THE SEGREGATED SOUTH ★^661machinery destroyed by the war. By the turn of the century, most of the great
plantations had fallen to pieces, and many blacks acquired land and took up
self- sufficient farming. In most of the Deep South, however, African- Americans
owned a smaller percentage of the land in 1900 than they had at the end of
Reconstruction.
In southern cities, the network of institutions created after the Civil War—
schools and colleges, churches, businesses, women’s clubs, and the like— served
as the foundation for increasingly diverse black urban communities. They sup-
ported the growth of a black middle class, mostly professionals like teachers and
physicians, or businessmen like undertakers and shopkeepers serving the needs
of black customers. But the labor market was rigidly divided along racial lines.
Black men were excluded from supervisory positions in factories and work-
shops and white- collar jobs such as clerks in offices. A higher percentage of
black women than white worked for wages, but mainly as domestic servants.
They could not find employment among the growing numbers of secretaries,
typists, and department store clerks.
The Kansas Exodus
Overall, one historian has written, the New South was “a miserable landscape
dotted only by a few rich enclaves that cast little or no light upon the poverty
surrounding them.” Trapped at the bottom of a stagnant economy, some blacks
sought a way out through emigration from the South. In 1879 and 1880, an esti-
mated 40,000 to 60,000 African- Americans migrated to Kansas, seeking political
equality, freedom from violence, access to education, and economic opportu-
nity. The name participants gave to this migration— the Exodus, derived from
the biblical account of the Jews escaping slavery in Egypt— indicated that its
roots lay in deep longings for the substance of freedom. Those promoting the
Kansas Exodus, including former fugitive slave Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, the
organizer of a real estate company, distributed flyers and lithographs picturing
Kansas as an idyllic land of rural plenty. Lacking the capital to take up farming,
however, most black migrants ended up as unskilled laborers in towns and cit-
ies. But few chose to return to the South. In the words of one minister active in
the movement, “We had rather suffer and be free.”
Despite deteriorating prospects in the South, most African- Americans had
little alternative but to stay in the region. The real expansion of job opportuni-
ties was taking place in northern cities. But most northern employers refused
to offer jobs to blacks in the expanding industrial economy, preferring to hire
white migrants from rural areas and immigrants from Europe. Not until the
outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914 cut off immigration did northern
employers open industrial jobs to blacks, setting in motion the Great Migration
How did the liberties of blacks after 1877 give way to legal segregation across the South?