A painting from Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series(1940–1941).
Source: Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy. (28.1942.20). ©The Museum of Modern Art/Artists Rights Society/Art Resource, NY.
The “New Negro” 657new militancy among many blacks. In 1919 W. E. B.
Du Bois wrote in The Crisis, “We are cowards and
jackasses if... we do not marshal every ounce of our
brain and brawn to fight... against the forces of hell
in our own land.” He increased his commitment to
black nationalism, organizing a series of Pan African
Conferences in an effort—futile, as it turned out—to
create an international black movement.
Du Bois never made up his mind whether to work
for integration or black separatism. Such ambivalence
never troubled Marcus Garvey, a West Indian whose
Universal Negro Improvement Association attracted
hundreds of thousands of followers in the early 1920s.
Garvey had nothing but contempt for whites, for
light-skinned blacks like Du Bois, and for organiza-
tions such as the NAACP, which sought to bring
whites and blacks together to fight segregation and
other forms of prejudice. “Back to Africa” was his slo-
gan; the black man must “work out his salvation in his
motherland.” (Paradoxically, Garvey’s ideas won the
enthusiastic support of the Ku Klux Klan and other
white racist groups.)
Garvey’s message was naive, but it served to build
racial pride among the masses of poor and
unschooled blacks. He dressed in elaborate braided
uniforms, wore a plumed hat, and drove about in a
limousine. Both God and Christ were black, helabor to admit black workers into its ranks). The
increasing presence of southern blacks in northern
cities also caused conflict. Some 393,000 settled in
New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois in the 1920s,
most of them in New York City, Philadelphia, and
Chicago. The black population of New York City
more than doubled between 1920 and 1930. In ear-
lier periods blacks in northern cities had tended to
live together, but in small neighborhoods scattered
over large areas. Now the tendency was toward con-
centration in what came to be called ghettos.
Even in small northern cities where they made up
only a tiny proportion of the population, blacks were
badly treated. When Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd
made their classic sociological analysis of “Middletown”
(Muncie, Indiana), they discovered that although black
and white children attended the same schools, the
churches, the larger movie houses, and other places of
public accommodation were segregated. The local
YMCA had a gymnasium where high school basketball
was played, but the secretary refused to allow any team
with a black player to use it. Even the news in Muncie
was segregated. Local papers chronicled the affairs of
the black community—roughly 5 percent of the
population—under the heading “In Colored Circles.”
Coming after the hopes inspired by wartime
gains, the disappointments of the 1920s produced a