WHO IS AN AMERICAN? ★^765strenuously to persuade the French not to treat black soldiers as equals— not
to eat or socialize with them, or even shake their hands. Contact with African
colonial soldiers fighting alongside the British and French did widen the hori-
zons of black American soldiers. But while colonial troops marched in the vic-
tory parade in Paris, the Wilson administration did not allow black Americans
to participate.
The Great Migration and the “Promised Land”
Nonetheless, the war unleashed social changes that altered the contours of
American race relations. The combination of increased wartime production
and a drastic falloff in immigration from Europe once war broke out opened
thousands of industrial jobs to black laborers for the first time, inspiring a
large- scale migration from South to North. On the eve of World War I, 90 per-
cent of the African- American population still lived in the South. Most northern
cities had tiny black populations, and domestic and service work still predomi-
nated among both black men and black women in the North. But between 1910
and 1920, half a million blacks left the South. The black population of Chicago
more than doubled, New York City’s rose 66 percent, and smaller industrial cit-
ies like Akron, Buffalo, and Trenton showed similar gains.
Many motives sustained the Great Migration— higher wages in northern
factories than were available in the South (even if blacks remained confined
to menial and unskilled positions), opportunities for educating their children,
escape from the threat of lynching, and the prospect of exercising the right to
vote. Migrants spoke of a Second Emancipation, of “crossing over Jordan,” and
of leaving the realm of pharaoh for the
Promised Land. One group from Mis-
sissippi stopped to sing, “I am bound
for the land of Canaan,” after their train
crossed the Ohio River into the North.
The black migrants, mostly young
men and women, carried with them
“a new vision of opportunity, of social
and economic freedom,” as Alain
Locke explained in the preface to his
influential book The New Negro (1925).
Yet the migrants encountered vast
disappointments— severely restricted
employment opportunities, exclusion
from unions, rigid housing segregation,
and outbreaks of violence that made it
Table 19.1 The Great MigrationCityBlack
Population,
1910Black
Population,
1920Percent
IncreaseNew York 91,709 152,467 66.3%
Philadelphia 84,459 134,229 58.9
Chicago 4 4,10 3 109,458 148.2
St. Louis 43,960 69,854 58.9
Detroit 5,741 40,838 611. 3
Pittsburgh 25,623 37,7 2 5 47. 2
Cleveland 8,448 34,451 3 0 7. 8How did the war affect race relations in the United States?