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Chapter 7. People on the Move: African Americans Since the Great Migration
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C Ch ha ap pt te er r 7 7 People on the Move: African Americans Since the Great Migration JOHN W. FRAZIER AND ROGER ANDERSON “During the Great Migration of the 1910s and 1920s, one in six African American migrants to the urban north moved to a suburb ... By 2000, more than one-third of African Americans — almost 12 million people — lived in suburbs” (Wiese, 2004, p. 1). “The South ... never ceased to represent home to many.... The years have not changed conditions at home so much as they have changed the people who once left home so urgently...” (Stack, 1996, pp. xiv– xv). African Americans have been people on the move since the period of American Reconstruction. Their movements have been shaped by choices confined in part by the racial boundaries imposed by white-controlled American institutions. Racial geography, therefore, contains African American cultural landscapes that reflect unique cultural history and ethnicity, and the controls of white America. This chapter examines briefly two major movements since the Great Migration and discusses some of their dimensions from a geographic perspective. One is black suburbanization during the 20th century. We address race, class, and ethnicity, as they have influenced African American suburban geography and landscapes. The second and most recent movement is the “reverse migration” of blacks to the South from other U.S. regions. We briefly examine the rural and metropolitan migration streams and some explanations for them. BACKGROUND The previous chapter discussed the multiple reasons that eight million African Americans left the South during the Great Migration. African American migration was motivated by the hope for a new and different life, one that provided family and economic stability through employment and land ownership. The importance of World War I and subsequent changes in immigration law (1910s–1920s) led to labor shortages during the period . African Americans were recruited as laborers in steel, munitions, and other factories, and the railroads. African American social networks quickly nullified the need for further recruitment. Reports sometimes exaggerated , told of job opportunities and the existence of a climate in which blacks might even talk back to white people. As a result, millions of African Americans made their way to the perceived “Northern Promise Land” (and later to the West). Tettey-Fio summarized some of the impacts of this movement in America’s largest industrial cities, where black populations expanded rapidly, especially after 1960. However, a less discussed movement also was underway prior to WWII and accelerated afterwards. This was the suburbanization of African Americans. 84 John W. Frazier and Roger Anderson TWENTIETH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN SUBURBANIZATION: RACE, CLASS, AND ETHNICITY Geographers have classified America’s diverse suburbs on the basis of employment type and commercial activities (Harris, 1990, 1991; Hartshorn and Muller, 1986). Although the growth of African American suburbs received some attention in the 1970s (Rose, 1976), more recent studies examine suburban geography along racial and ethnic lines (Harris, 1996; Darden, 2003; Li, 1998; Skop and Li, 2003). Recent studies also offer valuable insights into some of the details of African American suburbanization, both in terms of process and as places where African Americans shaped their cultural landscapes. One important dimension of evolving black suburbs receiving attention is socioeconomic status. The Blue-Collar Basis for the Rise of the Twentieth Century Black Working Class African Americans desire for permanent employment and land ownership preceded their entry to the working and professional classes, as indicated by their formation of new communities in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas in the 19th century. Few blacks, however, could afford home ownership at the beginning of the 20th century. Improved economic status was necessary for accumulation of capital sufficient for home ownership. Despite remaining an elusive goal for many, the twentieth century expanding industrial complex and labor shortages provided sufficient opportunity for some blacks to secure working-class status by the 1920s. Richard Harris demonstrated the importance of this status and its link to home ownership. He maintained, based on a study of eight U.S. metropolitan regions, that by 1940 working-class Americans “seem to have valued property ownership more highly than other occupational and class groups, notably the middle class” (Harris, 1990, p. 63). He also demonstrated that many working-class Americans actually built their own homes in unplanned suburbia prior to 1940. This occurred due to the decentralization of industrial employment, inexpensive lumber, and the shorter workday won by labor, and the cessation of suburban annexation by central cities which resulted in the absence of...