Evaluate the ways that world war i and its aftermath provided african-americans with opportunities.

Photograph of Wayne Miner, American Legion Post #149 - October 20,1921

Image courtesy of Black Archives of Mid-America

President Woodrow Wilson’s proclamation that the United States was fighting “to make the world safe for democracy” rang hollow for many African Americans. Wilson had already disappointed civil rights leaders by allowing federal agencies to re-segregate their offices and by endorsing the white supremacist message of the controversial film Birth of a Nation.  Determined to fight for democracy at home and abroad, many African Americans saw the war as an opportunity to press forward with their demands for equality. 

During the period of neutrality most African Americans (like most Americans) remained indifferent to the larger geo-political issues surrounding the war. Many workers, however, immediately recognized the economic opportunities the war provided. The war had disrupted the flow of cheap immigrant labor to the United States just as global demand for American manufactured goods exploded. Before the war 90% of the nation’s black population lived the South. This changed once northern labor agents began recruiting black laborers in the South. The Great Migration, a movement of nearly half a million African Americans northward, transformed northern cities into thriving centers of black cultural and artistic expression. The absence of formal Jim Crow laws attracted Southern migrants to northern cities like Pittsburg, Chicago and Detroit where small, but politically potent middle-class African American communities already existed. The migration of more blacks into northern communities where they could vote helped African Americans enlarge their political power regionally and nationally.

Black middle-class groups like the Urban League helped migrants finding housing, schools, and churches. They also tried to acclimatize newly-arrived southerners to the more subtle, but equally dangerous, racial prejudices of white northerners. Migrants’ hopes of leaving the threat of lynch mobs behind in the South proved illusionary. Factory owners welcomed African Americans into their armament and meat-packing plants but white workers did not. Labor’s hostility benefited factory owners, who intentionally hired African Americans as strikebreakers to thwart white workers’ attempts to organize unions or conduct strikes. Competition over scarce housing further exacerbated racial tensions.

Racial violence therefore accompanied the Great Migration. The worst race riot of the wartime period occurred on July 2, 1917 in East St. Louis, Illinois. The riot left 30 blacks and 9 whites dead, and hundreds wounded. Appearing before a Congressional committee investigating the riot, the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett gave gruesome accounts of cold-blooded murder and torture that rivaled the prominent stories circulating of German abuses in Belgium. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) responded by organizing the largest civil rights protest-to-date, a silent parade by 10,000 black men, women and children down Fifth Avenue in New York City. The Congressional investigation held white employers and labor leaders responsible, but 6,000 African Americans left the city anyway.

While the outcome was meager, the fact that Congress launched any investigation revealed a wartime reality: the government relied on African American participation in the wartime economy and military to successfully fight the war.  Officials recognized the danger of a disaffected African American population either silently refusing to “do its bit” or even worse actively opposing the war.  A vocal debate ensued among African American intellectuals over whether or not to “close ranks” (in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois) with white Americans for the duration of the war by putting their “special grievances” aside until the national crisis had passed. The passage of the Espionage and Seditions Acts made dissent difficult, however. The government initiated an intensive (and secret) domestic surveillance program that dispersed federal agents to monitor civil rights groups. The government arrested the most outspoken leaders by claiming they were under the influence of German spies and banned their publications from the mails. Many African American community leaders felt that clear demonstrations of patriotism offered a better path to civic equality than anti-war activism. African American communities throughout the nation organized to sell war bonds and conserve food.   

Meanwhile, African American men were entering the U.S. military. With just 4,000 slots reserved for black volunteers, over 96% of the 367,710 African Americans who served during the war were conscripted.  African Americans formed 13% of the wartime army, even though they only represented 10% of the civilian population.  African American men also formed a greater proportion of those who evaded the draft.  Nearly one hundred thousand African American men either failed to register for the draft or neglected to report when called.  Sometimes this was by choice, sometimes it was not.  Southern white land-owners, for example, often withheld mailed draft notices to avoid losing their workers to the military.     

In the segregated army over 89% of African Americans were assigned to non-combatant units, mostly in Quartermaster and Engineer units.  African Americans made up approximately 1/3rd of the army’s laboring units and 1/30th of its combat force.  Demands for equal treatment by the NAACP and other civil rights groups led to the creation of a black officers’ training camp in Des Moines, Iowa and the appointment of Emmett Scott as a special advisor to Secretary of War Newton Baker. Racial prejudice and discrimination nonetheless remained the defining characteristic of military service for African American soldiers.

Forty-thousand African Americans served in two combatant units, the 92nd Division and the provisional 93rd Division. The latter consisted of four infantry regiments that spent most of the war embedded in the French Army. These two divisions had completely different experiences. The 92nd was reviled by white American commanders while French officials honored and celebrated the achievements of the 93rd.  The positive interactions between African American servicemen and French civilians offered yet another stark challenge to Wilson’s claims that American-style democracy offered a model for the world to follow. 

African Americans did not have long to celebrate the end of combat on November 11, 1918. The summer of 1919 became known as the “Red Summer” for the wave of assaults that engulfed black communities nationwide. Southern communities mobilized to prevent black veterans from challenging the racial status quo, leading to a dramatic, but short-lived, spike in lynchings. Race rioting also rocked Chicago and Washington, D.C., but something important had changed since East St. Louis.

In 1919 African American communities collectively embraced an ethos of fighting back, with returning veterans leading the way. Besides fighting back in the streets, ex-servicemen poured into the NAACP and the more militant United Negro Improvement Association. Community wartime committees transformed themselves into new chapters of the NAACP, further bolstering the strength and reach of the civil rights movement. Abandoning the gradualist approach of older activists, the World War I generation pioneered new legal and protest strategies with the goal of ending racial discrimination immediately. There were many setbacks still to come, but in World War I the African American community took crucial first steps towards building the successful civil rights movement of the twentieth century.

The Great Migration was the relocation of more than 6 million Black Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West from about 1916 to 1970. Driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws, many Blacks headed north, where they took advantage of the need for industrial workers that arose during the First World War. During the Great Migration, Blacks began to build a new place for themselves in public life, actively confronting racial prejudice as well as economic, political and social challenges to create a Black urban culture that would exert enormous influence in the decades to come.

WATCH: Black History Shorts on HISTORY Vault 

What Caused the Great Migration?

After the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, racial inequality persisted across the South during the 1870s, and the segregationist policies known as "Jim Crow" soon became the law of the land.

Southern Blacks were still forced to make their living working the land due to Black codes and the sharecropping system, which offered little in the way of economic opportunity, especially after crop damage resulting from a regional boll weevil infestation in the 1890s and early 1900s.

And while the Ku Klux Klan had been officially dissolved in 1869, the KKK continued underground after that, and intimidation, violence and lynching of Black southerners were not uncommon practices in the Jim Crow South.

Did you know? Around 1916, when the Great Migration began, a factory wage in the urban North was typically three times more than what Black people could expect to make working the land in the rural South.

READ MORE: How the Black Codes Limited African American Progress After the Civil War

The Great Migration Begins

When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, industrialized urban areas in the North, Midwest and West faced a shortage of industrial laborers, as the war put an end to the steady tide of European immigration to the United States.

With war production kicking into high gear, recruiters enticed Blacks to come north, to the dismay of white Southerners. Black newspapers—particularly the widely read Chicago Defender—published advertisements touting the opportunities available in the cities of the North and West, along with first-person accounts of success.

WATCH: Yohuru Williams on the Great Migration 

Life for Migrants in the City

By the end of 1919, some scholars estimate that 1 million Black people had left the South, usually traveling by train, boat or bus; a smaller number had automobiles or even horse-drawn carts.

In the decade between 1910 and 1920, the Black population of major Northern cities grew by large percentages, including New York City (66 percent), Chicago (148 percent), Philadelphia (500 percent) and Detroit (611 percent).

Many new arrivals found jobs in factories, slaughterhouses and foundries, where working conditions were arduous and sometimes dangerous. Female migrants had a harder time finding work, spurring heated competition for domestic labor positions.

Aside from competition for employment, there was also competition for living space in increasingly crowded cities. While segregation was not legalized in the North (as it was in the South), racism and prejudice were nonetheless widespread.

After the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially based housing ordinances unconstitutional in 1917, some residential neighborhoods enacted covenants requiring white property owners to agree not to sell to Black people; these would remain legal until the Court struck them down in 1948.

Rising rents in segregated areas, plus a resurgence of KKK activity after 1915, worsened Black and white relations across the country. The summer of 1919 began the greatest period of interracial strife in U.S. history at that time, including a disturbing wave of race riots.

The most serious was the Chicago Race Riot of 1919—it lasted 13 days and left 38 people dead, 537 injured and 1,000 Black families without homes.

READ MORE: How a New Deal Housing Program Enforced Segregation

Impact of the Great Migration

As a result of housing tensions, many Black residents ended up creating their own cities within big cities, fostering the growth of a new, urban, Black culture. The most prominent example was Harlem in New York City, a formerly all-white neighborhood that by the 1920s housed some 200,000 Blacks.

The Black experience during the Great Migration became an important theme in the artistic movement known first as the New Negro Movement and later as the Harlem Renaissance, which would have an enormous impact on the culture of the era.

The Great Migration also began a new era of increasing political activism among Black Americans, who after being disenfranchised in the South found a new place for themselves in public life in the cities of the North and West. The civil rights movement directly benefited from this activism.

Black migration slowed considerably in the 1930s, when the country sank into the Great Depression, but picked up again with the coming of World War II and the need for wartime production. But returning Black soldiers found that the GI Bill didn’t always promise the same postwar benefits for all.

By the 1970s, when the Great Migration ended, its demographic impact was unmistakable: Whereas in 1900, nine out of every 10 Black Americans lived in the South, and three out of every four lived on farms, by 1970 the South was home to only half of the country’s Blacks, with only 20 percent living in the region’s rural areas. The Great Migration was famously captured in Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

Sources

The Great Migration (1910-1970). National Archives.
The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration. Smithsonian Magazine.
Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North. NPR: Fresh Air.

READ MORE: Black History Milestones: A Timeline