White mob violence followed Black migrants north rather than ending at the Mason-Dixon line

Evidence

Often the precise causes and triggers of white fear and rage were mixed or unclear, but the consequences were always devastating. Between 1877 and 1950, more than four thousand Black men, women, and children lost their lives to lynching. Fleeing violence, harsh segregation laws, and exploitative economic conditions, many Black Americans headed north, in what would become known as the Great Migration, to take advantage of the need for industrial workers that arose during the First World War and to achieve some modicum of safety. Unfortunately, many soon realized that white mob violence reigned there as well. One of the bloodiest race massacres in the twentieth century occurred in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917. That tragedy involved a spree of lynchings, mayhem, and brutal burnings of people and buildings that left an official death toll of at least thirty-nine Black and eight white Americans, though historians estimate that more than a hundred Black people were actually killed. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 389

Categorization

• XREF: The Great Migration’s northward movement and the East St. Louis massacre echo patterns in Parable of the Sower — displaced people fleeing destruction for another site of violence rather than safety. — connects to: Black northern migration met epidemic white urban violence through 1919 — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 865