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1: The Most Fatally Fascinating Thing in America
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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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 ofJim Crow legislation in the South helped precipitate a sharp increase in the number ofsouthern 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 10 Chapter 1 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 offifteen and twenty-eight. "Young people is more restless than old people," explained a nineteenyear -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 ofwhite people," the younger folk "who could not take such subservience left for the city as soon...