By Patrick N. Allitt, Emory University
The transformation of America into an ethnically diverse nation, predominantly urban, caused a backlash in the 1920s from the populations who thought that they were being swallowed up. What happened during this backlash? Did this backlash give birth to the Harlem Renaissance?
(Image: Everett Collection/Shutterstock)
No Foreigners Allowed?
The laws of 1921 and 1924 restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and banned immigration completely from Asia. There was an openly racial intent in this legislation. It was to restrict immigration, except of northwestern Europeans, Teutonic peoples, Scandinavians, and Britons primarily. It was an attempt to keep out the darker races of south Europe.
The Great Migration of African Americans into the North was also changing the character of American urban life. How did this happen?
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
The Move to the North and the ‘White Flight’
Many African Americans had moved to the industrial cities in the North as many white men had joined the war. The Chicago Defender was an African American newspaper that encouraged The Great Migration, telling people to get out of their lives as sharecroppers in the South and move to the northern cities. And they scoffed at African Americans’ fears of the cold northern winter. Here’s an editorial from 1917 in the Defender:
If you can freeze to death in the North and be free, why freeze to death in the South and be a slave, where your mother, sister, and daughter are raped and burned at the stake, where your father, brother, and sons are treated with contempt and hung to a pole riddled with bullets.
As African Americans moved into American cities, they set off the process that is referred to as “white flight.” Their arrival in the neighborhood would usually lead to a stampede of the white residents out of that neighborhood, so that very quickly it would become consolidated as a black ghetto. This is true, for example, of Harlem in New York, and of the South Side in Chicago, which got big black populations for the first time during the First World War.
Marcus Garvey’s Vision of Africa
African Americans fulfilled the demand of labor during the war, but afterwards they were regarded by demobilized white military men as threats to their jobs. From 1918 through 1921, there was a series of violent race riots. The white gangs would rampage through African-American neighborhoods, creating lots of damage and destruction.
The most influential African-American leader of the time was Marcus Garvey, who ran an organization called the Universal Negro Improvement Association. He led a “back to Africa” campaign. He was a Jamaican immigrant and a spell-binding orator in the traditions of that time, who could pack Carnegie Hall with 25,000 enthusiastic African Americans who loved his vision of returning to Africa, and creating a mighty African nation there.
Here’s a little passage from one of his speeches:
The Negroes of the world say we are striking homewards towards Africa to make her the big black republic, and in the making of Africa a big black republic what is the barrier? The barrier is the white man, and we say to the white man, who now dominates Africa, that it is to his interest to clear out of Africa now, because we are coming, not as in the time of Father Abraham, 200,000 strong, but we are coming 400 million strong, and we mean to retake every square inch of the 12 million square miles of African territory which belonged to us by right divine.
Garvey and Dubois
Garvey was a charismatic figure, but unfortunately, a highly impractical businessman. He attempted to buy a series of steamships to create what he called the Black Star Line, on whose ships people could literally sail back to Africa. He was, however, bilked in a series of transactions, and also operated shady business practices himself, with the result that he was convicted of fraud in 1923 and sent to jail. Afterwards he was exiled back to the West Indies.
W.E.B. Dubois, a black leader and the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People continued to insist that African Americans were American and that the idea of going to Africa was a delusion. It seemed to Dubois they were giving up on the rights for which people had worked very hard.
Alain Locke and the Harlem Renaissance
It was in the 1920s that for the first time a major African-American intellectual movement developed. This was the Harlem Renaissance. Alain Locke is one of its most important figures. He said:
Harlem is now a place where such a large number of highly educated black people are living in the same place together that they’ve become an important sociological phenomenon in their own right. For a long time in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being, something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be kept down, or in his place, or helped up…to be harassed or patronized…but now, a change is coming about making American Negroes the advanced guard of the African peoples in their contact with the 20th century civilization which would rehabilitate the race in world esteem.
Thus, Alain Locke and many of his friends—people like Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston—many of the most prominent black writers of the early 20th century, were participants in this movement.
Common Questions about the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance
African Americans fulfilled the demand of labor during the First World War, but afterwards they were regarded by demobilized white military men as threats to their jobs. Therefore, the white men took to violent means to show their rage and discomfort.
The Harlem Renaissance developed in the 1920s in America. Many of the most prominent black writers of the early 20th century were members of this movement.
As African Americans moved into American cities, they set off the process that is referred to as “white flight.” Their arrival in the neighborhood would usually lead to a stampede of the white residents out of that neighborhood.
