High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [80]
They headed north out of a South that was increasingly hostile. Reconstruction ended in 1877 and the protections that the government attempted to put into place to protect the newly freed African Americans ceased. The promise of Reconstruction, with its more equitable tax system and attempts to integrate blacks into the American fabric of life, was over. The end of Reconstruction led to the imposition of a series of Jim Crow laws in the South that required the segregation of whites and black on public transportation and, later, in schools, public places, and restaurants. Slavery was gradually transformed into sharecropping. The white supremacist organizations that had been formed at the end of the Civil War grew. The Ku Klux Klan, which originated with Confederate veterans at the end of the Civil War, was rekindled, and a second Klan was founded in 1915. Violence escalated. Between 1889 and 1932, 3,700 lynchings of blacks were recorded in the United States. For many in the South, the rights won by the Civil War disappeared slowly into bleak lives of hardscrabble subsistence farming. The South held little for them; it was time to leave.
In 1910, seven eighths of African Americans in the country lived in the South below the so-called Cotton Curtain. By i925, one tenth of the black population of the country had moved to the North. Between 1916 and 1918 alone, almost four hundred thousand African Americans—almost five hundred a day—stepped out onto dusty roads, pointed their faces toward the horizon, and headed north. They headed toward metropolises where there were jobs in the factories created by increasing industrialization. They arrived in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and New York and began to make their presence felt by creating neighborhoods and communities where they supported and sustained one another in their churches, their shops, their restaurants, and their gathering places.
Initially, Northern companies sent agents down to recruit labor, but as the trickle turned into a tidal wave, agents were no longer necessary. People did their own recruiting. Males who had journeyed northward to seek their fortunes found a toehold and sent for brothers and then families, and neighborhoods were established. The jobs were not the gold-paved streets of the blues or the easy money of the grapevine rumors, but segregated jobs that paid blacks less than whites and placed them in competition with the new waves of European immigrants. There were jobs in manufacturing and industry, and for those with specialized skills, there was the ability to make money in areas offering services not performed by whites for blacks even in the North. Doctors, dentists, and undertakers also came north, formed the nuclei of the new communities, and prospered.
The black press grew and fueled the northward migrations with its own columns and connections. Papers like the New York Amsterdam News, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Chicago Defender were so much a part of the migration that some Southern cities banned them, feeling that they were luring away the blacks who had formed the basis of the Southern unskilled job pool. Yet still they came, following routes as worn as those of the Underground Railroad. Those from the Mississippi Delta headed due north to Chicago. Folks from Georgia, Alabama, and Upper Mississippi headed to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit. Those from the Carolinas and