Mass Black migrations broke middle-class leadership and spawned class renegade radicals.

Evidence

The most important consequence of these mass mobilizations, that is both the short-lived alliance with the agrarian rebellion of Populism and the urban migration, was that they amounted to a visible renunciation of the Black petit bourgeoisie’s “leadership” by the Black peasantry. Hundreds of thousands of Blacks demonstrated that they were no longer willing to tolerate the social and economic insecurities of living in the rural South, to work in semi-slavery as the nation’s cheapest labor, and to perish under the dual oppressions of the racist patronage of the white southern ruling class and the class opportunism of an ambitious and presumptuous Black petit bourgeoisie. It is not surprising, then, that in these circumstances some members of the Black middle class should discover in this an occasion for renouncing those among them who dominated their class’s political and historical vision. In the same act, these renegades were drawn into the orbit of the masses of Blacks and the radical tradition. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 909

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier framework of the Black petit bourgeoisie’s contested leadership role over the peasantry in prior chapters.