KB: Tell us more about the impact of the Great Migration on the rise of the urban industrial black working class in the United States.
JWT: The Great Migration was deeply anchored in the volition, decision-making, and social struggles of Southern black workers. The numbers themselves are astounding. An estimated eight million African Americans moved from the rural and urban South to the North, West, and South from World War I through the mid-1970s.
The industrial sector offered a significant incentive to blacks in southern agriculture. African Americans who moved directly from a southern farm labor job to the urban North may have increased their earnings by as much as 300 percent in some cases. Even after adjustments for the higher cost of living in their new homes, a recent econometric study suggests that increases in migrant earnings ranged from a low of about 56 percent to a possible high of 130 percent.
The Great Migration not only helped fuel the transition of black men and increasing numbers of black women from general labor, household, and domestic service work into the higher paying manufacturing sector. The wages of massive numbers of black workers also enabled the rise of broader and more expansive African-American urban communities, described by some contemporary observers as the Black Metropolis, replete with an expanding range of institutions, including churches, fraternal orders, social clubs, and entrepreneurial pursuits.
The development of a black institutional infrastructure also underlay the rise of new forms of national and transnational social, political, civil, and human rights struggles that cut across class, ethnic, and racial lines. New social movements not only included organizations like the National Urban League and the NAACP but also the Garvey movement, the Communist Party, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. These dynamic political developments culminated in aggressive demands for full citizenship rights during the March on Washington movement during World War II and the rise of the modern black freedom struggle during the postwar years.
KB: One of the central themes of your book is the role black workers played in helping build American cities. What do you see as the most significant contributions of black workers in some of the nation’s largest cities, including Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Chicago?
JWT: Their impact was widespread. African Americans had their most profound impact on the development of the manufacturing, transportation, general labor, and household sectors of the urban industrial economy.