Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, for such alleged crimes as "stealing hogs, horse-stealing, poisoning mules, jumping labor contract, suspected of stealing cattle, boastful remarks" or "trying to act like a white man." One was killed for stealing seventy-five cents.
Like the cotton growing in the field, violence had become so much a part of the landscape that "perhaps most of the southern black population had witnessed a lynching in their own communities or knew people who had," wrote the historian Herbert Shapiro. "All blacks lived with the reality that no black individual was completely safe from lynching."
—Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Sharecropping is a way of farming in which a landowner allows a tenant to use his land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land. This system developed in the South after the end of the Civil War. The freed slaves were not given any land by the government and most only knew how to farm cotton. The white landowners needed workers to continue raising cotton on their land. African-American families (and many white families as well) became sharecroppers on the white-owned land.
Each family began the agricultural cycle in the spring by getting seed, supplies, and food on credit from the landowner. They planted the seeds, tended the cotton plants as they grew, and picked the cotton when it was ready to be harvested. The landowner decided on a price and paid them for the crop, but first took out the amount they owed him for the seeds, supplies, and food they had bought on credit.
Even in the best of times, the family’s share might not be enough to cover these expenses. When the price for cotton was low, this became more and more the case. Sometimes landowners cheated the African-American sharecroppers. The result was more and more debt and dependency for sharecroppers in the 1880s and 1890s. The poverty of these families was remarkable even in this generally poor region: the typical African-American sharecropping woman kept house with only a straw broom, a laundry tub, a cooking kettle, and a water pail.
African Americans had no effective way to challenge this unfair system. Many had never learned to read or write. Because they were prevented from voting or serving on juries, they had little chance of fair treatment in the court system, which was dominated by whites.
Question: Why did you come to Chicago?
Some of my people were here.
For better wages.
To better my conditions.
Question: Do you feel greater freedom and independence in Chicago? In what ways?
Yes. Feel free to do anything I please. Not dictated to by white people.
Yes. Can vote; feel free; haven’t any fear; make more money.
Yes. Can vote; no lynching; no fear of mobs; can express my opinion and defend myself.
Yes. No restrictions as to shows, schools, etc. More protection of law.
Question: What were your first impressions of Chicago?
When I got here and got on the street cars and saw colored people sitting by white people all over the car I just held my breath, for I thought any minute they would start something, then I saw nobody noticed it, and I just thought this was a real place for colored people. No, indeed, I’ll never work in anybody’s kitchen but my own, any more…
Didn’t like it; lonesome, until I went out. Then liked the places of amusement which have no restrictions.
Question: What do you like about the North?
More money and more pleasure to be gotten from it; personal freedom Chicago affords [allows], and voting.
Freedom of speech and action. Can live without fear, no Jim Crow
Question: What difficulties do you think a person from the South meets in coming to Chicago?
Just the treatment some of the white people give you on the trains. Sometimes treat you like dogs.
Change in climate, crowded living conditions, lack of space for gardens, etc.
… Get in with wrong people who seek to take advantage of the ignorance of newcomers.
Question: Do you get more comforts and pleasures from your higher wages?
Yes. Living in better houses, can go into almost any place if you have the money, and then the schools are so much better here.
Yes. I live better, save more, and feel more like a man.
Yes. I live in a larger house and have more conveniences. Can take more pleasure; have more leisure time.
In Deborah Brown’s family lore, the American South was a place of whites-only water fountains and lynchings under cover of darkness. It was a place black people like her mother had fled.
But for Ms. Brown, 59, a retired civil servant from Queens, the South now promises salvation.
Three generations of her family — 10 people in all — are moving to Atlanta from New York, seeking to start fresh economically and, in some sense, to reconnect with a bittersweet past. They include Ms. Brown, her 82-year-old mother and her 26-year-old son, who has already landed a job and settled there.
The economic downturn has propelled a striking demographic shift: black New Yorkers, including many who are young and college educated, are heading south.
About 17 percent of the African-Americans who moved to the South from other states in the past decade came from New York, far more than from any other state, according to census data. Of the 44,474 who left New York State in 2009, more than half, or 22,508, went to the South, according to a study conducted by the sociology department of Queens College for The New York Times.
The movement is not limited to New York. The percentage of blacks leaving big cities in the East and in the Midwest and heading to the South is now at the highest levels in decades, demographers say.
“I feel a strong spiritual pull to go back to the South,” Ms. Brown said.
Middle-class enclaves, like Jamaica and St. Albans in Queens, are feeding this exodus. Black luminaries — like James Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois and Ella Fitzgerald — once lived in St.Albans, a neighborhood that is now being hit by high unemployment and foreclosures.
The migration of middle-class African-Americans is helping to depress already falling housing prices. It is also depriving the black community of investment and leadership from some of its most educated professionals, black leaders say.
The movement marks an inversion of the so-called Great Migration, which lasted roughly from World War I to the 1970s and saw African-Americans moving to the industrializing North to escape prejudice and find work.
Spencer Crew, a history professor at George Mason University who was the curator of a prominent exhibit on the Great Migration at the Smithsonian Institution, said the current exodus from New York stemmed largely from tough economic times. New York is increasingly unaffordable, and blacks see more opportunities in the South.
The South now represents the potential for achievement for black New Yorkers in a way it had not before, Professor Crew said. At the same time, unionized civil service jobs that once drew thousands of blacks to the city are becoming more scarce.
“New York has lost some of its cachet for black people,” Professor Crew said. “During the Great Migration, blacks went north because you could find work if you were willing to hustle. But today, there is less of a struggle to survive in the South than in New York. Many blacks also have emotional and spiritual roots in the South. It is like returning home.”
Ms. Brown, who spent 35 years investigating welfare fraud for New York State, may have seemed the embodiment of the black American dream in New York City.
In the 1950s, her parents moved to Harlem, and then to Queens, from Atlanta. Her grandmother was a maid; her grandfather was a brick mason. One generation later, her parents were prospering. Her father became a senior tax official for the state; her mother was an executive assistant to the state corrections commissioner.
But Ms. Brown says New York is now less inviting. She plans to join her 26-year-old son, Rashid, who moved to Atlanta from Queens last year after he graduated with a degree in criminology but could not find a job in New York.
In Atlanta, he became a deputy sheriff within weeks. She is hoping to open a restaurant.
“In the South, I can buy a big house with a garden compared with the shoe box my retirement savings will buy me in New York,” she said.
The Rev. Floyd H. Flake, pastor of the 23,000-member Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral in Jamaica, Queens, said he was losing hundreds of congregants yearly to Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.
“For decades, Queens has been the place where the African-American middle class went to buy their first home and raise a family,” Mr. Flake said. “But now, we are seeing a reversal of this as African-Americans feel this is no longer as easy to achieve and that the South is more benevolent than New York.”
Some blacks say they are leaving not only to find jobs, but also because they have soured on race relations.
Candace Wilkins, 27, of St. Albans, who remains unemployed despite having a business degree, plans to move to Charlotte, N.C.
She said her decision was prompted by an altercation with the police.
In March 2010, witnesses say, Ms. Wilkins was thrown against a car by a white police officer after she tried to help a black neighbor who was being questioned. She was charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, according to the Queens district attorney’s office.
Ms. Wilkins disputes the charges, which are pending, and has filed a complaint against the police. A police spokeswoman said the department was investigating her complaint.
“Life has gone full circle,” said Ms. Wilkins, whose grandmother was born amid the cotton fields of North Carolina and moved to Queens in the 1950s.
“My grandmother’s generation left the South and came to the North to escape segregation and racism,” she said. “Now, I am going back because New York has become like the old South in its racial attitudes.”
Many black New Yorkers who are already in the South say they have little desire to return to the city, even though they get wistful at the mention of the subways or Harlem nights.
Danitta Ross, 39, a real estate broker who used to live in Queens, said she moved to Atlanta four years ago after her company, responding to the surge in black New Yorkers moving south, began offering relocation seminars. She helped organize them, and became intrigued.
Ms. Ross said she had grown up hearing stories at the dinner table about segregation. She said the Atlanta she discovered was a cosmopolitan place of classical music concerts, interracial marriage and opulent houses owned by black people.
A single mother, she said that for $150,000, she was buying a seven-room house, with a three-car garage, on a nice plot of land.
Ms. Ross said she had experienced some culture shock in the South, and had been surprised to find that blacks tended to self-segregate, even in affluent neighborhoods.
She said that the South — not New York — was now home.
“People in Georgia have a different mind-set and life is more relaxed and comfortable here,” she said. “There is just a lot more opportunity.”
This worksheet aligns to Common Core Literacy Standards in History/Social Studies:
WHSS.6-8.2. Write informative/explanatory texts, including the narration of historical events.
Students will learn about lynching, segregation, sharecropping, and the experiences of African Americans in northern cities after they moved there from the South during the World War I era
Students will understand how life was different in the South and in northern cities for African Americans
Students will understand how African Americans tried to improve their lives in the North
This activity supports the following Common Core Literacy Standards in History/Social Studies:
RHSS.6-8.1. Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources.
WHSS.6-8.2. Write informative/explanatory texts, including the narration of historical events.
Step 1: Discuss with students: When does home become so bad that you have to leave? Is it better when you do leave? Write down their answers and have them available on the board or chart paper to refer back to later.
Hand out Map of Migration Routes Followed by African Americans During the Great Migration
Ask students to find Mississippi (MS) and Chicago on the map and draw a line between the two. Explain that the Up South documentary they are about to see will show stories of people who went from Hattiesburg, Mississippi to Chicago, but as they can see from this map, this is part of a larger story of more than a million people who left different parts of the South for cities in the North.
Step 2: Play chapters 1-3 (00:17-6:01) of Up South. Ask students to think about the following as they watch: One part of the story of life in the South is lack of economic opportunity; another part of the story is about oppression and segregation. What was so bad about sharecropping?
After watching, lead a brief shareout of students’ thoughts on “what was so bad about sharecropping.” (If you think your students need additional information in order to clarify their understanding of sharecropping, have them read and discuss Description of Sharecropping.)
Hand out the Active Viewing: Up South worksheet and ask students to write down examples of what life was like from the document and/or film in the Jim Crow and Sharecropping sections of the worksheet.
Step 3: Hand out Bar Graph of Lynchings of African Americans, 1890-1929. Have student volunteers read aloud the description text above the graph and the text below it.
Ask students to write down three facts about lynching in the Lynching section of the worksheet.
Play chapters 4-5 (6:02-12:09) of Up South. Ask students to think about the following as they watch: What was the Chicago Defender and why is it important in this story?
Step 4: Discuss the Chicago Defender and ask students to summarize why people left the South. Ask students to predict what they think will happen when migrants get to the North; record their answers. Either provide these categories or organize their responses on the board or chart paper into these categories: jobs, rights, community, housing.
Play chapters 6-7 (12:10-21:35) of Up South. Assign small groups of students to listen for information about one of the categories (jobs, rights, community, housing) as they watch.
Ask students to write examples from the documentary and from the survey about life in the North on the worksheet, making sure to fill in at least one example for each category (jobs, rights, community, housing)
Ask students to write examples from the documentary and from the survey about life in the North on the worksheet, making sure to fill in at least one example for each category (jobs, rights, community, housing)
Step 5: Revisit the predictions students made about life in the North and ask each group to report back what they learned from the film.
Hand out Black Chicagoans Describe Their Migration Experiences and ask students to circle evidence that relates to what category they were listening for in the film. Briefly discuss their answers.
Play chapters 8-10 (21:36-29:18) of Up South. As students view the clip, ask them to think about: Who was the New Negro and how did he try to solve problems in the North?
After watching the clip, review students’ understanding of the New Negro.
Step 6: Assign students to complete the Active Viewing: Up South Writing Prompt.