The passage of the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924 restricted the volume of southern and eastern European immigrants entering the United States. The demand for African American labor in the North thus persisted during the 1920s and the large-scale movement of southern blacks to northern industrial centers continued. This movement, peaking between 1923 and 1925, was also prompted by the serious decline in cotton production that began around 1923 with the advent of synthetic fabrics. With the Great Depression, which was rooted in the stock market crash in October of 1929, the northern movement of African Americans declined considerably.
As part of the Great Migration, a steady stream of southern blacks continued to pour into New Jersey in the 1920s; the state's African American population increased by roughly 78 percent (from 117,132 to 208,828). Of the state's major cities, Newark again registered the highest percentage increase in black population; its 38,880 blacks in 1930 were more than double its 16,977 blacks in 1920.
The arrival of black southerners to northern urban centers in the twenties facilitated the continued development of black ghettos. The first and largest of these, which also resulted from a large influx of black Caribbean immigrants, was New York's Harlem. Heightened demand for black housing and various discriminatory housing practices, notably restrictive covenants, and block-busting, were the principal features of the ghetto-formation process, itself essentially a function of the exclusion of blacks from white residential areas.
With the rise of the ghettos came a host of major social ills, such as overcrowded and deteriorated housing, inadequate sanitation, a high incidence of communicable diseases, and crime. These features of ghetto life soon led to an equation of ghettos with slums.
Life in the "promised land" witnessed other developments as well. On the political front the expansion of a black electorate enabled African Americans to gain public office in the North for the first time. For example, Oscar DePriest, a Chicago Republican, was elected in 1928 to the House of Representatives, becoming the first black congressman since Reconstruction and the first of his race from the North. It was also during this decade that the first black New Jerseyan was elected to the state legislature. This was Walter G. Alexander, a Republican from Orange, who entered the state assembly in 1921.
The growing ghetto population also facilitated the expansion of the black community's institutional structure, as blacks sought refuge among themselves. Black churches, the community's traditional social centers, multiplied in number and enlarged their congregations; some even held double services in order to accommodate the spiritual and social needs of ghetto dwellers. Storefront churches, appealing to those African Americans who desired a more intimate and emotional form of religious worship, appeared for the first time and proliferated. The concentration of blacks in specific areas of a city also encouraged the growth of social clubs and fraternal orders and benefited black professionals and businessmen who relied on the patronage of the African American masses.
Coinciding, with the growth of black ghettos was greater interracial tension and strife in northern cities. Competition for jobs, which were not as plentiful as they had been during wartime, in particular contributed to much of the hostility northern black urbanites experienced. Many hotels and restaurants that had previously served African Americans now barred them. Jim Crow schools surfaced in many northern communities, usually the result of school boundaries drawn by school boards and the transfer policies of such bodies. And northern blacks were also affected by the rapid growth of a Ku Klux Klan that was national in scope. By the middle of the decade this organization had over two million members, many of whom could be found in New Jersey, which ranked tenth among states in Klan membership. With the addition of its southern blacks to its many "new immigrants," many of whom were Catholics and Jews, the state was indeed home to most of the targets of the new Klan's bigoted propaganda. Opposition to the Klan in New Jersey peaked in 1923 with two anti-Klan riots in Perth Amboy.
The first anti-Klan riot took place on June 5, when a mob composed of Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Czechs, Irish, Danes, Jews, Italians, Germans, and African Americans, many from surrounding communities, gathered outside of a Klan meeting and stormed the hall. They attempted to attack the Klan spokesman, but the police engineered his escape. The protesters were dispersed an hour later, after overturning trash cans and damaging several automobiles. The second riot, much larger, occurred on August 30. Between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. more than six thousand people from the same ethnic groups that had disrupted the June 5 meeting assembled outside a hall where the Klan was to meet. At around 8:30 they tried to enter. Several Klansmen were severely beaten as they fled, and the police attempted to rescue the rest by escorting them through the back doors and windows into waiting paddy wagons. But the mob discovered these efforts, brushed aside the police, and beat the Klansmen it captured. There-upon, for the first in New Jersey history, a riot alarm was sounded for the state police. Even after the troopers arrived, however, the crowd continued to throw rocks and bottles at the meeting hall and to overturn and burn automobiles thought to belong to Klansmen. Indeed, the disturbance spread into the downtown area of the city. Around 5:00 a.m. the besieged Klansmen were finally evacuated and normalcy was restored.
Finally, the 1920s also witnessed the emergence of what was called the New Negro. This term referred in one sense to a more militant, defiant, and assertive mood by black Americans in responding to racial injustice in the postwar period. Returning black veterans, many of whom had been trained to be violent and combat-ready and had received civil treatment from the French, in particular contributed to this mood. Evidence of it was seen when African Americans took up arms to defend themselves from attacking whites as, for example, in the race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, in which nine whites arid twenty-one blacks were killed. In the Sweet Incident in Detroit in 1925, a white mob attacked a home purchased in a white neighborhood by a black physician, Dr. O.H. Sweet, and a member of the mob was killed by gunfire from the house, With the help of the NAACP, Dr. Sweet and several others who were in the house during the attack were acquitted of the charges brought against them.
The term the New Negro was also associated with the Harlem Renaissance. This cultural movement composed mainly of Harlem-based artists and intellectuals, flowered during the 1920s and helped make Harlem the center of African American intellectual and cultural life. It is perhaps best remembered as a literary expression; Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, and Jessie Redmon Fauset (a New Jersey native) were among its more celebrated figures. Such artists, aware that a few white writers (for example, Eugene O'Neill and Carl Van Vechten) were beginning to treat the Negro in their works, also began to draw on themes from black life and history. They used their prose and poetry to assail social and economic wrongs, to proclaim pride in the black race and its cultural heritage, to perpetuate a group identity, and to assert the value of a black subculture.
Others identified with the Harlem Renaissance were performing artists such as the actor/singer Paul Robeson (a New Jersey native), singer Roland Hayes, composer J. Rosamond Johnson, and the jazz musicians Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Fletcher Henderson, and Louis Armstrong. They were joined by visual artists such as the painters Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Hate Woodruff, Palmer Hayden, and Malvin Gray Johnson and the sculptors Augusta Savage, Richmond Barthe, and Sargent Johnson, as well as such intellectuals as the bibliophile Arthur Schomburg, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, A. Philip Randolph, Cyril V Briggs, Hubert Harrison, W.A. Domingo, and Walter White. Alain Locke, a Howard University philosophy professor and the first black Rhodes Scholar, was the foremost advocate and interpreter of the Harlem Renaissance. His anthology, The New Negro, published in 1925, was instrumental in conveying the artistic and social goals of the movement. And another Washington, D.C. resident also exemplified the extraordinary scope and character of black intellectual and scholarly life in the 1920s. This was Carter G. Woodson, the "Father of African American History." Founder in 1915 of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and the Journal of Negro History the following year, in 1926 Woodson inaugurated the celebration of Negro History Week, which in 1976 was transformed into Black History Month.
America's failure to practice democracy on the homefront after World War I also stimulated a defiant mood that enabled the black nationalist UNIA to continue to attract support during the 1920s and to become the largest black American protest movement ever. With its emphasis on African Redemption, race pride, self-help, and black business development, the UNIA replaced "accommodationism" as the major ideology in opposition to the militant integrationism identified with W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP.
Marcus Garvey was imprisoned in 1925 for using the mails for fraudulent purposes; he was released and repatriated to Jamaica in 1927. His confinement and departure, which separated him from his followers and exacerbated factional disputes and rivalries within the UNIA, hastened the UNIA's decline. The hardships of the Great Depression, which eroded the financial resources of many Garveyites, also contributed to the UNIA's difficulties. Meanwhile, the NAACP came to play an even greater role in fighting racial injustice, focusing on the passage of a federal antilynching bill and the use of litigation to secure enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Although federal antilynching legislation was never enacted, the NAACP did rally considerable public support for this cause, and the number of lynchings decreased during the 1920s.
Still another important area of organizational activity among African Americans during the twenties was the labor movement. In 1925 A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (Pullman Porters). Through serving as the president of this union, the largest black labor body in the nation's history, Randolph emerged as the black community's foremost labor spokesman of all time and one of its most prominent civil rights leaders. A division of the Pullman Porters was organized in 1936 in Jersey City, a key railroad terminal until the 1950s, and Nora Fant, president of this division's ladies auxiliary, was a member of the Ladies Auxiliary International Executive Board.
As the decade began to wind down, the economic prospects of many in the black community began to dim. Indeed, as early as 1927 the demand for black unskilled and semiskilled labor in northern industry had slackened considerably, and it was estimated that a third of the black northern industrial work force was unemployed. With the market crash in October 1929, the economic difficulties of black Americans only worsened.
During the 1920s southern blacks continued to move to northern industrial centers in massive numbers, in the process forming the early black ghettos. By 1990 over 90 percent of the African American population could be found in urban areas, so the rise of these kinds of communities essentially defined the nature of black life for the remainder of the twentieth century.
Students should read either chapters 25 and 26 in The African American Experience: A History ("Black Nationalism, 1916-1929" and the "Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1930") or chapters 31 and 32 in African American History ("Nationalism in the Black Community" and "A Brilliant Season in the Arts and Sciences").
Students should read the excerpt from Marcus Garvey's "An Appeal To The Soul of White America" .
Students and the teacher should read pages 54-68 in Afro-Americans in New Jersey: A Short History.
The teacher should read chapters 17, 18, and 20 in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans ("Democracy Escapes," "The Harlem Renaissance and the Politics of African-American Culture," and "The American Dilemma")
Each of the activities that follow will take one class period.
Evaluation: Have the students write a 500-word essay indicating how they, as a long-time black resident of Camden, would have responded to the arrival in Camden of large numbers of black migrants from the South. Would they have welcomed their arrival? Why? Or would they have expressed dissatisfaction with the arrival of the migrants? Why?
Walter G. Alexander. This Orange, New Jersey, resident became in 1921 the first African American elected to the New Jersey State Assembly.
Louis Armstrong. Outstanding jazz trumpeter and one of the few truly innovative figures in jazz music.
Countee Cullen. One of the finest poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Cullen is perhaps best known for his "Heritage," which focuses on his African roots.
Oscar DePriest. Chicago Republican who in 1928 became the first African American elected to the House of Representatives after the post-Reconstruction period.
Duke Ellington. Composer and pianist whose orchestra, which came to fame through its 1927 engagement at Harlem's Cotton Club, was one of the most outstanding in the jazz idiom.
Jessie Redmon Fauset. A native of Fredericksville, New Jersey, Fauset was a novelist, editor, teacher, and poet whose writings provided the first real and compassionate portrait of black middle-class life.
Langston Hughes. The most famous Figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes was a prolific writer of poems, novels, short stories, plays, essays, and librettos.
Zora Neale Hurston. The most prolific woman writer identified with the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston, as an anthropologist, was also a pioneer in the study of black American folktales.
James Weldon Johnson. A lawyer, diplomat, and civil rights activist (he was the first black NAACP executive director) who began to write poetry late in his life, Johnson wrote the lyrics to "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" and edited several major volumes of poetry during the Harlem Renaissance.
Alain Locke. Rhodes Scholar, a professor of philosophy at Howard University, and the foremost interpreter of the Harlem Renaissance as reflected in his The New Negro (1925).
Claude McKay. A Jamaican, McKay is perhaps best known for his protest poem "If We Must Die" (1923) and his novel Home to Harlem (1928).
Paul Robeson. A native of Princeton, and an outstanding athlete, scholar, lawyer, stage and screen actor and singer, Robeson's artistic career began in the 1920s when lie starred in The Emperor Jones (1924) and All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924).
Augusta Savage. Outstanding sculptor who worked primarily in marble, plaster, and wood and used her art to express her opposition to racial injustice.
Arthur Schomburg. A Puerto Rican of African descent, Schomburg was a writer, curator, and bibliophile whose massive collection formed the basis for the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Jean Toomer. On the strength of Cane (1923), he is considered one of the most original American writers of his time.
Carter G. Woodson. Considered the "Father of African American History" because he authored twenty books dealing with black American history, founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915), founded the Journal of Negro History (1916), and inaugurated the celebration of Negro History Week (1926).