Before Harlem

The Black Experience in New York City Before World War I

Marcy S. Sacks

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812239614, 9780812239614
• eBook ISBN: 9780812203356
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the years between 1880 and 1915, New York City and its environs underwent a tremendous demographic transformation with the arrival of millions of European immigrants, native whites from the rural countryside, and people of African descent from both the American South and the Caribbean. While all groups faced challenges in their adjustment to the city, hardening racial prejudices set the black experience apart from that of other newcomers. Through encounters with each other, blacks and whites, both together and in opposition, forged the contours of race relations that would affect the city for decades to come. Before Harlem reveals how black migrants and immigrants to New York entered a world far less welcoming than the one they had expected to find. White police officers, urban reformers, and neighbors faced off in a hostile environment that threatened black families in multiple ways. Unlike European immigrants, who typically struggled with low-paying jobs but who often saw their children move up the economic ladder, black people had limited employment opportunities that left them with almost no prospects of upward mobility. Their poverty and the vagaries of a restrictive job market forced unprecedented numbers of black women into the labor force, fundamentally affecting child-rearing practices and marital relationships.Despite hostile conditions, black people nevertheless claimed New York City as their own. Within their neighborhoods and their churches, their night clubs and their fraternal organizations, they forged discrete ethnic, regional, and religious communities. Diverse in their backgrounds, languages, and customs, black New Yorkers cultivated connections to others similar to themselves, forming organizations, support networks, and bonds of friendship with former strangers. In doing so, Marcy S. Sacks argues, they established a dynamic world that eventually sparked the Harlem Renaissance. By the 1920s, Harlem had become both a tragedy and a triumph—undeniably a ghetto replete with problems of poverty, overcrowding, and crime, but also a refuge and a haven, a physical place whose very name became legendary.

Chapter 1

The Most Fatally Fascinating Thing in America

When James Weldon Johnson relocated to New York City in 1902, he joined a growing wave of southern black men and women moving to northern cities. The fall of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow legislation in the South helped precipitate a sharp increase in the number of southern black people seeking friendlier environs in the North. While the net migration of blacks from the South amounted to fewer than 70,000 in the 1870s, during the 1880s it increased to 88,000, more than doubled in the 1890s, and jumped to 194,000 in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the same thirty-year period, 100,000 fewer whites chose to leave their southern homes than black people. By the early twentieth century, every southern state had experienced a decline in the percentage of its black population. Correspondingly, by 1906, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia all housed more transplanted than nativeborn blacks within their city limits.¹

The coming of age of the freedmen’s children helped to spur the initial flow of black people out of the South. As the sons and daughters of former slaves approached adulthood, they demonstrated far less willingness than their parents to accept the imposition of an increasingly repressive social and economic order. While former slaves might counsel forbearance to their children, the freeborn generation exhibited a greater inclination to challenge and defy stringent racial codes.² “[W]e are now … the equal of whites,” asserted a group of frustrated young black men, and “should be treated as such.” When their demands failed to elicit changes, some directly confronted their tormenters. In 1881, for example, a band of black youths in Atlanta attempted to free two men who had been arrested by the police. Two years later a similar incident prompted one white newspaper to observe acerbically, “The moment that a negro steals, or robs, or commits some other crime, his person seems to become sacred in the eyes of his race, and he is harbored, protected and deified.”³

The impatience and defiance exhibited by some young black people elicited the attention and ire of concerned southern whites desperate to reinstate tight controls over the black population. In contrast to “faithful old darkies,” southern whites complained, the “new Negro” lacked “habits of diligence, order, [and] faithfulness.” Growing up “without steady instruction in lessons of propriety and morality,” cautioned white social critic Philip Bruce, black adolescents lived by their “impulses and passions.” They shirked responsibilities and avoided steady employment. Bruce blamed inept black parents for excessive lenience and for their failure to train children in restraint and obedience. According to Bruce, the weaknesses of black parents produced their children’s incorrigibility. By the time black youths reached adolescence, he claimed, they chafed “even under the lax parental authority; every kind of discipline galls [them] beyond endurance.”⁴ Bruce’s simultaneous condemnation of incompetent black adults and unmanageable black children exposed the strategy being developed to forcibly resubjugate the South’s black population: by claiming that black people lacked self-control, southern whites could justify harsh and repressive treatment.

Despite southern whites’ claims about defiant and rebellious black youths, however, in reality self-preservation prevented most black people from disregarding the South’s strict racial codes. Accordingly, some of those most frustrated by worsening conditions in the last decades of the nineteenth century chose to leave rather than subject themselves to segregation or endanger themselves by fighting back. Young and single members of the freeborn generation, those with the greatest ease of movement and the most intractable resentment about the broken promises of Reconstruction, comprised the overwhelming majority of early black migrants to New York City and other northern destinations. Typically, they made their move between the ages of fifteen and twenty-eight. “Young people is more restless than old people,” explained a nineteen-year-old South Carolinian in New York. Another young woman who left for New York at the age of fifteen, concurred. “[T]he old people are used to their fare, and they never leave, but the children won’t stand for the situation down there.” Of 240 migrant men surveyed in New York in 1907, 72 percent had arrived before they were twenty-six years old.⁵ Benjamin Mays explained that while “[m]ost Negroes grinned, cringed, and kowtowed in the presence of white people,” the younger folk “who could not take such subservience left for the city as soon as they could—with or without their father’s permission.”⁶ Unable to safely fight back against their oppression, growing numbers simply quit the South in search of freedom and brighter opportunities.

These early migrants spoke repeatedly of the destructive impact of being ensnared within Jim Crow’s elaborate web of virtually incontrovertible controls, a system created, according to whites, to protect themselves from blacks’ “innate” savagery. Freed from the “civilizing influence” of slave masters, whites cautioned, black people would revert to their natural condition and become a menace to white society. Rendered politically powerless and the victims of vicious racial stereotypes, black people endured brutal conditions. Black women faced the particular danger of sexual abuse and rape, acts frequently committed by male employers of live-in domestic servants. “The sad, but undeniable fact,” lamented the editor of Alexander’s Magazine, a black monthly published in the beginning of the twentieth century, is “that in far too many southern homes the Colored waitress or cook is not morally safe.”⁷ And less frightening but equally degrading assaults on black womanhood occurred with impunity in the South. Not granted the courtesies generally reserved for white women, black women commonly endured insults, harassment, and mistreatment from white men. Unprotected by the southern justice system or the codes of honor required of gentlemen, black women sought to escape the exploitation of their bodies and their labor. They headed northward to a place they believed would offer greater occupational opportunities and the protection of their persons.

White men’s predatory attacks on black women affected black men as well, undermining their sense of masculine prerogative and responsibility. Unable to protect their wives, sisters, mothers, or daughters, black men at times admitted to feeling helpless. “[A]fter thinking of my three little girls who might grow to virtuous womanhood, but whose virtue had no protection in public sentiment,” a father from South Carolina explained, “I decided to take my chances in a freer, though harder climate.” Richard Wright described the sense of emasculation he felt after witnessing a white night watchman slap a black coworker on her buttocks. “I could not move or speak,” he recalled. “My immobility must have seemed a challenge to him, for he pulled his gun. ‘Don’t you like it, nigger?’” the watchman demanded. “Oh, yes, sir!” Wright managed to stammer, as he walked away with the watchman’s gun trained on his back. Catching up to the woman, he confessed that he wanted to retaliate for the white man’s audacity. “It don’t matter,” his companion replied in resignation. “They do it all the time.” Black women and men felt imprisoned by the abuse perpetrated by white men; it became an effective strategy for maintaining a submissive, docile black population. Repeated violations of black women undermined the women’s sense of self-worth. And the terrorization of black men who might try to stop the assaults stripped them of an important symbol of their manhood—the ability to protect their loved ones.⁸

Southern whites promulgated the stereotype of black female promiscuity that rationalized the sexual exploitation of black women. Likewise, they cultivated an image of black males lusting after white women, justifying hundreds of lynchings during the Jim Crow era. Though the alleged rapes were more imagined than real, black men often paid with their lives for the mere suspicion of impropriety.⁹ And as the lynchings became increasingly sadistic with the passing decades, the victims regularly paid with their manhood as well; the summary execution of black men frequently included their castration. Through this act whites symbolically and graphically demonstrated the emasculation of southern black men.¹⁰

Devastated by the constant assaults on their manhood that they experienced in the South, black men employed a range of escapist strategies. “How could I walk the earth with dignity and pride,” asked one man. “How could I aspire to achieve, to accomplish, to ‘be somebody’ where there were for Negroes no established goals?”¹¹ Referred to as “boys” in the South, treated at best as children and often as far worse, some black men began looking northward in order to achieve respectability in America. “It all gets back to a question of manhood,” explained a black preacher when questioned about the causes of migration. “[T]hey’re treated more like men up here.” A southern transplant in New York City confirmed this assessment. “[W]hen I ceased to be a boy,” he explained, “[my father] advised me to live in the North where my manhood would be respected. He himself cannot continually endure the position in which he is placed, and in the summer he comes North to be a man.”¹²

Some black leaders in this period used the emerging proclivity for migration as a tool for fighting against the antiblack violence permeating the South. Highlighting the threat that black migration posed to the agricultural economy, critics of the vigilante justice pointed to the South’s lynch law as an impetus for flight. “Mob violence,” declared an article in a black magazine, led many to quit the South. W. E. B. DuBois suggested that the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot alone sent thousands of emigrants to northern cities. Presaging future events, DuBois cautioned that “as the black masses of the South awaken or as they are disturbed by violence this migration will continue and perhaps increase.” The Wilmington Messenger corroborated DuBois’s claim, declaring that nearly fourteen hundred black residents had left the city since the massacre. The Atlanta riot of 1906 likewise drove away black members of the community, some twenty-five families fleeing one small neighborhood alone.¹³ Black newspapers and public figures stressed the correlation between vigilantism and migration, hoping that whites’ dependence on black labor would induce a retreat from the violence. Though southern whites did exhibit concern about the stability of their workforce, they nevertheless continued to perpetrate violence against black people, spurring further movement out of the South.

Individual testimony confirmed that the fear of falling victim to lynching propelled black people away from their native homes. The New Orleans agent for the Colored American Magazine left the South with her husband after a white mob killed her elderly grandparents. She described the mob “running up and down the street howling and crying, ‘Kill a nigger and don’t leave one. Kill any one you meet so long as he is a nigger, for they are all just alike.’” Adam Clayton Powell explained that he left West Virginia in 1884 “[t]o keep from being lynched or murdered.” In 1892, Ida B. Wells sought refuge in New York City after being run out of Memphis by local whites for publishing an incendiary article in her newspaper. She was warned “on pain of death” not to return. Eight years later, James Weldon Johnson barely escaped Jacksonville, Florida, with his life.¹⁴

Though the violence that pervaded the South during the Jim Crow era clearly played a critical role in the flight from that region, restricted transportation options significantly impacted migration patterns. Black southerners confronting the harshest conditions at home often faced the greatest difficulty escaping. The Deep South, where segregation was the most oppressive, contributed very small numbers to the early migration. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana all experienced only very limited outward movement of blacks between 1870 and 1910. Instead, most black people arriving in the North during those decades originated in the upper South and the border states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, where the availability of cheap transportation opened opportunities for migration.¹⁵ Travelers from Virginia, for example, took advantage of inexpensive steamer fares. The Old Dominion Steamship Company ran biweekly service between Richmond and New York City carrying “two to three hundred negroes” on each trip. The ticket from Norfolk or Richmond cost between $5.50 and $6.00, a sum within the reach of even poor southerners.¹⁶

Black youths with only limited attachment to the soil and who felt little optimism about the restricted economic opportunities available to them at home took advantage of the cheap transportation that could send them away from the rural countryside. Many watched their parents struggle to succeed as freemen and women, only to find that land ownership brought new hardships. They had to be “exceedingly careful” lest they be accused of being “uppity” or of trying to “act like a white man.” Ned Cobb, whose father had twice been swindled out of his property, explained the economic situation for black people in the South: “[I]t weren’t no use in climbin too fast … weren’t no use in climbin slow, neither, if they was goin to take everything you worked for when you got too high.”¹⁷ And sharecropping offered a bleak future. One migrant in New York City captured the paradox of the southern agricultural system: “I could look around and see how things was going. During summer while you was working your back off in the cotton field, prices would be tree high. Then when you finally pick your cotton and carry it to the store, prices would be down so low that after you sold it, you wouldn’t get enough to run you through the winter…. Think people want to live in a place like that?”¹⁸ The near impossibility of realizing economic ambitions contributed to black youths’ itinerant tendencies. One “victim of the wanderlust” explained that even strong family ties “could not and did not quiet my restless spirit.”¹⁹ Young people, sensitive to their parents’ inability to accumulate material wealth, had no desire to be trapped in the same cycle of indebtedness and dependency.

Alternatively, New York City offered captivating attractions that built illusions and enticed hopeful (if unsuspecting) black southerners away from home. Like whites from the nation’s rural regions making the gradual but relentless push to metropolitan centers, black youths sought the excitement found only in a big city. “I don’t know what it was that held me in New York after I got here,” admitted one man. “I didn’t have a job for some little time but it was just the lure of the city.” New York City’s dynamic night life created a powerful draw for people accustomed to the quiet rhythms of rural life. “Down there the only recreation we had was prayer meeting and little parties,” complained a migrant. But in New York City, he marveled, dances were held “every Saturday night.” One woman insisted, “That’s why people move more than anything else.”²⁰

The stories and material possessions that migrants brought back to those in the countryside induced others to follow suit. “I can remember a girl who lived near us,” wrote John Dancy, a former southerner. “[S]he went to New York and got a job working as a domestic.” Each year she would return to her home in Wilmington, Delaware, “with fine new clothes—and she would live for the day when she could go to church on a Sunday morning and show off her finery.” He recalled “hearing the women talk in awed tones about the beautiful clothes Tam Green wore.” The young woman reveled in the admiration of her former companions. “She went to New York every year,” Dancy explained, “then she would come back to Wilmington with new finery and flabbergast her old neighbors again. It went on year after year.”²¹ The contrast with the drudgery and poverty of the South could not have been more stark. A South Carolinian living in New York similarly visited his former home with regularity. He regaled the throngs who came to hear his stories. “[M]y mother’s house [couldn’t] hold all the people,” he recalled. “I have set up all night talking to people down there about the things I’ve seen up here.” By the end of each trip, he invariably had friends and relatives begging to go back North with him.²² The fine clothes and exciting stories offered a powerful incentive to young people already beginning to feel the tug of wanderlust. With enticements like that, it was no wonder that black people viewed the North almost as a utopia.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Most Fatally Fascinating Thing in America
• 2. Purged of the Vicious Classes
• 3. To Check the Menacing Black Hordes
• 4. Jobs Are Just Chances
• 5. The Anxiety of Keeping the Home Together
• 6. Negro Metropolis
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments