Claiming Their Citizenship: African American Women From 1624-2009

The Second Industrial Revolution Era

The Second Industrial Revolution Era ranged from 1878-1913. The last three decades of the nineteenth century ushered in the era of political machines and spoils system. The Comprise of 1877 secured victory for President Rutherford B. Hayes at the cost of withdrawing troops from the South, which rendered the government funded reconstruction effort a toothless lion, relinquishing formerly enslaved people subject to the whim and good will of their previous enslavers. The federal government’s abandonment of the south forced African Americans to provide for themselves from within their communities. The new industrial era connected big business and government, silencing the needs and concerns of women, working class and African American people. Industrial giants like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan employed white ethnic immigrants in their factories. Many of these people were exploited in slave-like conditions until workers united and forced change, such as an eight-hour work day and moderate safety measures.

Photo of an unknown sharecropper. Library of
Congress, LC-USF34-017112-C.

The majority of African Americans lived in the south and did not have the economic means to escape their vocations, most often sharecropping. During this period, a trickle of men, women and young adults began to leave the south and travel northward; this trickle led to the largest internal migration in US history. The Great Migration of 1910-1930 relocated millions of African Americans from southern states to northern cities such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, New York, and Detroit. The push-pull factor was economic: the belief that better jobs with skilled and semi-skilled labor would lift many out of poverty took on spiritual meaning. Unfortunately, the new life sought by these migrants was filled with great difficulty, and they encountered conflicts with racism, white ethnic tensions and poverty. To counter this period of indifference, black women remained stalwarts throughout the black community.

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Sharecropping

If a woman elected to remain in the south, she most often became a sharecropper; however there were many women who worked as seamstresses, teachers, midwives and laundresses.

Sharecropping was a system whereby a tenant farmer was essentially “loaned” land and agreed to give their landlord a share of their crops, in lieu of rent. But sharecropping was not without its disadvantages either: sharecropping wives and husbands retained a minimal amount of control over their own productive energies and those of their children on both a daily and seasonal basis.

The Great Migration

By the turn of the 20th century, there was a well-established black elite of highly educated men and women in America. According to a study completed by W.E.B. Dubois in 1900, there were more than 1.5 million black students enrolled in schools. There existed in the south a number of Black Institutions of Higher Education, including Tuskegee (1881), Morehouse (formerly Augusta Institute) and Fisk (1866).

However, for many southern African Americans, the quality of education available in the south was still very poor and many blacks continued to find it hard to gain upward economic mobility as a result of a culture still deeply rooted in racism. Compared with their counterparts in the North and Midwest, southern laborers were grossly underpaid. Earnings in the south represented about two-thirds of those paid elsewhere.

It was in the knowledge of this bleak reality and in the promise of great economic opportunity in the north, that approximately 7 million African Americans made an expansive journey into the Northern, Midwestern and Western continental U.S, starting in 1916.

From 1916-1918 alone, over 400,000 black men and women trekked from the south to the north, filling neighborhoods of Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston and Baltimore.

The Great Migration took place over the span of about 30 years, from the Spring of 1916-1930. During this time, women had gained the right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920 and World War I had come and gone. African American men and women steadily filled neighborhoods on an unprecedented scale in U.S. history, African Americans were leaving the south in pursuit of a better life in the north. An average of 16,000 men and women per month, and 500 per day, made the journey. But while life outside of the Jim Crow south promised an ostensible escape from racism, many new immigrants became disillusioned as they faced lynchings and racial discrimination. Preconceived ideas about the aptitude of African Americans barred them from certain jobs. For many black women before World War II, domestic work was the most profitable and only means of work to come by.

However, there were many black women throughout major northern cities like Chicago, New York City, Baltimore and Boston that became very successful and powerful black elite, devoted to working for the social progression of their people. Ida B. Wells-Barnett is perhaps one of the most well-known of these women. While living in Chicago, she continued to be an advocate for blacks—rallying against the practice of lynching, which was rampant in the south.