The Great Migration: Racial Violence in the Midwest and Northern Part of United States

In the 1890s alone, lynching claimed the lives of 104 black men, women, and children annually. As historian Leon Litwack notes, between 1882 and 1959 ”an estimated 4,742 blacks met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs. As many, if not more blacks were victims of legal lynchings (speedy trials and executions), private white violence, and _nigger hunts,’ murdered by a variety of means in isolated rural sections and dumped into rivers and creeks.” Lacking the ability to serve on juries, hold political office, or even vote, African Americans throughout the South were virtually powerless in the face of violent anti-black repression of this sort. Roughly 40,000 black southerners were part of the Exoduster movement.

Between 1879 and 1898, the Exodusters established independent, all-black communities in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. More importantly, the largest internal migration in U.S. history witnessed close to two million African Americans leaving the South between 1910 and 1940. This massive wave of migrants concentrated primarily in the Midwest and North, although many made it as far as California during the Great Migration. While the push of the Black Nadir explains much of this movement, the various socioeconomic pulls of better job opportunities, better housing, and higher living standards played important roles in the decision of African Americans to leave the South. Similar to the utopian views of the Midwest and North shared by many enslaved African Americans before 1850, these regions were envisioned as the ”Promised Land” for millions of black migrants during the early portion of the twentieth century. These dreams would soon be dashed as African American settlers realized there was no escape from the Black Nadir or the American paradox.

One set of responses to the influx of such large numbers of African Americans into the Midwest and North was an increasing number of race riots. Two riots in Illinois-Springfield (1908) and East St. Louis (1917)-proved that the Midwest would not necessarily be more hospitable for African Americans. Accusations of raping white women and intense labor competition led to the deaths of dozens of African Americans and hundreds being forced or displaced from their homes. Despite the intensity of these incidents, nothing matches the Red Summer of 1919 in which two dozen race riots occurred throughout the country. Pioneering historical and sociological assessments of this violent summer have explained it as the outcome of labor competition, anti-black propaganda in the media (especially the 1915 release of Birth of a Nation), and the influx of white supremacist doctrines into midwestern and northern states. Whatever the specific causes of the numerous race riots in 1919, they proved once again that the American paradox was alive and well in the twentieth century. The irony of sending more than 300,000 young black men to fight to make the world ‘’safe for democracy” during World War I was made more glaring by the number of anti-black race riots and overt attempts to deny these same men full citizenship. Mirroring the anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe, the savage destruction of two black communities in the 1920s became additional proof that the United States had not found an effective way to negotiate the widening gulf between African Americans and whites. In 1921, the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, suffered through an all-out war, complete with death squads and incendiaries dropped from airplanes by whites. What was once a prosperous black community lay in ashes after days of uncontrolled rioting. In addition, more than 200 black residents were killed in what can be described as a massacre.