Abstract

In the year or so before Woodrow Wilson's administration took the United States into the Great War raging in Europe, Americans recognized that something unusual was taking place in communities across the South: African Americans were departing in unprecedented numbers for the North. While black and white contemporaries might have differed on the particulars, the outline they saw was clear. With the European war dramatically reducing the number of immigrants, laborstarved industrialists were tapping a labor force they had previously ignored or rejected. And since the vast number of blacks lived in the South, labor recruiters logically turned their attention toward that region. Advertising good jobs, high wages, and a level of personal freedom unknown in the land of Jim Crow, recruiters, black newspapers, and earlier migrants spread the word that exclusionary employment barriers were falling and that a land of hope now beckoned. In the first wave of what was called the "Negro Exodus," a half million southern blacks headed North; in the decade after the war, another 700,000 followed. The Great Migration was on.

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