II.1 Resistance

The black experience in New York has been a bit different from that in other cities. In the American South, a pattern developed. For example, in a place like Memphis, my home town, there were black neighborhoods scattered around the city, more or less; but the presence of that black neighborhood said nothing whatsoever about your social status. Nobody thought that having a black person living nearby was bad. That would be like saying that your plantation had lower status because there were slave quarters on it. I mean, it was a nonsensical argument. They were slaves, and you were the plantation owner. The very fact that there were slave quarters on it meant that you had status, not vice versa. There was so much social distance between the races that geographical proximity meant nothing.

Most Northern cities, however, were among the destination points of a large migration of blacks during World War I. The war was cutting off the old source of labor. Italy and Russia didn't let their young men emigrate because they were at war, so the supply of laborers from those countries to the United States was obstructed. At the same time, the war was increasing demand for some of the goods produced in Northern factories, so Northern manufacturers began to advertise and recruit blacks in Mississippi and Georgia and throughout the South. For a variety of reasons, Northern manufacturers were able to prevail over Southern interests, which were opposed to black migration from the South, because at that time it needed workers. When black people settled in Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit and created small neighborhoods, they encountered incredible opposition to the growth of the possibility that borders of that neighborhood might widen.

A lot of people would be pouring into a little neighborhood. It was needed to grow but met intense resistance from surrounding white neighborhoods. There would often be violence on the edges. In Chicago, for example, a big banner across Cottage Grove Avenue read, "They shall not pass." That was actually the French byword at the Battle of Verdun in 1916 against the German army. The French meant, This is it. But in Chicago, they meant blacks. They didn't want the black neighborhood to come across this street, and in Paradise Valley in Detroit, or Hough in Cleveland, the same was true.