"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)
“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)
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)
Active Viewing: <em>Up South</em>
In this activity, students watch the ASHP documentary <em><a href="http://ashp.cuny.edu/ashp-documentaries/up-south/">Up South: African-American Migration in the Era of the Great War</a></em> with documents and exercises designed to support and reinforce the documentary's key concepts of Jim Crow, lynching, sharecropping, migration, and life in northern cities. At the end of the activity, students complete a short writing task on how life changed and how it stayed the same for migrants, and how they tried to improve their lives in the North.
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2011
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
2011
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/" rel="license"><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 href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License</a>.
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
Active Viewing: <em>Up South</em> vocabulary sheet
These words and phrases from the <em>Up South</em> documentary may be unfamiliar to students.
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2011.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
2011
<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>.
1894
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
Active Viewing: <em>Up South</em> worksheet
This worksheet is designed to help students organize information from the documentary <a href="http://ashp.cuny.edu/ashp-documentaries/up-south/" target="_blank"><em>Up South: African-American Migration in the Era of the Great War</em></a>.
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2011
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
2011
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"></a><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>.
1894
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
Active Viewing: Up South Activity Writing Prompt
This is a writing prompt for the Active Viewing: Up South activity.
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2011.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
2011
1894
English
Bar Graph of Lynchings of African Americans, 1890-1929
From 1890 to 1900, an average of 175 African Americans were lynched each year. Lynchings were attacks motivated by racism where white mobs brutally murdered black victims, sometimes in the night, but often in a public way with many witnesses. Lynch mobs often hung their victims, but also sometimes burned or tore apart the victim's body. African-American men were the most common targets of lynch mobs, but women were also hurt and killed. White public officials in the South did not criticize lynching, did not punish those responsible, and often supported the actions of lynch mobs. African Americans (most notably the journalist Ida B. Wells) fought back against lynching by trying to bring national attention to the issue.
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
“Lynchings by Year and Race,†University of Missouri Kansas City Law School, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html and Isabel Wilkerson, <em>The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration</em> (New York: Random House, 2010), 39.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
2011
Graph copyright American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning <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>.
1894
English
Modern America (1914-1929)
Black Chicagoans Describe Their Great Migration Experiences
Civil Rights and Citizenship
In the summer of 1919, violence broke out between whites and African Americans in Chicago. The five-day riot left thirty-eight people dead and more than five hundred people injured. The city formed a Commission on Race Relations to study what happened during the riot and what conditions in the city contributed to the violence. As part of that study, the Commission surveyed recent African-American migrants from the South. These questions and answers are a selection from the larger survey.
Chicago Commission on Race Relations
Chicago Commission on Race Relations, <em>The Negro in Chicago</em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 97-102.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1922
1889, 1894
English
Modern America (1914-1929)