter are raped and burned at the stake, where your father, brother and son are treated with contempt and hung to a pole, riddled with bullets at the least mention that he does not like the way he has been treated? Come North, then, all of you folks … For the hard working man there is plenty of work—if you really want it! The Defender says come!”
¹⁶

They came.

Also promoting northward emigration was the Illinois Central Railroad, which had bought railroad lines through the Mississippi Delta in the 1890s and offered special weekend excursion rates and group discounts for tickets from the Delta to Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, East St. Louis, and other midwestern cities, providing the infrastructure for much of the extensive black exodus to the North Central states of the early decades of the twentieth century.
¹⁷

Between 1910 and 1920, at least half a million blacks moved North, the great majority of them—four hundred thousand or more—in the second half of the decade. Previously, the majority of the black emigrants had gone to New York, Philadelphia, and other eastern cities and towns. This time, more and more blacks from the Deep South were riding the railroad lines due north to the rapidly growing industrial cites of the Great Lakes, Cleveland, Detroit, and especially Chicago, as well as to St. Louis, East St. Louis, Indianapolis,
and the smaller industrial cities of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The immigrants to the Midwest came in the main from the beleaguered cotton states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, and it is not coincidental that those were the states with the harshest Jim Crow laws and the worst record on lynching and other forms of brutality against blacks.
¹⁸

According to the conservative figures of the U.S. Census Bureau, while the black populations of New York and Philadelphia increased by roughly 60 to 65 percent from 1910 to 1920, the black population of Chicago went up 148 percent, from about 44,000 to more than 109,000. Detroit, which had a black population of only about 5,700 in 1910, saw the number soar more than sevenfold to almost 41,000 by 1920 as the city's automakers grew rapidly and began hiring blacks. And Cleveland's black population rose from about 8,000 to about 34,000.
¹⁹

Many thousands of the immigrants to the North were lured by offers of jobs on the railroads. For decades in the South, the roughest work on railways—the laying and replacing of tracks and maintenance of rail yards—had been done mainly by blacks, with many miles of tracks in the pre–Civil War South laid by teams of Irish immigrants and slaves owned by the railroads. After emancipation, track crews on Southern railroads were predominantly black. After World War I began, in order to fill openings created by increased shipping and the departure of large numbers of immigrants, Northern railroads openly recruited crews of trackmen in the South. Labor agents from Northern cities, including the major rail hub of East St. Louis, made weekly hiring trips to Southern cities. Public officials became alarmed at the weekly departures of carloads of young black men headed for railroad work up North, with their friends and families crowding train stations to see them off, and passed laws restricting the activities of labor-recruiting agents, or rediscovered old laws dating back to the fight against Reconstruction.

In early August of 1916, two entire trainloads of men—about one thousand black laborers—set off from Union Station in Savannah, Georgia, for track-maintenance jobs in Pennsylvania. In response, the city council of Savannah created a license fee of $1,000 for agents who sent workers out of state. Later that year, the city arrested hundreds of blacks at the station on trumped-up charges, inspiring W. E. B. Du Bois to remark in the
Crisis
, “All the slave catching machinery of the South is being put into motion to stop migration.”
²⁰

As they saw their work force heading North, some Southern employers raised wages and made other concessions to induce blacks to stay. An observer for the U.S. Department of Labor reported, “Negroes remaining in the South are being given a consideration never before accorded them … Owing to the scarcity of labor, a Georgia farmer near Albany this year laid aside his whip and gun, with which it is reported he is accustomed to drive his hands, and begged for laborers.”
²¹

Beginning early in 1916, steel mills and other large Northern employers added to the exodus by offering free transportation to blacks who wanted to work in the North. The result, an observer recalled, was “like the gold fever in '49.” The muckraking Chicago journalist Ray Stannard Baker, among the first white reporters to cover the African American community extensively, reported that, in the spring of 1916, “trains were backed into southern cities and hundreds of Negroes were gathered up in a day, loaded into the cars and whirled away to the North … Negro teamsters left their horses standing in the streets or deserted their jobs and went to the trains without notifying their employers or even going home.”
²²

No matter where they ended up, the great majority of the black migrants found themselves, at best, with low-paying, menial jobs. For example, Carnegie, the Pittsburgh steel giant, employed about fifteen hundred blacks before 1916. By the summer of 1917, the number had swollen to more than four thousand, but only ninety-five of them were doing skilled labor.
²³

Few black workers in any Northern city, skilled or unskilled, belonged to unions. The American Federation of Labor remained the dominant force in the American labor movement, and founder Samuel Gompers had given up his earlier attempts at unionizing blacks as futile and going against the grain of racial attitudes in the white rank and file. Although the radical Industrial Workers of the World, which welcomed blacks and unskilled workers, won some bitterly fought labor battles in the first two decades of the century, the overwhelming majority of American labor remained lily white, and serious and effective organizing of black workers by mainstream American labor would not come until the top-to-bottom industrial unionism movement of the 1930s. In some industries, like the railroads, blacks shut out of white unions formed their own labor organizations, but most black workers who emigrated to the North were without union representation.