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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - III. Population and Migration - 8. Migration - 3. The Great Migration to the Urban North - 4. Continued Northward Migration
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196 An American Dilemma
tion. Some saw the North as a place where members of their race could
get a new start in life, economically, socially and politically. Others felt
that migration was a disrupting force, and that the Negro problem could
not be solved by running away from it. Some professionals and businessmen
in the South were afraid of losing their clientele, and some community
leaders were afraid of losing their communities. A number of them joined
in the caravan, but the ones left behind were not particularly happy about
it all. The upper class Negroes in the North had mixed feelings with
respect to the new migration. On the one hand, they saw their own social
status decreasing: prejudice mounted against Negroes in the North as a
reaction to the sudden influx of rough Southern Negroes.* On the other
hand, the economic basis of their businesses or professions broadened as
the Negro community grew.
4. Continued Northward Migration
After the First World War many of the same influences continued,
and Negroes kept up their migration northward. After a few years of
depression, unprecedented prosperity brought a new demand for industrial
goods. Immigration laws effectively kept out competitors to American
labor, except for Mexicans and a few French-Canadians. Cotton production
in the South Atlantic and East South Central states was still in the dol-
drums, though not so badly as during the War. Also important was the
fact that a pattern of migration had been well started j
fear and local ties
were no longer so potent in deterring migration as they had been before
the War. Jobs, however, were not so plentiful in the North, and a housing
shortage for Negroes, who were kept in segregated quarters of the cities,
caused rents to eat up a large part of the Negroes wage.
With the depression beginning in 1929, a new set of circumstances arose
to determine the extent of the Negroes migration northward. There were
no longer new jobs for Negroes in the North j
in fact, Negroes there were
laid off by the thousands. In November, 1937, 39 per cent of the male
nonwhite labor force in Northern states outside of the Rocky Mountain
and Pacific Coast Divisions were unemployed.^^
* An elderly upper class Negro woman who had lived all her life in the North told an
interviewer in 1927:
“The Negro invasion began about 1915. Until that time we had been accepted as equals
but as soon as the Southern Negroes began coming in we were relegated to their class.
Our white friends shunned us and we were really without social life until our own group
was better organized. . . . We really do not mingle with the Southern Negro and they do
not come near us as they know that we are Northerners.^*
This woman was president of a local society composed of Negroes who had lived in the
North for at least 35 years, or their descendants. (Unpublished document in possession of the
Social Science Research Committee of the University of Chicago, “History of Douglas,”
document No. 15).
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