Policy Cuts
Chap 8
An important aspect of this migration to our model is the formation of an urban black culture, developed in the Midwestern/Northeastern central cities ghettos populated by the Great Migration. This culture owes its existence to talented African-American intellectual/cultural elite of writers, musicians, and entrepreneurs that developed new forms of expression and thought in these strange and often hostile cities. Relocation to the North, whatever other good and bad that resulted from it, offered an opportunity for these elite refuges to break with attitudes and culture of the sharecropper/former slave South—a culture that required some modification in the northern cities[1]. Afro-Americans needed to forge new attitudes which better reflected their urban realities.
Lawrence Levine has suggested that “Implicit in all these reactions was a heightened tendency to look inward, to reach within the community for protection, understanding and sustenance…. The impetus it gave to internal development and to searching within Afro-American culture and looking to the black people themselves for those things necessary to survival and the building of a meaningful dream.[2] Drawing inward for traditions, values and beliefs, Great Migration black theorists advocated Migration-era Afro-Americans to become “socially self-sufficient through building their own communities—essentially enclaves isolated from the larger white community…. African-American migrants worked diligently to establish communal networks of support and institutions …. One of these institutions established was the church, which served as the foundation of many African-American communities”.[3] If correct, this adaptation over the following decades created a new, neighborhood-level political-social-economic sub-culture within the cities of the North and Midwest. It would eventually prompt a redefinition of the American community development approach which has been earlier described in this history.
From these racial ghettoes, solidly African-American voting districts and black middle/ business classes (whose prosperity was tied to the enclave and racial solidarity) emerged. A black business class interacted weakly, if at all, with the white business community (the chambers for instance) and eventually resulted in widespread formation of independent Afro-American Chambers and other similar neighborhood and community-based EDOs. The Depression. public housing, urban renewal, and World War II thrust these neighborhoods and their residents into new dilemmas, and I suppose, opportunities. The Great Society and the race riots of the sixties brought it all to an unholy boil. These, however, are factors to be described in later chapters. Suffice it to say, the First Great Migration and the Migrations to follow fundamentally altered Northeast/Midwest Big Cities and their suburbs as well. They were truly page-turning. Without these migrations, Big City economic development would be radically different.
[1] This thought developed by Booker T. Washington (“hard work, thrift and resolute will”) and W.E. Du Bois who urged blacks to “shoulder with our own fellow white citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy” was advocated in the Pre-Great Migration period. If these cultural strategies had worked well in the North, it is quite possible that some other beliefs would have developed.
[2] I borrow extensively from Baskerville’s earlier-cited Heading North. His analysis includes the main outline of our argument and in many ways this is a précis of his article. In this citation, we are directly quoting Lawrence W. Levine “Marcus Garvey and the Politics of Revitalization” in John Hope Franklin and August Meier’s (eds) Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Urbana Illinois, University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 105-138.
[3] John D. Baskerville, Heading North, op. cit. p. 7.
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Ron W. Coan 