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I’ll be down to get you in a Taxi honey. —Shelton Brooks, “The Darktown Strutters Ball” c h apt e r t h r e e The Black City The Early Jim Crow Migration Narrative and the New Territory of Race What happened when black became a place, not perhaps yet a country, as Amiri Baraka coined it, and no longer a cluster of cabins on the edge of the plantation, but an urban neighborhood, a seeming city that one could reach by foot, private car, taxi, subway, train, or streetcar? As noted before, one of the chief features structuring the growth of the modern, post-Reconstruction city in the United States, a feature that would grow more obvious as the twentieth century wore on, was the racial segregation of urban space on a new scale and the growth of the black ghetto. As Farah Jasmine Griffin observes in her seminal Who Set You Flowin’?, the migration narrative describing the movement from a provincial, often rural ancestral home in the South to the northern metropolis was a dominant form of African American expressive culture in many genres and media during the twentieth century (3). On one level, that migration and urbanization should be at the center of African American writing in the twentieth century seems self-evident. One could argue that, other than racism and Jim Crow themselves, the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West over a period of about sixty years was the single largest fact shaping African American life in the twentieth century—and, indeed,U.S. urban (and, negatively in the post–World War II “white flight” era, suburban) life. After all, in 1890, about 90 percent of all African Americans lived in the South. In 1970, the proportion was about 52 percent. In Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, New York, Buffalo, Newark, Philadelphia , Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Oakland, Boston, and so on, the dramatic growth of the black population was due overwhelmingly to migration from the South—though New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other eastern sea- THE BLACK CITY | 97 board cities also saw a significant immigration from the Caribbean (often, too, a movement from the countryside to the city). The African American community nationwide, which was still very rural in the 1890s, became predominantly urban by the 1940s and overwhelmingly urban by the 1970s. In short, this migration was enormous, in terms of both numbers and duration. It dramatically changed the landscape of African American life and American life generally. But while migration and urbanization might seem to be natural subjects for black writers in the United States, it is worth noting that their treatment by African American authors was not predetermined by the actual facts of the Great Migration in any simple way. For example , while it is true that there was a huge exodus of African Americans to northern and western cities in the twentieth century, there was also a tremendous migration of African Americans from the country to the city within the South. In fact, it is this migration that to no small extent made the growth of large southern cities possible—and ultimately made the African American population of the South nearly as urban as that of the North. Yet the movement of African Americans to Houston, New Orleans, Memphis , Birmingham, Atlanta, and so on has nowhere near the same literary resonance as the move to New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia , Oakland, Los Angeles, and other large northern and western cities. Why? Some reasons are obvious—since southern cities always had sizable (and sometimes majority) African American populations, the intrasouthern migration was perhaps less startling than the growth of the huge black ghettos of the urban North that seemed to emerge almost overnight even if they, in fact, had a considerable foreground. And the northern and western urban centers were economically more important, larger in population, and the home of much more of the national mass media and culture industries than the cities of the South—at least until the last fewdecades of the twentieth century. Still, if one were to consider the question of black migration and urbanization from a strictly numbers-crunching point of view, there does seem to be an imbalance in the cultural weight given to the migration North by African American artists in the twentieth century. While it is true that therewas a tremendous movement of African Americans from the country to the city and from the South...

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