39.1 Theme 1 - The changing geography of civil rights issues

Breadth Frame

This is a Paper 3 breadth theme. The most important skill is not memorising a sequence of migrations, but explaining how place shaped civil rights problems. A strong essay keeps three linked questions in view:

The broad chronology looks like this:

Two concepts are essential.

De jure segregation means segregation required or authorised by law, such as Jim Crow laws separating schools, transport and public facilities in southern states. De facto segregation means segregation that exists in practice even without an explicit segregation law. It can be produced by private discrimination, mortgage policy, redlining, restrictive covenants, unequal wealth, local school boundaries, white flight and patterns of policing.

The key change across the whole period is therefore not "segregation ended". It is that segregation changed its legal form, its geography and its mechanisms. In 1850 racial control was concentrated in slavery and the slave South. By 2009, many of the sharpest issues were metropolitan: who could buy homes, which schools children attended, whether suburbs shared the costs of integration, and how far political rights translated into equal life chances.

Freedom and Slow Drift

In 1850 the geography of Black life was overwhelmingly southern. The 1850 census recorded about 3.6 million Black people in the United States, of whom about 3.2 million were enslaved. The great majority lived in slave states, especially in the plantation belt stretching across the lower South and in older slaveholding states such as Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. This matters because before 1865 geography was not just where people lived; it was a system of control. Enslaved people could be bought, sold, moved, separated from family and forced to work. Slave patrols, state laws and white violence restricted movement. Free Black communities existed in northern cities and in parts of the Upper South, but they lived under surveillance and discrimination too.

Freedom in 1865 was therefore the first great geographical turning point. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery; the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments later promised citizenship, equal protection and male voting rights. Freedom meant that Black Americans could legally marry, search for family members, negotiate labour, build churches and schools, and decide whether to remain where slavery had placed them. Movement immediately followed emancipation. Some freedpeople left plantations for towns and cities; some tested labour markets; some sought relatives separated by sale; some moved briefly and then returned because kinship, work and security pulled them back.

Yet emancipation did not produce mass northern migration at once. Most Black Americans remained in the South after 1865. There were several reasons:

The phrase slow drift north is useful for the period before the First Great Migration. It does not mean that nothing happened. Black populations grew in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit. Some migrants were pushed by southern violence and rural poverty; others were pulled by industrial jobs, education and political rights. The Exoduster movement of 1879, when thousands of Black southerners moved toward Kansas, showed that leaving the South could become a political act. However, migration remained limited compared with the twentieth-century Great Migrations.

The problem was that after Reconstruction ended in the 1870s, the South rebuilt racial control through new methods. Sharecropping and tenant farming tied many Black families to land they did not own. Debt limited mobility. White terrorism, including the Ku Klux Klan and later lynching, enforced racial hierarchy. From the 1890s, disfranchisement through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and intimidation removed many Black men from politics. Jim Crow laws separated schools, railways, waiting rooms, public facilities and social space. In Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the Supreme Court accepted "separate but equal" in public facilities, giving constitutional cover to segregation even though equality was not real.

Settlement under Jim Crow was therefore a pattern of concentration without security. Black Americans remained heavily concentrated in the South, but they did not control the law, land or public institutions that shaped their lives. In rural areas, segregation worked through labour dependence, violence and local white power. In southern towns, Black communities developed churches, schools, newspapers, businesses and mutual aid, but within racial boundaries set by white authorities. The South was still the centre of Black population; it was also the centre of formal racial exclusion.

The best judgement for 1850-c.1910 is that freedom changed the legal meaning of movement more than it changed the national population map. Black Americans were no longer property after 1865, and some did leave the South, but the majority remained in a region where white supremacy adapted from slavery into Jim Crow.

First Great Migration and Harlem

The First Great Migration, c.1910-30, changed the civil rights map more dramatically than the slow drift of the late nineteenth century. Black southerners left in large numbers for northern and midwestern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York. The causes were both push and pull. Jim Crow, lynching, disfranchisement, poor rural schools, boll weevil damage to cotton, low wages and sharecropping pushed people away from the South. Industrial labour demand, especially during and after the First World War, pulled them toward cities. European immigration slowed during the war, and northern employers needed labour in steel, meatpacking, railways, automobiles and other industries.

Migration changed civil rights because it moved millions of Black Americans into places where they could often vote, join unions, build newspapers, support the NAACP and Urban League, and influence urban politics. A Black voter in Chicago or New York had leverage that many Black southerners had been denied by disfranchisement. Black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender publicised opportunities and encouraged departure. Family networks also mattered: once some migrants established themselves, they sent letters, money and advice to relatives and neighbours.

The most famous settlement example is Harlem. The specification identifies mass migration into Harlem from 1905. This date matters because Harlem's transformation began before the Great Migration reached its wartime peak. In the early twentieth century, overbuilding and vacancies in upper Manhattan created openings. Black real-estate entrepreneurs, notably Philip A. Payton Jr., helped African American tenants move into buildings that white landlords had struggled to fill. From there, Harlem became a magnet for migrants from the South and from the Caribbean. By 1930 it was a majority-Black neighbourhood and a centre of churches, publishing, politics, music, theatre, intellectual life and the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem shows both opportunity and confinement.

The same double pattern appeared in other cities. Migration created larger Black communities, but white residents, landlords, employers and officials often responded by defending racial boundaries. Northern segregation was not usually written into Jim Crow statutes, but it could be enforced through violence, real-estate practices, school boundaries and job exclusion. This is why the First Great Migration did not move Black Americans from oppression to equality. It moved many from southern legal segregation into northern urban segregation.

The Chicago riot of 1919 was a turning point because it exposed the racial tensions produced by migration, job competition, overcrowded housing and white resistance. The immediate trigger was the death of Eugene Williams, a Black teenager who drifted into a part of Lake Michigan informally treated as white space and was stoned. Violence followed from 27 July to 3 August. Chicago's Black population had more than doubled during the 1910s, and the riot showed that informal northern colour lines could be defended violently.

The Tulsa massacre of 1921 showed a different but connected pattern. Tulsa's Greenwood district, often remembered as "Black Wall Street", was a prosperous Black community. A white mob attacked it after an incident involving a Black teenage boy and a white teenage girl was sensationalised. Homes, businesses and livelihoods were destroyed; many Black residents were killed or wounded; and the event was long minimised in public memory. Tulsa matters for this topic because it shows that Black urban settlement could provoke white violence not only where Black people were poor, but also where they had built wealth and independence.

By 1930, civil rights issues had become visibly national. The South remained central because Jim Crow and disfranchisement were still strongest there. But Harlem, Chicago and Tulsa show that the geography of race relations now included northern and midwestern urban neighbourhoods, Black cultural centres, labour markets and flashpoints of racial violence.

Second Migration and Suburban Segregation

The Second Great Migration, c.1940-70, was larger and more geographically wide-ranging than the first. During and after the Second World War, defence industries, shipyards, aircraft factories, steel mills, ports and wartime labour shortages drew Black migrants not only to the older northern and midwestern destinations but also to the West Coast. Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle became more important. The migration also became more urban: by 1970 most Black Americans lived in cities, and only a slight majority still lived in the South.

The Second Great Migration changed the civil rights agenda in three ways.

First, it widened the map. Civil rights could no longer be represented as simply a southern question. Black workers in Detroit car plants, Los Angeles defence industries, Chicago meatpacking, Oakland shipyards and New York service sectors faced discrimination in jobs, housing and unions. Their presence made race a national urban issue.