Black Response to the Construction of Colored Huntington, West Virginia, during the Jim Crow Era

Huntington, West Virginia, located in Cabell County, experienced a phenomenal population explosion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By 1930, its increasing importance as a transshipment point for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, vital river port, and growing manufacturing center made it West Virginia's most populous city with 75,752 residents. Huntington's African American population growth paralleled this increase, comprising by 1930 the second largest conglomeration in the state at 4,630 residents (see Table 1).¹

Table 1.

Population of Huntington, West Virginia

Given such rapid growth, city leaders faced a host of difficult issues, including those affiliated with the surging influx of black migrants. Over time, with the tacit agreement of city officials and the general population, white realtors designated both white-only neighborhoods augmented by racially "restrictive covenants," and constructed a black-only residential subdivision as a way of containing the aspirations of black Huntingtonians. In this manner, they mirrored and implemented segregationist practices throughout the nation during the nadir of Jim Crow. Nevertheless, ambitious and savvy black residents who wished to improve their financial situation found ways to take advantage of these developments. However, before an examination of the construction of colored Huntington can begin, it is important to place its development within the larger historical context of the Jim Crow era.

Any discussion related to the black experience during this era begins with the well-documented "Great Migration" of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the urban-industrial North during the first third of the twentieth century. What is less known, but more important in the development of Huntington, is the intraregional movement of tens of thousands of blacks into central Appalachia and the southern West Virginia coalfields during the first decades of the twentieth century. This transplantation of black southerners, part of a larger movement south and west that began prior to the Civil War, shifted the center of the Negro population from its historical roots in the Chesapeake Bay region to northern Alabama.² The massive influx of black laborers into the southern West Virginia coalfields coincided with the movement of hundreds of thousands of black migrants south and west, and each of these must be viewed against the backdrop of the other to fully understand the historical reality and motivation behind this mass black migration. So extensive was black migration into the coalfields that, between 1890 and 1910, West Virginia was the only southern state to increase in total population. An infusion of northern black migrants also contributed to the population increase in the region. In his study of African Americans in West Virginia, historian Joe W. Trotter found that only about 21 percent of the state's blacks lived in the southern counties in 1880. By 1910 that figure had climbed to 63 percent.³

In conjunction with black migration into southern West Virginia, thousands of European immigrants also settled in this region. Southern West Virginia's population increased dramatically throughout the region from approximately 80,000 in 1880 to nearly 300,000 in 1910. The immigrant population from southern, central, and eastern Europe grew from 1,400 in 1880 to 18,000 (6 percent of the total increase) in 1910. African American growth outpaced foreign growth, expanding from 4,800 in 1880 (6 percent of the total) to over forty thousand (14 percent of the total) in 1910.⁴ These numbers represented over twice the proportion of European immigrants in the southern part of the state and transformed the region into a contested zone of social tension and labor strife as native-born whites, European immigrants, and African Americans competed for jobs, housing, and hegemony.⁵

Notwithstanding the increasing number of blacks and immigrants into the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, West Virginia remained overwhelmingly white in its racial composition. Thus, white political power and notions of racial superiority remained a source of pride and unity for many whites. Growing white resentment did not remain a...