Entangled by White Supremacy: Reform in World War I-era South Carolina

Chapter 6. The Great Migration

White reformers welcomed economic opportunities generated by the nation’s mobilization for World War I. Yet, by eroding white supremacy’s insularity, wartime opportunities also spawned a new, and less welcomed, instability. Among other things, the interjection of the federal government into local issues disturbed white domination of existing racial relationships. Complicating whites’ ability to control political, economic, and social relationships, the wartime threats to white supremacy deeply troubled white South Carolinians. Black Carolinians emerged as agents of change and, during wartime, obtained needed leverage, despite the structural impediments of segregation and disfranchisement. Such a reconfiguration of power relations contradicted white supremacy’s basic premise of white control . Between World War I and the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of African Americans offered another challenge to white supremacy. They exercised control over themselves in open defiance of many white southerners’ wishes and left the South. Stimulated by wartime circumstances, black migration continued and accelerated during the decade of peace that followed. By the simple act of leaving, black southerners put whites in the defensive and very uncomfortable posture of reacting to change rather than initiating it. The war-stimulated economic opportunities for African Americans outside the South empowered blacks to erode whites’ economic control scheme. Migration especially threatened whites whose economic prosperity rested on low wages made possible by maintaining an abundant, undereducated labor force. Thus, black migration challenged white supremacy fundamentally because it revealed that African Americans had a means of escaping white control. The Great Migration 148 Chapter 6 The Great Migration 149 This loomed as an especially crucial issue in South Carolina, where whites labored to control a black majority. The precarious control held by South Carolina’s white minority made whites sensitive to changes that altered the racial status quo. Collectively, white South Carolinians shared a desire to regain control, assert their authority, and restore the “appropriate” social hierarchy, but they disagreed with each other on precisely how to do this.1 Consequently the debate among whites over black migration became a public dispute about restoring white control over a situation that whites believed had been created by outside market forces and blacks’ initiative. While whites shared an impulse to assert their prerogative in reestablishing their racial control, this collective desire did not unite them in a common strategy or a mutually agreed-upon outcome. Whites’ unifying commitment to white supremacy created a misleading consensus by rhetorically blurring the tangible economic and class divisions among whites. Black migration provoked a crisis among white South Carolinians that exposed conflicting economic interests and revealed social strains that the white supremacy consensus attempted to conceal. Whites’ differing judgments about black migration emerged from their conflicting class interests. Although reluctant to defend their economic interests openly, all whites readily promoted solutions to the perceived migration crisis that bolstered their own interests while concealing their self-interested justifications behind the shared rhetoric of white supremacy. Large white landowners, especially cotton planters who relied on black sharecroppers, and the merchants who served this agricultural interest, had the most forceful and immediate response. Dependent on a surplus of black laborers, landowners panicked at the specter of financial losses they feared black migration would produce. They desperately hoped to slow, if not completely stop, the out-migration of blacks from South Carolina. Therefore, one facet of whites’ debate about migration included a search for the root cause of the exodus of tens of thousands of African Americans. Whites who hoped that retaining black laborers would further their own economic interests imagined that by identifying the cause of migration they could promptly control and severely limit the flow of blacks leaving the Palmetto State. Numerous possibilities surfaced to explain black migration. White reformers, on the other hand, seized upon the Entangled by White Supremacy 150 black migration debate as an opportunity to promote their larger reform agenda. Reformers argued that they could affirm white control with a better strategy. By rejoicing at black migration rather than lamenting it, reformers anticipated South Carolina losing its black majority and becoming a whiter state. Thus they took a position on migration that opposed the landowners’ interests. As white reformers and agricultural interests debated black migration, the discourse emerged as a question over how best to defend white supremacy . Advocating two conflicting solutions—slowing or stopping migration versus encouraging migration to produce a whiter state— differing groups of whites debated...