Banking on Freedom by Shennette Garrett-Scott

Author:Shennette Garrett-Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

THE EMERGENCE OF THE NEW NEGRO

What made the first Great Migration great had a lot to do with the numbers. Estimates vary, but about 1.6 million African Americans left the South and relocated to northeastern and midwestern cities from the mid-1910s through 1930. Scholars cite a number of push and pull factors that both forced blacks to make the move from the South and drew migrants to other regions. The economic factors that figured into migrants’ calculus included the search for better economic opportunities and the attractive options that many believed awaited them beyond the confines of the rural and urban South. Natural disasters, pest infestations, and plummeting cotton prices had brought many black tenant farmers and sharecroppers to their knees. Other economic sectors that were heavily dependent on agriculture and on the workers who drew their livelihood from the land had faltered as well. Better-paying jobs awaited workers in cities—in the North and the South. The migration, however, was not limited to rural migrants. Blacks already living in southern cities had equally compelling reasons to look north as well. Low-paying jobs, the lack of job mobility, poor housing conditions, and other economic factors weighed on urban black southerners’ decisions to move north.4

The allure of personal freedom beckoned to black women. To be sure, black women were not alone in seeking personal freedom. Blacks in general sought escape from the oppression of Jim Crow, which included demeaning racial etiquette, violence, disenfranchisement, and segregation. Black women’s desire to escape sexual victimization, particularly at the hands of their employers or partners, provided the key noneconomic motivation for black women to leave the South. Unlike black men, however, for whom northern factory and industrial jobs represented a major economic advantage for migrating, black women’s employment options remained similar to the kinds of work they did in the South: domestic and unskilled or low-skill labor. Opportunities for self-making and self-expression, then, were the aspects that made the first Great Migration great, especially for black women.5

In these new places, intellectuals and artists proclaimed the arrival of the New Negro. One thing that made the New Negro new was a greater political assertiveness and racial self-awareness. The New Negro traversed diverse political terrain and debated multiple strategies to achieve political, creative, personal, and economic liberation. The political and the economic engaged with claims for personal freedom and self-expression that ran the gamut from the conservative to the radical. Black men and women, however, brought a New Negro sensibility with them and cultivated it in these new spaces. They worked out the contours of modern black identity in urban locales in the North and South.6

The movement of more than a million people, however, did not in itself make the New Negro era possible. The Great War played a critical role as well. Mobilization for World War I, from soldiers enlisting to activities on the home front, helped to create, according to Gerald Early, a “truly modern national community with a more informed international consciousness and this, in turn, helped to make the New Negro Movement possible.

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