LEARNING TOGETHER: The Story of America
Free but not really free. Slavery may have ended, but Black Americans still performed many of the same jobs that slaves had done. White southerners needed lots of Black Americans to work the fields, do domestic work, etc. Sharecropping put many Black folks in deep debt that was nearly impossible to get from under. Upward mobility for Black people was mostly unheard of. There were too many Jim Crow laws and Black codes that kept people of color in their place to maintain the Southern way of life.
But in the early 1900s, Black Americans started hearing about better opportunities up north. The Great Migration had begun. To stop this mass exodus, white Southerners employed several tactics:
- If a Black person was loitering, he/she would be jailed and forced to work on the farms and plantations (for free, that’s called slavery).
- Laws were enacted that made it illegal for Black folks to travel via train in groups (like a family). Police would literally pull Black people from the trains.
- Black people were told that they would die from the extreme Northern cold weather.
- Black people were threatened or fired if it was known that they were planning to leave the south.
- Black people were denied access to the local Black newspapers that talked about good jobs up north.
Despite the legal and not so legal attempts at incarcerating Black Americans on Southern farms and plantations, the Great Migration persisted. Between 1916 and 1970, over six million Black people left the South, but why? See Part 3
5-part mini-series
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