Black northern migration met epidemic white urban violence through 1919

Evidence

Unlike the recent immigrant groups, however, black Americans endured a deeply rooted history of stigmatization that had begun centuries earlier in slavery and survived long after slavery’s abolition. When hundreds of thousands of blacks abandoned the Jim Crow South between 1900 and 1920, they found little respite from the institutions and symbols of white supremacy. Their Great Migration to the urban North met with riots as well as discriminatory housing and employment practices. A virtual epidemic of violence pervaded the nation’s cities as whites responded to black urbanization with fear and anger. Random attacks on black neighborhoods and full-scale rioting ravaged urban communities in both the North and the South: New Orleans in 1900; New York in 1900; Springfield, Ohio, in 1904; Greensburg, Indiana, and Atlanta in 1906; and Springfield, Illinois, in 1908. In 1917 riots erupted in Philadelphia and Chester, Pennsylvania, and in East St. Louis, Illinois. Racial violence reached a peak in the summer of 1919. During the “Red Summer,” so labeled for the bloodbath that occurred, riots exploded in dozens of cities, large and small—including Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Omaha, Nebraska; Longview, Texas; and Knoxville, Tennessee. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 865

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Northern migration offered black Americans no escape from racial economic violence — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 325; White mob violence followed Black migrants north rather than ending at the Mason-Dixon line — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 389; Black residence shifted from southern rural areas to hyper-segregated northern cities — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 367 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• White mob violence followed Black migrants north rather than ending at the Mason-Dixon line #corroborates (0.95) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 389
• White mob violence met Black families who moved into white neighborhoods. #exemplifies (0.85)
• Northern migration offered black Americans no escape from racial economic violence #expands (0.82) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 325
• Black residence shifted from southern rural areas to hyper-segregated northern cities #corroborates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 367
• Twentieth-century racism shifted from rural to urban concerns #expands (0.76) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 93
• Northern urbanites imposed segregationist ideas on arriving southern Black migrants. #complicates (0.74) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 808