Finding a Place: Mary Ann Shadd Cary and the Dilemmas of Black Migration to Canada, 1850-1870

1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirley J. Yee
Keyword(s):  
Black Migration ◽  
Mary Ann Shadd

Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Wild Mushrooms ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty ◽  
Black Land ◽  
The Human Condition

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  

African American Migration from the Colonial Era to the Present

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe W. Trotter
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Black Population ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
British North America ◽  
Upper South ◽  
The Impact

This essay explores several overlapping waves of black population movement from the African background through the early twenty-first century. It shows how enslaved people dominated the first two great migrations—from Africa to the tobacco-producing colonies of British North America and later from the Upper South to the cotton-producing lands of the Deep South. In the wake of the Civil War and the emancipation of some 4 million enslaved people, the great farm-to-city migration gradually transformed African Americans from a predominantly rural southern people into the most urbanized sector of the nation’s population. While massive black population movements resulted in substantial disruption of established patterns of cultural, institutional, and political life, African Americans built and rebuilt forms of community under the impact of new conditions, including the rise of a new wave of voluntary black migration from Africa and elsewhere by the close of the 20th century.

Black Migration from the South in Historical Context

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Platt Boustan
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Labor Demand ◽  
Economic Returns ◽  
Birth Cohorts ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
The North ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
European Immigration

This chapter explains that the mobility of black southerners began increasing in the birth cohorts born immediately after the Civil War. Many of these moves took place within the South. Despite plentiful industrial jobs in the “thousand furnaces” of northern cities at the turn of the twentieth century, the potential wage benefits of settling in the North was dampened by the absence of a migrant network that southern blacks could use to secure employment upon arrival. Large flows of northward migration awaited a period of abnormally high economic returns, which arose during World War I. Circa 1915, northern factories supplying the war effort experienced a surge in labor demand, coupled with a temporary freeze in European immigration, which encouraged northern employers to turn to other sources of labor.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Platt Boustan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Labor Demand ◽  
Housing Markets ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
The North ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
Industrial Cities ◽  
Black Economic ◽  
Black Residents

This introductory chapter outlines the central themes and methodologies underpinning this book. It discusses the factors for slow black economic progress in the North following the Great Black Migration. Despite the promise of the North and despite optimistic predictions, black migration to industrial cities did not lead to economic parity with whites either for the migrants themselves or for their children during the mid-twentieth century. This chapter introduces a new element to the story by pointing out that that the persistent influx of black migrants to northern labor and housing markets had created competition for existing black residents in an economic setting already constrained by weakening labor demand and northern racism.

Slavery Must Die

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Myers Asch ◽  
George Derek Musgrove
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation ◽  
The City

This chapter describes the increasingly bold efforts by local abolitionists to challenge slavery and the slave trade in Washington, as well as the attempts by local white leaders to protect slavery and discourage black migration to the city. Washington served as a central stage in the growing national drama over slavery. Despite Congress’s attempt to squelch public debate with the “gag rule,” the question of slavery in the nation’s capital would not die. Frustrated abolitionists, unable to overcome what they called the “Slave Power,” went “underground” to help Washington-area slaves escape to freedom. As more and more enslaved people “absconded” (the term often used in advertisements for fugitives), city leaders struggled to preserve the peculiar institution by capturing and punishing runaways. With the nation tilting ominously toward civil war, slavery’s opponents and its defenders placed Washington on the front lines of the struggle over human bondage in America. The chapter culminates with the emancipation of D.C.’s 3,100 enslaved people in April 1862, more than eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation.

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