 I want to start with a poem, play the audio of it for you. You should be able to hear pretty, pretty well. The poem is called Old Limb by a man named Sterling Brown, one of the great poets in American Letters in the 20th Century. He writes the poem after, you know, we're talking this week about the first decade and a half or so, the 20th Century. This poem was written after that, written, I think, in the late 20s or early 30s. I don't remember off the top of my head, but it speaks to the experiences, the rural experiences and the social and political experiences of African-Americans, and it certainly is, as you'll hear in the poem, gives you sort of a context behind why people might not want to stay in the South. The poem is called Old Limb. Old Limb. I talked to Old Limb and Old Limb said, they weigh the cotton, they store the corn. We only good enough to work the rows. They run the commissary, they keep the books. We got to be grateful for being cheated. Whip a snap of clerks, call us out of our name. We got to say mister to spinlin' boys. They make our figures turn summer sets. We buck in the middle say, thank you, sir. They don't come by once. They don't come by twos, but they come by tens. They got the judges, they got the lawyers. They got the jury rolls, they got the law. They don't come by once. They got the sheriffs, they got the deputies. They don't come by twos. They got the shotguns, they got the rope. We get the justice in the end, and they come by tens. Their fists stay closed, their eyes look straight. Our hands stay open, our eyes must fall. They don't come by once. They got the manhood, they got the courage. They don't come by twos. We got to slink around hang-tailed hounds. They burn us when we dogs, they burn us when we men. They come by tens. I had a buddy, six foot of man, muscled up perfect game to the heart. They don't come by once. I worked and I've fought any man or two men. They don't come by twos. He spoke out of turn at the commissary. They gave him a day to get out the county. He didn't take it. He said, come and get me. They came and got him. And they came by tens. He stayed in the county. He lay there dead. They don't come by once. They don't come by twos. But they come by tens. In that Sterling Brown poem named Old Lim, talking about forms of Southern justice. If you dare to speak back to somebody, if you're black and spoke back to somebody who's white, they might come after you. They would not come by ones or twos. They'd come by tens. What I want to talk about today, having set that really uplifting context for the day's lecture, is talk about the Great Migration and take us forward into the 19-teens with a film called The Birth of a Nation. Essentially what I want to do in today's lecture is look at the beginning of a fundamental shift in demographics of black America as far as geography is concerned. Black America is still overwhelmingly a rural population and is overwhelmingly southern. That begins to change and change rather quickly during the Great Migration. Now ended last week's lecture talking about the founding of the NAACP, 1909. And I want to point out the NAACP was not the only organization founded at this time that focused upon the quality of black life. Another such organization was the Young Men's Christian Association and the Young Women's Christian Association. Both groups are highly segregated but they still played a central role in making space available for blacks, particularly black travelers. Housing was provided, hot meals will be provided, community organizing has become sites of community organizing, much like black churches were playing still to this day of course but before that. In fact with the YMCA I was on an internship right after college and the internship leader, this is 1989-1990, the internship leader was talking about when he was coming through L.A. in the 1960s, traveling there for the first time, every black man knew that he had to go to the YMCA if he wanted to find a place to stay. So this is not just the history of the 19 Ottes in the 1910s, it goes forward all the way and through really the systematic desegregation of society or at least sort of structurally in the 1960s and 70s. Anyway, aside from the NAACP, in addition to the Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations, you have one of the most important betterment organizations being founded in this era, that's the National Urban League, founded in 1911. Now whereas NAACP dedicated itself to a legal and intellectual strategy, trying to find ways to seek justice for African Americans through legal means and through the idea of sort of civilizing, uplifting society through the Talented Tenth, the Urban League was explicitly concerned with labor, finding jobs for blacks sometimes at any cost. The Urban League was chiefly concerned with finding jobs for blacks who newly arrived to urban northern centers. The Urban League was from the start less radical than NAACP. Now to even think of the phrase NAACP and radical going together may sound strange, but it really was sort of an avant-garde organization in many ways at its founding. Urban League wasn't in that regard. Some old claimers you'll see later on that the Urban League was really quite the opposite, a conservative force in the back pocket of corporate interests and willing to bust unions in order to put blacks into jobs of any kind. Now the issue of jobs here can't be overemphasized. Jobs are important in any era to any people of course, but when you have a large segment of the population of a socially identified population, black folks in this case, in great flux, jobs become that much more critical. Blacks were that population. They were in profound flux in the first decades of the twentieth century and it is their mass migration. What is referred to in this era as the great migration and the events that surround that, that form the basis of this week's lectures. Now I want to start with just a clarification on the title of the name of this phenomenon, the Great Migration. At this moment in time, roughly early years of the twentieth century to roughly the start of World War I, this was the greatest internal migration of a people in U.S. history. However, and we'll get to it in a couple of weeks, the migration of African Americans in the 1940s and early 50s, way outstrips the migration I'm talking about now, but in terms of numbers. But the naming is, the naming convention is such that this early period of migration is called the Great Migration, just to be clear about that fact. Now aside from naming conventions, I want you to also realize that when I think of the Great Migration, I think that it needs to be understood as a political movement, that migration itself was a political act. Was it organized in the ways that we think of in terms of high politics or even grassroots protest movements? No, it wasn't. It wasn't. But it was profoundly political, and I wanted to delineate those reasons over the next little bit. It's important to first start to look at the Southern Black situation at the turn of the century. That's why I played that clip for it, to get a sort of a sense, at least artistically rendered, of the stakes, of the narrow room within which African Americans could move and move safely in the South. Blacks who had the option of staying in the South left during the Great Migration because all the political privileges that they had enjoyed during Reconstruction have been systematically stripped away, and I've been talking about this the last couple of weeks. Blacks who had the resources to leave, and that's a big issue. They had the actual means to get out of town. They might have left just for the fact that, you know, any hope of their having the right to vote and all the other political benefits that come along with that just weren't in the mix anymore, not after redemption, not after the systematic stripping away of the black voting presence. The men couldn't vote any longer. State-funded education for blacks was functionally non-existent. Social segregation was only increasing, and there, of course, was always the looming threat of lynch law. So lacking even the most basic political rights, some blacks just up and left. Black farmers might have left simply because of the sharecropping system, something else alluded to in this poem by Sterling Brown. Sharecropping as you already know, a form of employment that looked all too much like slavery, it was a dead end. Better opportunities, the bedrock of any sort of political philosophy awaited black sharecroppers in the north, at least this was the thinking. So you have the combination of maybe a little dramatic political death in the south as an option. That's not very viable, so blacks might want to leave. An economic system that's determined to keep them in second-class citizenship status. So if you think of the forces in the south that, or the reality, the daily reality on the ground in the south, you can see that just the determination to leave, to get out was a response to political and economic situation. And that way, the decision, I think, is to be rendered as sort of a political decision. And it's interesting if you think about sticking on this issue of, you know, the politics in the situation, it's interesting to think about how whites react, southern whites reacted to black exodus. At first, in some regions, whites were thrilled. We can finally get the so-called Negro problem, this is a popular phrase during the age, the Negro problem would leave once blacks left town. But rather quickly they realized, wait a second, this is our bedrock labor force. This is the force that keeps white, poor whites placatics, at least they're not black. The social order was based on color cast and was being destroyed by black exodus. So whites begin to threaten blacks if they make plans to leave. It sounds completely nonsensical, but this is just the state of the case. And there were white northerners coming down who were labor agents and white municipalities start charging these labor agents, I'll explain more about them in a second, exorbitant fees to register to try to get blacks out. Doesn't matter. Labor agents have the resources. Southern whites started seeing their socioeconomic political system, the foundation upon which so much of it was built, starting to crumble with black exodus. Now historians talk about push, when it comes to the great migration, push-pull factors. There's debate whether that's a useful model or not. I'm not going to worry about sort of that debate, but I'm going to talk about a series of different factors that were at play that really combine in such a way that make this migration so powerful, so large. You have an infestation is one of the ways that makes this migration so important. The bull weevil, little pest that comes up from Mexico sweeps across Texas and into southeastern U.S. The bull weevil is a little bug that gets into the bull, the cotton bull, B-O-L-L, and destroys it. Cotton wasn't the only crop in the south, but it was the main crop. It was so much of the, the bedrock of the southern economy was in that agricultural product. Cotton crops get destroyed. There's no work for blacks. They're working the farms. If you can't find work, what's the point of staying around? I already mentioned political disfranchisement. This job scarcity in the south, there's also an economic, and the south is essentially an economic colony of the north. And in the north there's a decreasing supply of immigrant labor as you move forward into the 20th century as a result of state conflict in European theaters heading toward World War I. You just take these things together. There's a decreasing reason to stay in the south and the lure of jobs in the north. Assisting this or abetting this process even more are the individuals I mentioned before, labor agents. These are essentially job recruiters employed by people owned factories and mills, mines in the Midwest and the north who had traveled south since the labor supply was drawing up in the north and come into town and are making up the numbers here. Come into a town where there's, you know, a lot of blacks looking for work, say, look, in the north you can own your own house or an apartment. You can vote, sit where you want to on the bus. We've got a job here. The job's going to pay you $3 a day, unheard of amounts of money. Being able to own property, at least rent property where you want to and ride on the bus to sit where you want to, unheard of possibilities in the south. They go, and we, and they say, well, we can't afford the train fare to get up to, say, Chicago, Cincinnati, or Cleveland. Just don't worry about it. I'll pay for it. And you can work it off. Or don't even worry about it. I'll just pay for it. So labor agents are coming down and signing up a black labor force to come to work in the mines and factories and mills. You have, of course, informal lines of communication. People who make, you know, that first person to make the trip up to Chicago and say, my God, I am making $3 a day. And I have my own apartment. And writing letters back or saving up a lot of money and driving down, you know, at the end of a year, in their own car, dressed in their fanciest clothes, talk about sort of the, quote, land of milk and honey up north. This certainly inspired others to travel. And then you have a very important newspaper, The Chicago Defender, the most important black newspaper of the time. Chicago Defender, course based in Chicago, but circulated heavily throughout the south. Bags of the Chicago Defender would be bundled up, thrown on trains, and they would appear in, say, Montgomery or Huntsville or, you know, other southern towns. And they'd be read by, who knows how many people. Now the Defender made it almost a sport talking about lynchings happening in the south. Most often they were about true events. It wasn't in, this was an era of newspapers where he just, you know, kind of made stuff up still. So most often talking about true events in the south and horrible events. And there would be letters out of the editor. Sometimes true, often fabricated, but still they were there, written by blacks, written in dialect, but talking about the opportunities in the north. And reminding folks of the degradation in the south. Chicago Defender's incredibly important as a tool to help people find the courage or find the resources or the determination to move north. And then you have service organizations like the National Urban League. Founded in 1911, dedicated to improving the quality of life or life chances for blacks migrating north. So you have just in the first two decades, sort of an astonishing convergence of all these different forces that really helped fuel this migration. The numbers are really quite striking. Just between, this is just to get a sense of things. You're not going to have to know this for the, for the, like an exam or anything. But looking at a few major northern cities, between 1910 and 1920. It's so funny when I say you don't have to know this for an exam, the tapping stops. That's hysterical. Anyway, you take New York City. In 1910, the populated African American population is around 90,000. Within 10 years it's 150,000. An increase of 66%. In Chicago, the population increases by 100 and, almost 150% from 44,000 to 110,000. In Cleveland, population soars from 8,000 to 34,000. An increase of 300%. And in Detroit, the population goes from 5,000 to 40,000 increase of 600%. There are radical changes in just 10-year periods of time. This is the era when Harlem becomes known as a black enclave. Now, so we know what was getting people out of the south. What did they find when they got to the North? Yeah, they could have their own apartments, certainly. Owning homes would take a little while for most migrants. But they would find segregated housing, de facto, not de jure, de facto. And segregated housing was bad housing. Low quality, poorly maintained, sites of high levels of crime, vice, public health hazards. Anybody know Washington, D.C. that well, sort of the area? Well, Georgetown used to be, you know, sort of a slum in the docks. But getting around, say, Dupont Circle and heading that area, a lot of townhouses around there, row houses. And in the area I'm talking about, you would go behind the row houses to the interior of the block in these alley dwellings. I mean, pestilence, horrible sites, horrible locations. This is where a lot of migrants black lived in the alleys in Washington, D.C. Sort of invisible to the public, but certainly there. Migrants to the North would find native black resistance. People who had been there already for generations who thought these black migrants talked funny, dressed strangely, cooked food that smelled wrong, and were loud and boisterous and acted out in public. All these kind of racially coded things we've certainly still live with, but you have long-term black communities deeply unhappy about these migrants coming up. You'd have people who had migrated just 10 years earlier unhappy about the new migrants because they're just making, they're embarrassing us. They're making, you know, the increasing job competition. Coming up was filled with challenges. You would also have, you know, an urban link trying to find people jobs. You would have African-Americans being brought up to a factory where a labor union, which blacks weren't allowed to join, and union being on strike. And the urban league working with the company that owns the factory saying, factory owners saying, look, if you can get me, you know, 100 black men to work in the factory, that'd be great, I'd give them jobs. Well, they're hired to scab labor. So they are vilified by white labor workers. It's a job, certainly, as long as the labor union stays on strike, but it's a job at some pretty serious costs, as we'll see in this week's readings and in Wednesday's lecture. So life wasn't easy. And you have to think about this tension between sort of black autonomy, the real power in being able to make a decision to leave town. You can't discount that. That's important. Sort of life-changing, in a sense, just to get up and go. You have to weigh that against the reality of, like, life when you got to your destination might be pretty horrible as well. Certainly different than anything you expected. Yeah, you got paid more. Yeah, you had your own roof over your head. But the tenements in which blacks were living were just, I mean, horrible. I mean, there's stuff beyond your imagination in so many ways. Sure, you could ride where you wanted to on the bus, but there were still costs or risks involved in acting out, shall we say. Again, we'll see more of this in the next lecture. Now, one thing I also want to make clear before moving into the next phase of the lecture is thinking about, you know, as we're trying to unpack what migration really was, it's important to realize that migration wasn't just blacks working on the southern farms, all of a sudden, you know, in a week's time they're working in a mill in Chicago. No, it wasn't that. I mean, migration was, among many things, at least, I mean, it was at least very complicated. So you might have some working in the farm, the bullweave attacks, there's no more opportunity to work. You go to the city, southern city, trying to find a job, something. Cities become crowded. This is where labor agents would really quote steel. You would find a lot of people, hire them up to the north. But would they always go all the, quote, all the way to north of Chicago or New York City? No, they wouldn't. They might end up in the cold fields in West Virginia or in Ohio or in Kentucky. And they might work there for, you know, six months and then go back home to Montgomery. Just pick a place. And then they might leave the next year for three months and then come back. And migration was not literally from field to factory in one straight direction. People going back and forth often, they might get up to, you know, the mines, coal mines in Kentucky, be there for a couple of years and then make it to Chicago after that. And who knows how long they would stay. So you need to understand that migration is doing, is moving in many different directions at once, although it was generally from field to generally to factory. One thing that's not ambiguous at all during this era is what I'll say, the commerce of racism. Remember, whites didn't want to have blacks leave, or whites wanted blacks leave at first and realized, wait, this would mess up our system. They didn't want blacks to leave at all. Yet they still treat blacks pretty shabbily in their southern towns and in their southern fields. One thing that is incumbent upon this sort of commerce and racism is control. Who's in control of society? It's a word I've used before. As society becomes destabilized by blacks moving on their own or with the help of labor agents, you start seeing a real rise in white resistance to the challenge for this system. White resistance to black autonomy becomes palpable. I already mentioned southern resistance to labor agents coming down. It's important to understand there are other things that were developing within white America, white southern America that complicated the nature of black-white relations in the south and that the most important force is the Klan, the KKK. Now the Klan, you remember, was destroyed at the national level during reconstruction. It starts to creep back during redemption, but it's really, you know, as terrifying as it is. Something happens when you get to around the height of the migration, around 1915. The popularity of the Klan skyrockets. I mean skyrockets. The fact that it's happening at the same time blacks are trying to leave the south in a real outflow is no coincidence. There's no doubt also that a large part of the Klan's popularity, reborn popularity, is a film, D. W. Griffith's film called The Birth of a Nation. This movie's based on a novel by a guy named Thomas Dixon, a novel called The Klan's Men. The book as well as the movie, and I'll only be talking about the movie, is a depiction of reconstruction. But from a point of view that was entirely sympathetic to the southern community, southern mentality. The film was immediately controversial, it was explicitly racist, but there's no denying the fact that it was cinematically revolutionary. Casting aside the subject matter for a moment, it may be the most important film, most important American film of all time, for the way in which it changed what was possible from a technical point of view. We have large outdoor scenes, the tracking shot, cat-side lenses, fade-ins, color or more like tenting, but still color, night photography, panning, close-ups, high-angle shots, and so forth. It was also the first feature-length film in American motion picture history. So technically it's an astonishing accomplishment. When it's shown at the White House, Woodrow Wilson, southern Democrat, but also a scholar of some merit, declared that it was, quote, history written in lightning. He lauded it for its bold and accurate depiction of the past. Now, for the record, it's only accuracy came in the fact that it represented a type of hysterical psychology that captivated Southerners who felt that they were victims of a war of Northern aggression. So Woodrow Wilson celebrates this thing. This is an incredible historical document. It is an incredible historical document, but not for what it shows on this, not for the story that it tells, but for how it captures a mentality in the 19-teens and how it excites a populist, I guess, I guess, a populist base in wide America and helps elevate membership numbers in the Klan. I mean, the film is hailed, and speaking of two sides of it, and the technical standpoint, Spike Lee, ever the controversial artist, talks about it as the most important film that he's ever, I mean, it was the most important film for him. On the other side of it, in terms of, you know, what the film is really about, it's still used by the Klan today as a recruiting tool. So it's not just this interesting silent movie from the 19-teens. It's still being used today. Now, the basic storyline tracks the rise and fall of the South as told through the experiences of two different families. You have a family called the Stoneman, the Stoneman family from the North, and the Cameron family from the South. So lifelong friends, both very powerful families, but divided by the Mason-Dixon line. A little bit of Romeo and Juliet to the story, you know, that the different sets of Stoneman and Cameron children are in love with each other. So the love crosses the Northern and South divide. And so the Stoneman's and Cameron's standing as metaphors for the entire North-South division. These are divisions that these are parts of the country that should love each other. They are in one spirit in some way, but there's a fundamental rupture, and we need to solve that rupture. So the premise is that the Cameron's, these are the Southerners, give three sons to the war. Only one survives, a guy named Ben, who then vows to avenge Southern dishonor, but he also happens to fall in love with. This makes it complicated. One of the Stoneman daughters, Northern daughter. So the sole surviving Southern male of the Cameron clan falls in love with the Stoneman's daughter. On the Northern side, the Stoneman's lose one son to the war, and the other son remains in love with the Cameron girl, so you see this crossing. After the war, Austin Stoneman, the family patriarch and a member of Congress, comes down South and puts the power-hungry and corrupt Silas Lynch, and that's his name, it's not a subtle film in any stretch of the imagination. Silas Lynch happens to be of mixed race, but has a particular craving for white women. He puts Silas Lynch in charge of the liberated slaves in the Cameron's hometown of Piedmont, and the Piedmont blacks now having the right to vote raise all sorts of trouble for the local whites and especially affected by the Cameron's, the Southerners. The film tracks this history, the rise of reconstruction governments, run by unprepared and unqualified blacks. It depicts black social and political intransigence and the systematic disenfranchisement of southern whites. And Birth of a Nation also gives us a cautionary tale of what happens when black men are freed and find themselves around white women. And we'll see this most clearly in the actions of Gus, a properly mannered servant for the Cameron's prior to emancipation. It becomes a leering threat with the conclusion of the Civil War. Despite Ben Stoneman, the surviving young man in the Southern family in the Civil War, despite Ben Stoneman's warnings to Gus to leave his family alone, and despite Ben's warning to his young sister Flora to stay in the house and thus remain safe, tragedy strikes. Gus stalks Flora when she leaves the home to get water from a stream in the woods. Flora sees Gus stalking her and runs for her life, knowing, and this is all very clearly implied in the film, that if Gus caught her, she would be raped. Flora finds herself at a cliff's edge while calling for help as Gus inches closer. She avoids certain rape by leaping to her death. She dies in her brother's arms and Ben, already determined to restore the South's honor, goes after Gus. We'll come as no surprise to you. I think that Gus is lynched. The castration scenes in the film were actually cut in the final print. And Ben already inspired about how to create a gang of Southerners to avenge the South's honor, organize the clan in an explicit move to social control, the protection of white womanhood and the redemption of the South. Now the story isn't just about the tangled love relationship that spanned the Civil War. It's also about representation of blacks and their quest for full citizenship rights and the real object that defined that quest, which was the white woman. It's also a story about romanticizing and justifying the rise of the clan, the role in the salvation of white womanhood and therefore Southern dignity. Now I spliced together, I was giving you all this background so you'll, it'll make sense of what you're about to see. I spliced together three different scenes from the movie to help you get a better understanding of what's at stake here. You should not look at the movie, the film so much for its interpretation of the fall and rise of the South. Now that, this patently falls. What's worth thinking about is the particular interpretation of blackness, of dignity, of citizenship, of intelligence, objectification, et cetera. How they all became an object of fascination when it was released. The movie was a runaway hit. Played assault at audiences around the country, even though it charged what was then the exorbitant price of seventy-five cents to two dollars, a ticket to get in. It's the Stoneman family coming down to the South to recuperate from bad health and the Stoneman and the Cameron children see each other, greet each other. And yes, they're in blackface when they are appearing black. It's been Cameron on the right with his love in the middle and his sister, the young one who kills herself on the left. It's the first clip. I don't, I confess, I don't know what happened. I was playing it this morning, getting it ready because there's no sound for this. So you just, it's just music playing in the background. Down here it says an historical facsimile at the State House of Representatives of South Carolina as it was in 1870 after photographed by the Columbia State. Basically blacks are now in control and this is what happens. You'll see the fade-in, this is technically never been done before. You have a mix of characters here in blackface and actually black actors. The depiction of the morality of black representatives drinking on the floor, eating either a turkey leg or a large chicken leg, not knowing how to comport themselves. These are the things that are important to black representatives. Whites have to salute. There's general chaos. They're not properly behaved. But there is, there are some representatives and you can see them there sitting there quietly. There's a close-in shot like that. Again, brand new. Blacks and whites in the gallery. You start seeing here a depiction of what the actual desire of black representatives happens to be and the reaction. That silenced lynch in the middle and at the bottom of the screen there for a second you saw a mixed-race man that's come down to take control of the south in this final clip right here. His sister's already died. Died in his arms. He's been Cameron. You see these young white children playing with the black children. Dressed up as pickin' linnies with their hair and such. It's hard to see on the screen, but their eyes get bug-eyed and they're terrified. Like I said, it wasn't the most subtle of films. And so you see your depictions of black depravity, of desire for white women. You also see, of course, the loyal servants who are sort of the mammy figure, the heavyset black woman. Again, these main characters in blackface. You didn't see much of a silenced lynch. I pointed them out to you, but the mixed-race individual that's a northern, appointed by northern representatives to come down and take control of the south and he desires white women. Gus, the servant who made eyes at the mammy figure, is the one who desires white women once he's armed as a member of the northern militia. The fear embodied in this film, the anxiety is what I really want you to take away from it. And the fact that the film was terrifically popular. It wasn't as popular as an organizing tool for the Klan. It was the top-grossing film. I mean, I don't know if this statistic is still true in our avatar age, and some people actually see connections to avatar and the kind of racial logic of a film like Birth of a Nation. But the film, off of seventy-five cent and two dollar tickets, earns over ten million dollars in its first release. Unbelievable amounts of money. And it also earned the specific attention of the young NAACP, which issued a forty-seven page pamphlet titled Fighting a Vicious Film, Protest Against the Birth of the Nation. They'd hold rallies wherever the theater film was being shown, protesting its screening. And it famously referred to the film as Three Miles of Filth. This is the state of the culture at the moment. Black Americans in flux, migration not happening in a uniform direction, a uniform pace, but happening clearly. Freud's black population blossoms by six hundred percent in a ten-year span. Black enclaves in places that they just simply weren't there before are now there. Sort of the reorganizing, repopulating of black America is beginning here and continues in earnest until around the nineteen-seventh when the population numbers begin to settle down, the migration numbers settle down, and actually in an age where the migration is reversing for the first time since the start of the twentieth century. We're not exactly sure why yet, as far as demographers. But we're dealing with a radical sort of population and relates to that, a radical rise in social anxieties and a determination to control it. And we'll see how that control is manifested beyond the Klan and the Birth of a Nation on Wednesday's lecture. Thank you.