2014/01/01 by Ibram X. Kendi · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · Arts and Humanities · #Race, History, and American Society #American History and Culture #Music History and Culture
paper · doi:10.1353/nyh.2014.0000
openalex publication_date 2014/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/05
New York History Fall 2014© 2014 by The New York State Historical Association 537 Special Issue Editor’s Introduction Nationalizing Resistance: Race and New York in the 20th Century Guest Editor Ibram X. Kendi, University of Florida Several hundred black families were quietly departing Selma, Alabama. “Treatment doesn’t warrant staying,” blared the subhead for a story in The Chicago Defender on February 5, 1916.1 The Great War had cut off the supply of immigrant labor from Europe. Northern industries started looking to women, and sent labor recruiters south to refill their labor supply . With exploitation of black labor still pervasive and with Hollywood’s first major motion picture, the lynching film, The Birth of a Nation, inciting lynchings across the South—fifteen thousand men, women, and children watched eighteen-year-old Jesse Washington burn alive in Waco, Texas, in May 1916—African Americans were all ears to wartime labor recruiters.2 “War is Hell but there are things worse than Hell, as every Negro knows,” W.E.B. Du Bois explained from New York.3 Black people traveling from rural towns to southern cities, from southern cities to border state cities, from border state cities to northern cities, the Great Migration had begun. Initially, many southern segregationists were stunned or proud of the movement. “As the north grows blacker, the south grows whiter,” rejoiced a New Orleans newspaper. Then, as black migrants started to empty out southern fields and industries, surprise and pride transformed into desperation. Black labor is “the foundation of our prosperity,” cried out a Georgia planter. “God pity the day when the 1. “Race Labor Leaving,” The Chicago Defender February 5, 1916. 2. See Patricia Bernstein, The First Waco Horror : The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the Naacp, 1st ed., Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005). 3. David L. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919, 1st ed., 2 vols., vol. 1 (New York: H. Holt, 1993), 515–6; W.E.B. Du Bois, “Refinement and Love,” The Crisis, December 1916. 538 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY negro leaves the South.” Planters were soon found terrorizing labor agents, arresting migrants, and improving labor conditions. But nothing and no one could stop the Great Migration. Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left their homes.4 Northerners did not greet these migrants with open arms. Migrants faced a racist backlash for leaving the South, and then a racist backlash when they arrived in the North.5 The northern “receiving stations,” as Great Migration chronicler Isabel Wilkerson termed them, were not much better than the Border States or the South. And no northern station received more migrants between the Great War and the Great Depression than New York (the white population, which had persisted in the 97th or 98th percentile for most of the nineteenth century, fell to 74.4 percent in 1990). Harlem residents organized to fight off what they called “a growing menace,” or an “invasion” of “black hordes.” They drafted restrictive covenants and segregated churches, restaurants, and theatres. In one of the earliest studies of the Great Migration in 1918, historian Carter G. Woodson predicted “the maltreatment of Negroes will be nationalized by this exodus.”6 Since Woodson’s unforgettable prediction came true, historians have been interrogating and complicating and sometimes removing the historical footing from the common conception of the racist South and antiracist North, the segregated South and desegregated North. They have tracked this Great Migration of maltreatment. Maltreatment followed African Americans from Florida and Georgia and the Carolinas to New York City and eventually to upstate towns and cities. Maltreatment also followed the immigration of Jews, Italians, Irish, and other disparaged European ethnics in the first half of the twentieth century and Asians and Latinos in the second half. The maltreatment of black New Yorkers and other victims of prejudice seemed to grow as their population grew in the twentieth century . But maltreatment did not animate the lives of old and new black New Yorkers. If anything, resistance to the maltreatment animated their lives as 4. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of...