Women and Blacks in Wartime 625soldiers, participate in food conservation programs,
and encourage people to buy war bonds. There was
a Women in Industry Service in the Department of
Labor and a Woman’s Committee of the Council of
National Defense, but both served primarily as win-
dow dressing for the Wilson administration. The
final report of another wartime agency, issued in
1919, admitted that few women war workers had
been paid as much as men and that women had been
promoted more slowly than men, were not accepted
by unions, and were discharged promptly when the
war ended.
The wartime “great migration” of southern
blacks to northern cities where jobs were available
brought them important economic benefits. Actually,
the emigration of blacks from the former slave states
began with emancipation, but the mass exodus that
many people had expected was slow to materialize.
Between 1870 and 1890 only about 80,000 blacks
moved to northern cities. Compared with the influx
from Europe and from northern farms, this number
was inconsequential. The black proportion of the
Women workers at the Dupont factory in Old Hickory, Tennessee, in
1917, form smokeless gunpowder into long strips, which will then
be cut for use in artillery shells and other armaments.
When manufacturers in East St. Louis (Illinois) sought to weaken
labor unions by hiring African American workers from Mississippi
and western Tennessee, the white workers went on a rampage.
Much of East Saint Louis was destroyed by fire, and several dozen
blacks and a few whites were dead. Here National Guardsmen lead a
black man to safety.population of New York City, for example, fell from
over 10 percent in 1800 to under 2 percent in 1900.
Around the turn of the century, as the first post-
slavery generation reached maturity and as southern
repression increased, the northward movement
quickened—about 200,000 blacks migrated between
1890 and 1910. Then, after 1914, the war boom
drew blacks north in a flood. Agents of northern
manufacturers flocked into the cotton belt to recruit
them in wholesale lots. “Leave the benighted
land,” urged the Chicago Defender, a black-owned
newspaper with a considerable circulation in southern
states. “Get out of the South.” Half a million made
the move between 1914 and 1919. The African
American population of New York City rose from
92,000 to 152,000; that of Chicago from 44,000 to
109,000; and that of Detroit from 5,700 to 41,000.
Life for the newcomers was difficult; many whites
resented them; workers feared them as potential
strikebreakers yet refused to admit them into their
unions. In East St. Louis, Illinois, where employers
had brought in large numbers of blacks in an attempt
to discourage local unions from striking for higher
wages, a bloody riot erupted during the summer of
1917 in which nine whites and an undetermined
number of blacks were killed. As in peacetime, the
Wilson administration was at worst antagonistic and
at best indifferent to blacks’ needs and aspirations.
Nevertheless, the blacks who moved north during
the war were, as a group, infinitely better off, materially
and psychologically, than those they left behind. Many