America in 1900 by Kent Noel J

Author:Kent, Noel J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317477372
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Leaving the South was yet another act of resistance. Some Louisiana blacks told Du Bois they were “willing to run any risk to get where they might breathe freer.” This modest northward black migration, 185,000 during the 1890s, marked the beginning of a great historic migration as threads of community and kinfolk began to stretch across the Mason-Dixon line. New York and Philadelphia each hosted communities of blacks 60,000 strong, and Chicago had 30,000. The Mississippi migrant who disembarked in Chicago from an Illinois Central Railroad train noted with wonder and pleasure that he might casually sit next to a white on a streetcar. The constant fears southern blacks lived with abated in a generally more relaxed, less threatening atmosphere. Where blacks had opportunities to break into white-monopoly industries, at Philadelphia’s Midvale Steel plant, for example, they did well. And there were occasional epiphanies: one March day in 1900, for instance, when a black man joined with two white men to save six children from a fire in Harlem. A newspaper account: “The Negro made a derrick of his body, his legs held by the white men and swings the children to safety.”51

But the emigrant who came “to better my condition” was arriving at a time when skilled black artisans were declining and blacks were being evicted from laboring and traditional service jobs in favor of fresh-off-the-boat immigrants. What remained were low-wage personal domestic service jobs. In New York City and Boston, the large majority of black workers were servants, janitors, and porters.52

Boycotted by both employers and unions, even blacks with skills and southern union cards were frozen out. “From all or nearly all trades, the colored man is shut out,” was the story from Baltimore. “No Negro apprentices will be found at bricklaying, painting, tinning, smithing etc.” White union members bought into popular antiblack folk myths and viewed black workers as unskilled “cheap labor” who would degrade wages. The railroad brotherhoods barred black members, and the railroads no longer hired black firemen. A vicious cycle was in place: Black men seeking to break into work on the Buffalo docks or Chicago building trades could do so only as strikebreakers, thus reinforcing white hostilities.53

The 1900 era marked the beginnings of the phenomenon of white flight. “Whenever a negro moves into a street the whites flutter away,” said a Baltimore source. “They simply vanish … the whites verge more and more towards the suburbs.” Inner-city neighborhoods might remain integrated, but boundary lines between white immigrants and blacks were hardening. Black ghettos began solidifying along a narrow strip of Chicago around State Street south of the Loop, in the tenement area of Manhattan’s West 60s, and in the rows of cheap, one-story frame tenements known as “Bucktown” in Indianapolis.54

Greater black visibility generated backlash from northern whites anxious to maintain skin privileges and fearful of labor competition. Gangs in Indianapolis and Philadelphia, shouting “kill the nigger,” staged assaults in parks and on streetcars. A Trenton, New Jersey, mob’s attempt to lynch a black

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