The Great Migration From Terror

http://www.citylab.com/crime/2015/06/the-great-migration-was-about-racial-terror-not-jobs/396722

Panel I from The Great Migration SeriesJacob Lawrence 1940-41
The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.
phillipscollection.org

Hello Everyone:

We are going to slowly edge our way back over to what this blog is about: architecture, historic preservation, urban planning and design.  Today, we are going to return to the subject of The Great Migration.  Instead of looking at vivid images of that great American internal movement of people from the South to the North (see post on June 3, 2015), we are going to look at the reasons why African Americans headed to cities like New York and Chicago.  To guide us is Brentin Mock's article for CityLab titled "The 'Great Migration' Was About Racial Terror, Not Jobs."  This article offers a different perspective on one of the greatest movements of humanity in the United States.

The Great Migration Map 1916-1930
centerstage.org

The American history books tell us the story of the "Great Migration" of African Americans during the twentieth century was about seeking better opportunities.  However, Michael Goldfield's 1997 book The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics (http://www.amazon.com) suggests:

There is, to be sure, some dispute over the degree to which conditions in the South pushed African Americans away from the South-these conditions being the decline of the cotton economy, mechanization, boll weevils, the AAA policies of the 1930s, and the general suppression of African-American rights-and the degree to which it was mostly a product of the pull caused by the calculated potential gains from the higher-paying northern labor market.

Panel III from The Great Migration SeriesJacob Lawrence 1940-41
The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.
phillipscollection.org

Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative (http://www.eji.org) is more certain about the reason for the "Great Migration."  Mr. Stevenson recently told The Marshall Project that African-American migration was more precisely about racial terror.  He said:

There are very few people who have an awareness of how widespread this terrorism and violence was, and the way it now shapes the geography of the United States.  We've got majority black cities in Detroit, Chicago, large black populations in Oakland and Cleveland and Los Angeles and Boston, and other cities in the Northeast.  And the African Americans in these communities did not come as immigrants looking for economic opportunities, they came as refugees, exiles from lands in the South where they were being terrorized.  And those communities have particular needs  we've never addressed, we've never talked about.  We've got generational poverty in these cities and marginalization within black communities, an you cannot understand these present-day challenges without understanding the Great Migration, and the terror and violence that sent the African Americans to these cities where they've never really been afforded the care and assistance they needed to recover from the terror and trauma that were there.

The Great Migration: Chicago grocery store
fasttrackteaching.com

Brentin Mock states, "This framing can't be emphasized enough..."  The Equal Justice Initiative has been leading the effort to map the locations where nearly 4,000 lynchings took place in America between 1880 and 1940.

Racial disparities are still apparent in contemporary America and include housing segregation and the multitudes of ways we, as a society, fail African American youths can be looked at through the way cities received African Americans during the "Great Migration."  Mr. Stevenson links the "generational poverty" plaguing African Americans today to the lack of "care and assistance needed to recover" from the trauma of lynchings, burning of black churches and towns, rapes and other racially motivated atrocities.

German Ugandan cab driver in Berlin
dw.com

This situation is also playing out in Europe, where David Frum wrote in The Atlantic, African and Middle Eastern immigrants have been flocking to European cities at reportedly unfathomable rates.  The majority of these immigrants are fleeing war, genocide, and poverty in countries such as Syria and Somalia.  Some are, in fact, seeking better economic opportunities.  As Mr. Frum reports, "There's little difference, in the eyes of native European residents, 57 percent of whom...hold negative attitudes toward people emigrating from outside the European Union.

Some nations, such as Jordan and Turkey, have doing a better job of taking in refugees.  The Jordanian and Turkish refugee camps provide more humane conditions.  However as Mr. Frum reports:

Much harder is creating economic opportunity within these overnight cities, and preventing extremism from taking hold.  Harder still: prompt resolution of the wars that displace people in the first place.

African Americans during World War I
nypl.org

 Brentin Mock states the obvious, "There's obviously a difference between the king of migration seen across seas today and that of African Americans in the past century.  But an injustice is illuminated in the comparison: Unlike in the European Union, African Americans were refugees in their own country; white Americans in the North and the South chose to disown their own people."

The families that were left behind during this period could have been identified as internally displaced people.  The quick resolution of the Civil War that the Federal government officials wished would happened during Reconstruction fell apart through acts of racially motivated terror by white Southern police, civic officials, vigilantes and Ku Klux Klan, all too frequently one and the same.

Great Migration in Chicago family photograph
blogs.baruch.cuny.edu

Northern cities, portrayed as sanctuaries, were anything but safe havens because they perpetuated similar systems and attitudes that relegated African Americans to inferior status. A June 11, 2015 CityLab article examined the origins of the term "black-on-black crime" (http://www.citylab.com/crime/2015/06/the...of...black-on-black-crime/395507), found that Northern whites believed that they migrants were criminal by nature, reason enough why the cities refused to offer assistance.

Panel XI from The Great Migration SeriesJacob Lawrence 1940-41
The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.
nytimes.com

Bryan Stevenson told The Marshall Project:

We created a narrative of racial difference in this country to sustain slavery, and even people who didn't own slaves bought into that narrative, including people in the North.  It was New York's governor-in the 1860s-that was talking about the inferiority of the black person even as he was opposed to slavery.

Brentin Mock offers this conclusion, "You don't have to have owned a slave to be complicit in the institution of slavery to have benefitted and have cheaper food to buy, cheaper materials, cheaper services, because the providers of the foods and services were using free slave labor."  Dare blogger add that the providers of foods and services still continue to use free slave labor?  The point here is that we are all complicit in the institution of slavery, the era of racial terror and lynchings. In short, the North and Congress essentially threw their collective hands up on equality of African Americans, setting us on the path we have yet to recover from.