"My dear Sister,...The people are rushing here by the thousands and I know if you come and rent a big house you can get all the roomers you want. ...When you fully decide to come write me and let me know what day you expect to leave and over what road and if I don't meet you I will have some one ther[e] to meet you and look after you. I will send you a paper as soon as one come along.[T]hey send out extras two and three times a day."(1) So wrote a woman who had just moved to Chicago, sending encouragement to family and friends in the South, adding her own very practical help to the seductive call of the newspaper that she promised to send.
That paper–-the Chicago Defender–-could not have been published in the South. In Memphis, when Ida B. Wells wrote editorials denouncing lynching, her newspaper office was destroyed and she was driven out of town. But in Chicago Robert Abbott and his staff felt safe. A transplanted Georgian, Abbott had established the Defender in 1905 and immediately had begun a crusade against the treatment of blacks in the South. The Defender–-sent by mail and carried by black Pullman porters to thousands of people all across the southern states–-did not just condemn lynching; it did not simply criticize the Jim Crow system of rigid segregation. When the war-time labor shortage hit northern industries, it urged blacks to leave the South in a mass migration.
The Defender invites all to come north. . . . Plenty of work. For those who will not work, the jails will take care of you. . . . Anywhere in God's country is better than the southland. . . .Come join the ranks of the free. Cast the yoke from around your neck. See the light. When you have crossed the Ohio river, breathe the fresh air and say, "Why didn't I come before?"(2)
They hadn't come before because they had not been welcome, and because there had been no jobs. Before the outbreak of the war, European immigrants arrived at Ellis Island, every year, in numbers roughly equal to the total number of African Americans living in the North.(3) Now, with immigration from Europe cut off and demand for American food and ammunition soaring, employers in the North, for the first time, welcomed labor from the South.
First, tobacco planters in southern New England recruited southern blacks to replace the Poles, Czechs, and Lithuanians who had been gathering and processing their crops. Then the Pennsylvania and Erie Railroads picked up trainloads of black men from cities in Florida, offering them not only jobs but free transportation to Pennsylvania. The railroads brought men north by the thousands, only to have them quickly scatter, finding better paying jobs in other industries. Then the railroads would bring up a thousand more.(4) Soon the wives and children of the men were coming north, too. And so, in 1916, the Great Migration had begun.
| By the fall of 1917, African American women were working in lumberyards, moving piles of lumber and even operating buzz saws. Women's Bureau photograph, courtesy of the National Archive at College Park (RG 86G-6S-7). |  |
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When blacks arrived in the North, there was of course never enough housing, and the railroads that had brought workers north sheltered many of them in tents and boxcars.(5) During the first winter of the migration, many died of exposure,(6) others of disease; but when the white southern press tried to frighten potential migrants, the Defender cited reports of African Americans freezing to death in the South, as well. "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 at the least mention that he does not like the way he is treated. Come North then, all you folks, both good and bad. If you don't behave yourselves up here, the jails will certainly make you wish you had. For the hard-working man there is plenty of work-–if you really want it. The Defender says come.(7)
And come they did. In the southeast, they headed for Philadelphia and New York; in the central south, they went to East St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit. Some simply put down their tools and hopped a train. Others spent months preparing. Sometimes the men went ahead and found jobs before sending for the wives and children. Shop keepers sold off their stock at a loss, boarded up the store, and moved the entire family at once. Preachers followed their congregations
Many would-be migrants wrote letters back to the Defender, or to its advertisers, asking for railroad passes or for information about jobs. A widow with two daughters wrote to asking for help finding a job as a cook Another woman wrote to offer her services as "a body servant or nice house maid. My hair is black and my eyes are black and smooth skin and clear and brown, good teeth and strong and good health and my weight is 136 lb."(8) And, from a seventeen-year-old girl: "I can wash dishes, wash iron nursing work in groceries and dry good stores. Just any of these I can do. Sir, who so ever you get the job from please tell them to send me a ticket and I will pay them."(9) Another, a fifteen-year-old, wrote "I wont to come there and work i have ben looking for work here for three months and cand find any...i can do any work that come to my hand to do....sin me a pass and you wont be sorry of it ... i will work and pay for my pass if you sin it."(10)
Relatively few migrants actually had their fare paid by labor agents. More often, they had to get to the North on their own. Some formed clubs to get a group rate; others sold a house or their farm animals; some simply rode on freight cars.(11) Altogether, during the war, about half a million southern blacks would migrate to the northern cities; of those, about 50,000 went through Chicago. Some then moved on to Gary and Rockford and Detroit, but many of them stayed in Chicago, settling on the South Side.(12)
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If an army travels on its stomach, then in 1917 meat packing became a war industry. In the first years of the European war, demand for American meat products had immediately gone up. In 1916 alone, American meat packers had exported 70 million tons of canned beef, more than 260 million tons of fresh beef, and half a billion pounds of bacon(13) to feed the soldiers and the hungry civilians of the warring nations. Now they would have to feed the American armies as well. Packing houses began by transferring workers from their southern plants to the higher volume northern plants. Then they advertised in the Defender, hired labor agents, and offered transportation to bring workers north.(14) By 1917, more than 10,000 African Americans had found work in the packing plants of Chicago, and 3,000 of them were women.(15)
| Few black women found such clean work in the canneries and meatpacking plants, but photos of women cutting and washing meat carcasses have not been found. War Department photograph, courtesy of the National Archives at College Park (RG 165-WW-587-5). |  |
Like other industries, meat packing had been broken down into assembly line–-or disassembly line-–procedures, speeding up meat production while reducing the need for skilled butchers. And as in other industries, black women did the dirtiest, wettest, smelliest jobs.
Melvina worked primarily in the fat washing department at the Morris & Co. packing plant. A widow supporting a ten year old child and a ninety-five year old mother, she had arrived in Chicago in March of 1917, just ahead of the Great Northern Drive. Sometime after Melvina began work, the last men disappeared from the fat washing room and the work was entirely taken over by women. For 20 cents an hour, she stood all day in front of a tub, washing fat under sprinklers–first under cold water, then hot, her hands under water all day.
In other parts of the packing plants, black women split open hogs' heads and removed the brains. They cut the ear drums and trimmed the snouts and tongues. In the casing room, they stripped fat from the outside of the intestines and scraped mucus from the inside, then turned the casings by forcing water through them. They measured and inspected the casings that would later be stuffed for sausage. At some stages, the meat had to be kept chilled, and the women worked in heavy dresses, sweaters, and shawls. Other rooms were hot. Under low ceilings, in windowless rooms lit only by a bare electric bulb, temperatures reached 115 degrees in summer.(16)
As more men disappeared from the packing plant, Melvina's work expanded. She began to spend her mornings in a basement room cutting meat for sausages–taking the fat and meat off pig tails, cutting meat off neck and rib bones. Then in the afternoons she went upstairs to wash fat again. In the basement cutting room, water splashed everywhere, and blood ran freely onto the brick floor beneath her feet. She wore clumsy, wooden-soled shoes to keep her up out of the slime. One day, in the middle of the morning, she took her knife up to the fifth floor to have it sharpened. On the way down, her feet slipped and she fell down several flights of stairs. For 26 days, Melvina lay in bed unable to move anything but her hand. The women of the Eastern Star club helped feed her family, and the company paid her thirty dollars for her time away from work. But when Melvina returned to the packing plant, she worked only three weeks, and then was told not to come back because she "might fall again."(17) She would not earn packing plant wages again.
As an individual, Melvina was dispensable; but as a class, black workers suddenly, during the war, became valuable to the packers. In the contest between labor and employers to see which side would gain more from the pressures and opportunities of the war-time economy, the loyalty of black workers became a prize to be won.
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Outside the stockyards, other kinds of factory work also opened up. As black men and white women moved up and out of the lowest-paying jobs, black women moved in. At glass factories, while white women were etching, sorting, and packing glass pieces, black women spent the day carrying large trays of glass back and forth over brick or concrete floors, taking glass pieces from the hot furnaces of the blowing room and putting them into the tempering ovens.(18) In commercial bakeries, they cleaned and greased the largest, heaviest pans. In waste processing factories, they replaced men at the task of sewing up bales of rags-–doing work, the employer said, "that no white women would do."(19) In factories with no hot and heavy labor, they swept the floors and picked up refuse. For the railroads, women cleaned cars inside and out. They sorted and put away laundry for the Pullman cars, cleaned up scraps in the rail yards, moved oil barrels, and operated lift trucks for transferring freight. The young and strong even drove in spikes with sledge hammers. In Newark, New Jersey, black women found work loading shells at a munitions factory. In Philadelphia, they were employed at the big government arsenals and warehouses.
Some of these jobs were easier than working in the cotton fields and scrubbing laundry in backyard washtubs. Many of them were harder, however, than domestic service in middle class northern households. Still, eager to escape the interminable hours of domestic work and the tensions of the servant-mistress relationship,(20) black women took industrial jobs whenever they could find them. One 22-year-old, identified only as Miss T. S., had been a cook in Georgia. In Chicago, after finding work in a box factory, she told an investigator, "I'll never work in nobody's kitchen but my own any more."(21)
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| A male supervisor (far right), oversees the work of female workers in a Pennsylvania brickyard. Women's Bureau photograph, courtesy of the National Archives at College Park (RG 86-6S-3). |
Gradually, a fortunate few began to find better jobs. With the Urban League writing letters and knocking on doors, with the club women spreading messages about how to adapt to the northern climate and northern customs and work schedules, and with more and more white women abandoning their traditional trades to take up war work, employers began to consider black women for cleaner and more skilled work. In Detroit, although most black women still worked as domestics, some began to find jobs assembling automobiles and aircraft engines.(22) The Banner Manufacturing Company, also in Detroit, was owned by African Americans and employed black women throughout the company, from machine operators to office clerks.(23) It appears to have been a model factory, well-illuminated, not over-crowded, equipped with chairs with back rests. The black community also began to provide some of its own training. Triana Woods, a Mississippi school teacher, moved to Chicago in 1917 and immediately established a training school where she taught women to operate power sewing machines.(24)
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Through the months of war and far beyond, the migration would continue, and the message that was first spread in the Defender would be echoed in the letters that the new migrants wrote to those who had stayed behind. They told sometimes of illness and homesickness, but also of success. "Nothing here but money and it is not hard to get," wrote one man to his old lodge brother in Alabama. The women wrote home, too. "We get $1.50 a day and we pack so many sausages we don't have much time to play," a woman wrote to her friend, "but it is a matter of a dollar with me and I feel that God made the path and I am walking therein." And another: "I work like a man. I am making good."(25)