“A colored family in a one room light housekeeping apartment”
One of the first challenges for southern migrants who arrived in Northern cities like Chicago was finding a place to live. One report tells of a single day when 600 families applied to live in 53 housing units. Given the demand, unscrupulous landlords charged high rents for run-down apartments. Rapid population growth was not the only reason black families had so few options. Both de facto and de jure segregation contained black residents' housing choices to a few neighborhoods like those on Chicago's south side that became known as the city's "black belt." A strong sense of family sustained many migrants through these difficult conditions.
Unknown
Known as "Chicago Families in Furnished Rooms" or "A Colored Family in a One-Room Light Housekeeping Apartment," in dissertation by Evelyn Heacox Wilson, March 1929; University of Chicago Library.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1929 (Circa)
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
A Black Migrant Crosses the Mason-Dixon Line
Immigration and Migration
In this memoir first published in 1952, Charles Denby, an African-American migrant from Alabama, recalls his train ride North and first night in Detroit, Michigan. In 1930, out of work because of the Great Depression, Denby moved back to the South. He returned to Detroit in 1943, where he became an member of the United Auto Workers union and was active in radical causes for more than three decades.
Charles Denby
Charles Denby, I<em>ndignant Heart: A Black Worker's Journal</em> (Wayne State University Press, 1989), 27-28.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1952
Reprinted from <em>Indignant Heart: A Black Workers Journal</em> by Charles Denby. Copyright © 1978 Wayne State University Press, with the permission of Wayne State University Press.
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
Great Migration Scrapbook worksheet
This worksheet helps students plan a character and takes notes on primary sources for the activity "Create a Migrant's Scrapbook from the First Great Migration."
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2010.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
2010
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
<div><a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" alt="Creative Commons License" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License</a>.</div>
1600
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
Create a Migrant's Scrapbook from the First Great Migration
In this activity students examine documents from the period of the First Great Migration of African Americans to the North. As they look at the documents, they take notes to build a character of a migrant. Then they create a scrapbook that shows their characters' personal journeys and experiences during the Great Migration. This activity can be part of a unit that includes the film <em><a href="http://ashp.cuny.edu/ashp-documentaries/up-south/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">Up South: African-American Migration in the Era of the Great War</a></em>. Â Students will need art supplies such as construction paper, tape or glue, scissors, and markers to make the scrapbooks.
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2010.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
2010
Copyright American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
<div><br />This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License</a>.</div>
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
Mahalia Jackson Remembers Chicago
Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (1911-1972), the grandaughter of former slaves, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she learned to sing in her family's baptist church. In 1927, at the age of sixteen, Jackson migrated to Chicago where she found a job as a domestic. She joined a gospel choir and earned money as a soloist at churches and funerals. In 1937, she began recording gospel music professionally. Jackson became a strong supporter of the civil rights movement and performed at many rallies, including the 1963 March on Washington. In her in her autobiography Movin' On Up, she remembers her early years in Chicago.
Mahalia Jackson
Mahalia Jackson, with Evan McLeod Wylie, <em>Movin' On Up</em> (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966), 46-49.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1966
1600
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
Chicago’s Urban League Offers Assistance to Southern Migrants
Between 1910 and 1920, as the Great Migration swept north, the African-American population in Chicago and other northern cities more than doubled. Members of established African-American communities tried to help new arrivals adjust to city life. Organizations such as the Urban League distributed cards like the ones below offering advice and assistance with housing and employment.
Chicago Urban League
Card distributed by Chicago Urban League, circa 1920. Arthur and Graham Aldis Papers, Special Collections Department, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1910 - 1920
1600
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
Help Wanted Advertisements in the Chicago Defender
Work
In the United States, the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) increased the demand for industrial production while decreasing the flow of European immigration. Labor shortages in both factories, mines, fields, and service industries meant greater economic opportunities for African Americans willing to move north. Many African Americans heard about jobs through African-American newspapers that circulated in the South. Help wanted advertisements, such as the ones below compiled from the Chicago Defender, attempted to attract workers with the promise of higher wages, housing, and other benefits.
Various
<em>The Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition)</em>, Nov. 11, 1916; Sept. 29, 1917; Dec. 1, 1917; Oct. 26, 1918.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1916 - 1918
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
A Tenant Farmer’s Daughter Remembers Leaving Mississippi
Immigration and Migration
In 1917, ten-year-old Rubie Bond left Mississippi with her parents and migrated to Beloit, Wisconsin. Her father, who worked as a tenant farmer in the South, had been recruited to work at a factory in Beloit. In 1976, she was interviewed as part of an oral history project documenting the experiences of African-American migrants who moved to Wisconsin between the 1910s and 1950s. In this excerpt, Bond describes why her parents decided to leave the South.
Bond, Rubie. Interview. Tape Recording, 1976. Beloit Bicentennial Oral History Collection. Beloit College Archives, Beloit, Wisconsin; from Wisconsin Historical Society, “Oral History: Rubie Bond, the African-American Experience in Wisconsin,” Audio Number 637A/1, http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/teachers/lessons/secondary/rubiebond.asp.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1976
Used by permission of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
1600
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
Map of Railroad Routes Followed by Black Migrants
Immigration and Migration
African-American migrants to the North chose their destinations primarily based on their state of origin: those from Georgia and the Carolinas headed to cities along the eastern seaboard like New York and Philadelphia; migrants from Alabama and Mississippi headed for the Midwestern cities like Chicago; and those from Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee often headed west to California.
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
American Social History Project, <em>Who Built America?: Working People and the Nation's History</em> (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008).
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
2008
Copyright American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
<div><a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" alt="Creative Commons License" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License</a>.</div>
1600
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
"The Reason"
Immigration and Migration
In the early twentieth century, African Americans had plenty of reasons to leave the rural South: disfranchisement, segregation, poverty, racial violence, lack of educational opportunities, and the drudgery of farm life. As the cartoon below from The Crisis magazine shows, lynching stood out as particularly horrific and unjust. Violently reinforcing the legal system of discrimination in the South, white mobs tortured and murdered black men for alleged wrongdoings or for the “crime” of prospering economically. More than 3,700 people were lynched in the United States between 1889 and 1932, the vast majority of them in the South.
Albert A. Smith, “The Reason,” <em>The Crisis</em>, March 1920.
Albert A. Smith, “The Reason,” The Crisis, March 1920.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1920
1600
English
Modern America (1914-1929)