Tom Paine 1949
Diamond Member
- Mar 15, 2020
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I read your historical comments carefully, Oldstyle . I was inclined at first to agree with you when you first mentioned the economic pull of better paying jobs in the north, about WWI creating job opportunities for southern African Americans, about decreased family farm ownership among all groups. Obviously for many blacks WWI opened up a possible escape from poverty and oppression. Many were long economically and politically forced into de facto slavery in the south. They were a despised race-color caste of sharecroppers, prisoners searching for any escape.
But then you started this narrow game about why they didn’t leave earlier, challenging IM2 to “explain that!,” and I concluded you were not trying to educate but just win a point, a point you were fundamentally ignorant about. As I tried to explain earlier, NOTHING about the African-American experience in that period, not life in the south, not life in the north, not buying a tiny farm or losing that farm, not staying in the south, not moving to the north .... can be explained adequately without reference to the overwhelming reality of American racism. This was a period of increasing national racism, north and south. Black scholars understand this. Most whites have no idea.
So let me see if I follow your rationale here, Tom! You think that it took two generations of blacks living in the south before they were suddenly overwhelmed by the "reality of American racism" and THAT caused millions of them to uproot and move to the north? That's what you're going with to explain why The Great Exodus started in 1920 and not in 1870? With all due respect...that's absurd!
A more reasonable explanation is that a massive shortage of labor in the north brought on by the First World War prompted northern industrialists to recruit southern black labor to work in their factories. It isn't that the southern blacks were reacting to southern racism because let's be honest here...racism was alive and well from the close of the Civil War until the start of WWI...it's that they were reacting to the promise of a better life in the north. A better life because of better jobs!
Nobody denies that big “northern industrialists” sought to “recruit southern black labor” during WWI when immigrants were no longer arriving in great numbers and the war sent young men, including young black men, to war overseas. IM2 already talked about how southern bosses tried to prevent the loss of black semi-enslaved labor. The use of poor black labor as strike breakers in mining areas was also often tried, even before the war. When direct physical efforts to stop “emigrants” didn’t work, in some areas of the south in those years there were even temporarily “improved terms” offered to black sharecroppers. Racist manipulation and exploitation takes many forms.
So did black resistance! You say I am arguing that ...
NO. That is not at all what I am saying. That is what you are presuming I am saying.“It took two generations of blacks living in the south before they were suddenly overwhelmed by the "reality of American racism" and THAT caused millions of them to uproot and move to the north? That's what you're going with to explain why The Great Exodus started in 1920 and not in 1870? With all due respect ... that is absurd!
First of all, after the Civil War most black ex-slaves were living in the Deep South, and the first mass migration movements off plantations were often just frantic searches for family members, children and parents and siblings separated and sold away. But then there was a need to eat!
Next the overwhelming struggle until 1877 (and until much later in most places) was to establish and then defend integrated reconstruction governments and other remaining gains of Reconstruction ... in the south. To build and save the new Freedmen schools, churches, technical colleges, to preserve the right to vote, to get a piece of the land they had worked for generations. Nobody was thinking about migration as long as there was any hope of Reconstruction. But the early promises of help, of “40 acres and a mule,” were betrayed, as schools and churches were burnt down and the vast majority of ex-slaves driven back to picking cotten as indebted sharecroppers in semi-feudal conditions. Blacks then had virtually NOTHING. No money. No land. No education. No rights. Even the famed abolitionist movement that had helped a few thousand slaves escape on the Underground Railroad was gone, exhausted. Except for a few brave but dwindling schoolteachers. Even at its height the Underground Railroad had rarely reached the Deep South states. Besides, it was all too easy just to sit back an argue that the slaves ... were “free” now!
In the next period there was just a struggle to survive. Some of the black soldiers still alive and active became “Buffalo Soldiers” fighting Indians in the Southwest, maybe later black cowboys. Others made it to California. There was still some “philanthropy.” But for most Deep South ex-slaves there was no hope but to remain and try to work out a way to get some land. Many who had a few dollars and lived near the Mississippi by 1879 were trying to emigrate WEST, e.g. to Kansas, like the famous “Exodusters”:
The Exodusters was a name given to African Americans who migrated from states along the Mississippi River to Kansas in the late nineteenth century, as part of the Exoduster Movement. It was the first general migration of black people following the Civil War.... As many as forty thousand Exodusters left the South to settle in Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado.
* 98,000 sign emigration papers
*Around 26,000 African Americans arrived in Kansas
The number one cause of black migration out of the South at this time was to escape racial violence or "bulldozing" by white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan ... In large parts of Mississippi, less than 1 in 100 black workers owned land or a house.
In the aftermath of the Compromise of 1877 and the traumatic political campaigns of 1878 in Louisiana, the plight of organized black resistance had reached a point of hopelessness, leading to the Exodus.... Political and economic oppression was enforced by means both legal and illegal, on the streets and in contracts, at both the local and federal levels. Grassroots black political activism .... functioned only in total secrecy and at great risk of assassination. Such efforts were eventually pushed out of rural communities and into New Orleans, where many organizers ... found themselves exiled.
The Exoduster movement has been characterized as an example of millenarianism, in that many exodusters created settlements they believed to be their new, Promised Land. The journey of these refugees was termed an “exodus,” a word taken from the Old Testament in reference to the Jews’ flight from Egypt...
— Exodusters - Wikipedia
Historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote a 1976 book, "Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction," that explains how little real opportunity there was at the end of Reconstruction for ex-slaves to go anywhere, and that even the move to Kansas, known to Freedmen as the home of John Brown, and where Homestead Lands were supposedly available, was sometimes made by walking there. Some paid $5 to take a steamer up to St. Louis, where they were all but stranded. The Freedmen and their families initially headed to Kansas at the urging of recruiters like Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, born into slavery in 1809 in Nashville, Tennessee. When he was 37, having escaped several times, he finally made it to Detroit. After the Civil War, he came back to Tennessee, where he tried to help blacks buy land. When that failed, he traveled the South, organizing blacks to resettle in Kansas. But while towns were built in Kansas and elsewhere on mostly barren land that nobody else wanted, twenty years later they were all essentially gone, as new railroads being built purposely avoided them, or the barren land gave out as in Oklahoma and Nebraska.
So yes, as new opportunities arose due to industrialization and WWI, many African Americans took the chance to escape, even if most stayed in the south and struggled to build lives there. Nowhere in the north or west did they find that “Promised Land” of real legal equality (or job equality and equal opportunity) — not until well after the Civil Rights Movement began to change consciousness. Even today the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and racism lingers, and is hard even for well-meaning people to escape it entirely.
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