Black History Month 2015 - The Harlem Renaissance - The Great Migration North

Photo source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons  title: "Great Migration" 

Today we continue the look at the Harlem Renaissance and look at the background of the era.

~~~

From the Wikipedia article on the Harlem Renaissance:

Until the end of the Civil War, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived in the South. After the end of slavery, the emancipated African Americans, freedmen, began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural self-determination. Soon after the end of the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 gave rise to speeches by African-American Congressmen addressing this Bill. By 1875 sixteen blacks had been elected and served in Congress and gave numerous speeches with their new found civil empowerment. The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was renounced by black Congressmen and resulted in the passage of Civil Rights Act of 1875, part of Reconstruction legislation by Republicans. By the late 1870s, Democratic whites managed to regain power in the South. From 1890 to 1908 they proceeded to pass legislation that disenfranchised most Negros and many poor whites, trapping them without representation. They established white supremacist regimes of Jim Crow segregation in the South and one-party block voting behind southern Democrats. The Democratic whites denied African Americans their exercise of civil and political rights by terrorizing black communities with lynch mobs and other forms of vigilante violence as well as by instituting a convict labor system that forced many thousands of African Americans back into unpaid labor in mines, on plantations, and on public works projects such as roads and levees. Convict laborers were typically subject to brutal forms of corporal punishment, overwork, and disease from unsanitary conditions. Death rates were extraordinarily high. While a small number of blacks were able to acquire land shortly after the Civil War, most were exploited as sharecroppers. As life in the South became increasingly difficult, African Americans began to migrate north in great numbers.

Most of the African-American literary movement arose from a generation that had lived through the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. Sometimes their parents or grandparents had been slaves. Their ancestors had sometimes benefited by paternal investment in cultural capital, including better-than-average education. Many in the Harlem Renaissance were part of the Great Migration out of the South into the Negro neighborhoods of the North and Midwest. African–Americans sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South. Others were people of African descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean who came to the United States hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was their convergence in Harlem.

~~~

As a person who grew up in a state that only has a 5-10% Black population depending on the area (I'm sure there are outlying areas in the state with even lower percentages), my perspective of Harlem in general was as a mystical Black place where everything we are started coming together at it's finest.  Actually most of the boroughs of  New York had this allure to me.

It wasn't until I visited Brooklyn for a few months in the late 90s that I saw that the people there were just people living regular lives and the famous people who were highlighted were a small part of a much more mundane whole. Yet I still have a bit of a sentimental romanticized view of Harlem.

I did see that the Great Migration of the American negro didn't stop after WWI. So many of the people I saw in the different areas were obviously southern. Things are better for Black people than they were in the 1800s and prior to the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s, but the south still gives reason for people to leave in search of something better.

I hope you will continue with me tomorrow on this journey through this era in American history that happens to be focused on the people of African descent.

Thanks or reading!