Urbanization

Early Black City Dwellers

African Americans have always lived in cities. From colonial times, household slaves lived as urban blacks in both the Northern and Southern United States, as did those free blacks who worked as craftsmen, artisans, and seamstresses.

Free Northern blacks also lived on the urban periphery, where they farmed and labored away from the central city. By the time of the Civil War, for example, blacks had already populated a number of suburban areas, such as Kinlock, outside of St. Louis, Missouri. Free blacks also lived in either separate or integrated communities that ringed Chicago, Cincinnati, and other cities in the Midwest. Black enclaves also developed around Southern cities, such as Atlanta, Richmond, and Savannah. Still, before the Civil War, most blacks lived as slaves in rural areas of the South.

With the onset of the Civil War, slaves flooded Northern cities as they escaped from the South. Still, urban blacks accounted for only a small percentage of the total African American population in the country. Even after the war, most blacks remained in the South and in rural areas. This soon began to change, however.

Urbanization Begins in Earnest

The so-called Great Migration of blacks from the rural areas of the South to the cities of the North began in the 1890s. At that time, large numbers of African American men and women migrated to the cities of the east coast, such as Philadelphia and New York.

An even more significant migration to urban areas occurred in 1916 as a result of the labor shortage caused by the start of World War I. In that year, most blacks in the United States lived in the rural South; only one-fourth of African Americans lived in urban areas. Even those blacks who lived in southern cities often lacked city services, such as running water and electricity. Worsening economic conditions and increasing racial violence aimed at southern blacks in the decades prior to the war combined with a northern labor shortage to create a flood of black southern migrants into northern cities.

The single largest wave of African American migration occurred during World War I, when half a million Southern blacks moved to the cities of the North and Midwest. They came because the North needed workers. With its industrial capacity stretched to its limits by the European war and its source of cheap European immigrant labor cut off, industries of the north had no choice but to employ southern blacks. Although hired for low-level jobs, the new urban blacks still earned significantly more money than they had in the rural South.

As a result of this migration, cities such as Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia exploded in population. Chicago's black population alone grew from 44,000 in 1910 to 110,000 in 1920. Unfortunately, such a large influx of people in so short a period of time resulted in the formation of large black ghettos, areas where the poor lived in crowded and often unhealthy conditions.

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