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23 1 to live a fuller and freer life BLACK WOMEN MIGRANTS’ EXPECTATIONS AND NEW YORK’S URBAN REALITIES, 1890–1927 I couldn’t stand the treatment we got in the south, so I came north to escape humiliation and to live a fuller and freer life. . . . And I’m happier even though I’m finding it harder to make enough to live on. —Black woman migrant, 1919 The will to improve their lives propelled African Americans from the South to the urban North. Beginning with a steady trickle during Reconstruction and increasing through the turn of the twentieth century, the Great Migration swelled to a flood during the years around World War I. Women migrants , whether on their own or aided by family members, moved in the hope of enjoying freedoms denied them in the Jim Crow South. They found that freedom was incomplete and came at a price. Some made occupational or financial sacrifices. For example, the woman interviewed in 1919 was a trained teacher who had left her professional position in the South to work in New York City’s garment industry. Still, she spoke for other black migrants as well as herself when she judged the move worthwhile.1 Some migrants improved their economic as well as their social position. When she was interviewed in 1917, twenty-nine-year-old Leslie Payne, a native of Virginia , remembered her comfortable home, her Baptist upbringing, and her caring and supportive parents. When she was fifteen, her brother, who had migrated to Yonkers, New York, had “sent for” her to come north in order to earn more money. She had been working for three years on a Virginia plantation for only three dollars a month. In 1903, Payne moved to Yonkers near her brother and began making twenty-two dollars a month as a domestic. Throughout her time in Yonkers,White Plains, and Peekskill, she continued 24 AFRICAN AMERICAN URBAN LIFE to work as a domestic and laundress. By 1917 Payne was earning $6.00 a week doing laundry and $1.50 a day working two days a week as a domestic.2 Migrants’ stories bear witness to their determination to escape the social and economic limitations they faced below the Mason-Dixon line, yet they also attest to the difficulties they encountered in New York City. The urban North had its own problems with race relations, especially in the housing and labor markets. The former teacher-turned-garment-worker was not alone in “finding it harder to make enough to live on.” The struggle for economic survival shaped the trajectories of all African Americans in New York. Conversations with the city’s native-born black residents would have clued them into the fact that working-class black urbanites, despite their diversity, were engaged in a constant and collective struggle to live a “fuller and freer life.” Twenty-year-old Edith Smith, who grew up in Manhattan , remembered that she had been frustrated by having to leave school at thirteen in order to care for her “sick” and “helpless” mother and believed that getting married at fifteen would allow her to be “free from [her] parents .” But, unlike her father who worked every day, her husband had “refused to work.” Eventually, Smith, by then the mother of two children, left her husband on Long Island and returned to her Catholic parents’ more stable home on East Ninety-eighth Street, where she toiled at dissatisfying, low-paying jobs in personal and domestic service.3 Difficult financial circumstances facing southern migrants and nativeborn women alike influenced the lives of women like Hazel Dixon, who was born in New York to a woman who had migrated there from Virginia. Dixon’s mother, without a husband or helpful kin nearby, was unable to parent her. At the age of three, she was placed in the Riverdale Colored Orphanage. Although she was released after seven years, she was sent to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum four years later. Dixon’s mother struggled to raise her daughter but was unable to make a home for her, perhaps because of alcoholism. Her decision to place her child in a residential program was not unusual; many destitute black parents concerned about their inability to provide for their children proactively used the services of public institutions. Dixon experienced neither the humiliations of the Jim Crow South like her mother nor the benefits of a close-knit New York community ; instead, her future was shaped by her early and...

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