• Essay by William M. Tuttle, Jr.: “Going into Canaan”
  • the essay is about race riots in Chicago in 1919
  • Chicago in the red summer of 1919
  • Chicago’s militant black newspaper was called The Defender
  • 1916 great migration starts
  • 1916 10% increase in wages for railroad car workers
  • University of Chicago Binga Dismond a black woman was a track star
  • Jack Johnson the greatest boxer of them all was beat up by the great white hope Jess Willard a white boxer black people thought the boxing match had been fixed and not federal agents arranged the outcome
  • Muskogee Oklahoma wanted to rid their neighborhood of the filth of prostitution and white men that prostitution attracted
  • the defender newspaper was not encouraging men to move to Chicago yet in 1916 because housing was difficult to find in a good neighborhood
  • 1916 black population in urban North Chicago doubled over the next four years from 1916 to 1920
  • 1914 there were 54,557 black people
  • 1920 there were 110,000 black people in Chicago
  • most of the migrants had been southern
  • 450,000 blacks went North between 1916 in 1918
  • Chicago represented the “top of the world” and “freedom” to southern blacks
  • Chicago had world’s Columbian exposition of 1893, it was famous for mail order houses, mass production industry, railroads
  • Chicago was a state of mind for southern blacks
  • 1916 Chicago migrant named shot Pickney was a sharecropper with 300 others on a 2000 acre Mississippi farm that he was never paid money only credit at the commissary for food he had to sneak out of the plantation past the guards by saying he was going to a circus they were issued passes they only brought a few belongings because they were supposed to come back
  • they got on a train
  • I labor agent would go south and picked up workers from northern industries
  • 18 79,000 blacks migrated to Kansas because it was the free soil home of John Brown
  • 1889 blacks moved from southern Alabama to Arkansas and Texas
  • 1890s blacks moved to mineral regions around Birmingham Alabama
  • blacks moved from southern cotton fields to Cane of Louisiana and then stayed when sugar planters came
  • World War I migration happened between 1916 and 1918 so instead of just moving everyone went North it was called the Great Northern Drive
  • people left because blacks were counted no more than a dog
  • blacks are mistreated by police, verbal insults, social and political forces
  • anywhere North will do
  • school was two months shorter for blacks than whites
  • the poll tax state in parish taxes with the same but investment in public school in the South was 5 to 10 times more per white child men per black child
  • salaries for white teachers were $28.89 and black teachers were paid $.87 per student
  • the defender newspaper advertise Chicago to photographs one of a single room Jim Crow school in Louisiana the other of a stone column building housing Chicago’s Robert Lindblom high school where no color lines were drawn

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  • cotton crops were being destroyed by the boll weevil in the South
  • so many crops were damaged because of the Weibel they had to turn to peanuts Korn velvet beans boats and sweet potatoes all of those crops required less labor than cotton so there was an excess of labor supply
  • 1916 increase in the cost of living but wages did not go up as well
  • there were a lot of jobs
  • 4,791,172 American served in the armed forces during World War I so they needed more of a labor force
  • the new force were women, machines, southern whites, and mostly blacks
  • the best wages were in slaughterhouse and meat packing, iron and steel forging, electrical machinery and machine shop products
  • the stockyards needed 50,000 men and women immediately and that Packers would provide temporary living quarters was a rumor
  • representatives were appointed to notify Chicago industries and request train tickets for groups of people that sized from 2 to 3 families to more than 1000 people at a time
  • sometime businesses paid for train fare to get new employees
  • then Negro car on trains was always full sometimes I would put on a special card just for them
  • the more mob violence and lynchings the more black people left
  • people used to send back money and tell their friends to buy a train ticket and leave because things were great in Chicago
  • black people have their kids in the same school as white kids
  • blacks could vote in Chicago
  • government agencies, private labor agents, certain industries and the press including the newspaper defender were driving forces to lure people to Chicago
  • southern planters started to protest by making councils have license fees to discourage recruiters to come there Birmingham Alabama week wired $2500 tax for labor agents so did the state of Alabama so labor agents had to pay $5000 in Alabama to recruit people in the state
  • they started to charge every strange base in southern towns
  • there were con artist who would vanish after collecting two dollars a person in exchange for a train ticket that didn’t exist for pretend job in Chicago
  • between July 1916 in January 1917 the Pennsylvania Railroad imported 12,000 blacks do unskilled labor
  • meatpackers were the largest employers of black labor in Chicago
  • the defender newspaper was the most effective institution stimulating I Gratian of blacks because it talked about the horrible treatment of blacks and the emphasis on pride in the race
  • the defender newspaper circulation increased 10 times between 1916 and 1918
  • the defender said blacks were still slaves in the South because of Jim Crow laws
  • millions to leave South defender headline January 6, 1917 the defender newspaper said that May 15 would be the date of the great Northern Drive
  • the defender wrote stories about success stories of people who went north about people who arrived with nothing and came to the North worked and got a car and a house in a bank account he started with a nickel and a penny
  • the defender was read him for blacks there was a rumor that blacks would freeze to death
  • some southern towns outlawed the circulation of the defender newspaper and called a propaganda Mississippi Louisiana
  • older blacks were worried they would freeze or starve to death but younger blacks were restless and dissatisfied and could not accept a plantation life and the caste system anymore
  • there was a lot of resistance from members of their own race because older blacks were worried that younger people would be hurt
  • biblical story of people leaving Israel from Egypt or Israelites from Egypt had fueled the hopes of slaves for freedom
  • blacks were looking for a new Moses to free them from their oppressors
  • Jordan was the Ohio River so the biblical story of Israelites crossing over Jordan it was blacks crossing over the higher River men would stop their watches and women would cry and kiss aground when they were on the other side