Jim Crow's Counterculture Read online

  Man, lawd, she keeps on through,

  I swear ma baby’s gone to Georgia,

  I believe I’ll go to Georgia too.43

  Blues historians have analyzed this “first” blues song to many ends, but important here is the evidence that African Americans’ desire to be free to move had survived attacks by white slave owners and segregationists and arrived intact in the early twentieth century. While jazz innovators such as Louis Armstrong voiced the restlessness of the urban African American population in their new “hot” rhythms and driving improvisations—a restlessness that Armstrong exemplified in his own migration from New Orleans to Chicago, and then New York City—musicians among the overworked, underpaid farmers of the black South expressed their desire for mobility in the rough, poetic, and conversational blues.

  Northward Mobility, Upward Mobility

  Cultural evidence and migration data demonstrate that southern blacks were a people on the move through Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim Crow. By the 1910s, however, economic and social conditions allowed, motivated, and even forced southern blacks to stretch their collective capacity for movement to new limits; hence, a Great Migration out of the South. From 1910 to 1940, the South lost a net 1.9 million in black population, while the Northeast and Midwest gained 950,000 and 859,000, respectively, in black population. In 1900, 4.3 percent of southern-born blacks lived outside their home region; that number rose to 20.4 percent by 1950. Black populations in the North’s biggest cities rose tremendously between 1900 and 1930: Detroit, from 4,111 to 120,066; Chicago, from 30,150 to 233,903; and New York, from 60,666 to 327,706. Between 1910 and 1920, Mississippi alone lost 148,000 black residents in net out-migration, and the number of Mississippi-born blacks more than doubled in the urban areas of Ohio and Missouri and more than quadrupled in the manufacturing states of Illinois and Michigan.44

  Southern whites, too, were leaving their homeland in nearly equal numbers in the early decades of the twentieth century. Considering the South’s larger economic problems with overpopulation—the problem according to sociologist Howard Odum—and agricultural stagnation due in large part to the boll weevil and recurrent floods, University of North Carolina’s T. J. Woofter stated, “There are very few counties in the South where the colored and white people do not move in the same direction in response to the same situations.”45 Certainly, many of the larger economic concerns affected black and white southerners alike, and the mass migration of southerners, regardless of race, was simply part of a larger development usually referred to as the move from “farm to factory.”46

  Many of the songs circulating in the popular cultures of white and black southerners reflected similar migratory impulses. A comparison of two songs in particular, Woody Guthrie’s “Goin’ Down the Road” and Blind Blake’s “Detroit Bound Blues,” demonstrates that black and white migrants took to the road with like thoughts in mind. “Goin’ Down the Road” mirrors the blues idiom, employing the AAB lyrical form, but Guthrie performs the song with the square dance-like quick-tempo characteristic of white music in the Dust Bowl states; here, the guitar provides a rhythmic platform for lyrics, as opposed to the guitar’s role as conversational partner in downhome blues. Like House in “Dry Spell Blues,” Guthrie depicts the southern homeland as a dry, used-up environment that can barely support its population, and the sense of movement pervades the lyrics.

  I’m goin’ where the dust storms never blow,

  I’m goin’ where the dust storms never blow,

  I’m goin’ where the dust storms never blow, Lord, and I ain’t gonna be treated this-a-way.

  In the next verse, the economic motive is clear, but Guthrie repeats the earlier line (a common refrain in each verse) about being treated this way, implying mistreatment at the hands of a landlord, employer, or other authority:

  I’m a lookin’ for a job and honest pay,

  I’m lookin’ for a job and honest pay,

  I’m lookin’ for a job and honest pay, Lord God, and I ain’t gonna be treated this-a-way.47

  Themes prevalent in Guthrie’s song resonate in Blind Blake’s tribute to the northern exodus, “Detroit Bound Blues.” Like Guthrie, Blake casts their home country as a used-up land, unable to sustain its farmers:

  I’m goin’ to Detroit, get myself a good job,

  I’m goin’ to Detroit, get myself a good job,

  Tired of stayin’ ‘round here with the starvation mob.

  Blake promotes an important, specific source of employment in the North—the automobile manufacturing industry:

  I’m goin’ to get a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place,

  I’m goin’ to get a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place,

  Stop these eatless days from starin’ me in the face.

  Blake does not make his song a simple tale of a man looking for a job but also relied on common tropes in the blues such as male-female relationships. He may use the man-woman dynamic as a proxy for larger social situations, as so many blues musicians did, but it is clear that he equates economic success with social and romantic success and exploits:

  When I start to makin’ money, she don’t need to come around,

  When I start to makin’ money, she don’t need to come around,

  ‘Cause I don’t want her now, Lord, I’m Detroit bound.

  Because they got wild women in Detroit, that’s all I want to see,

  ‘Cause they got wild women in Detroit, that’s all I want to see,

  Wild women and bad whiskey would make a fool out of me.48

  In comparison, we see that both Blake and Guthrie equate physical mobility with social upward mobility, and that Blake’s blues song, unlike Guthrie’s Okie music, utilizes some common blues themes like romance, alcohol, and good times. But the similarity in the two songs should not be interpreted to mean that the white migration out of the South was somehow equivalent to the black migration northward. While black and white migrants felt the same “push” factors of agricultural hardship and the “pull” factor of northern manufacturing work, black southerners faced many race-specific challenges as they took to the road.

  The reinstitutionalization of white supremacy under Jim Crow succeeded, in part, because most black southerners after Reconstruction remained in the traditional domestic and agricultural labor force. African Americans sought new opportunities in the rural and urban South, but before World War I, black labor was not generally welcome in the burgeoning manufacturing towns of the North.49 Native whites left the South for northern jobs, and northern and southern whites headed to the West looking for new opportunities. Between 1870 and 1910, 2.27 million native white Americans left the industrial North, many of them among the 2.56 million native whites who arrived in the West during the same five-decade period. European immigrants in northern cities worked jobs recently abandoned by upwardly mobile native whites—some 3.5 million Europeans came to the United States in the 1890s alone. The number of blacks migrating to the West before the Great War—a mere 22,000—was less than a tenth of the white population migrating to the same states.50 Directors of American industrial production had long resisted the hiring of black workers. Frederick Douglass keenly observed white capitalists’ preference for white over black as early as 1853: “Every hour sees the black man [in the North] elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived immigrant whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place.” During the Great War, however, immigration from Europe was severely reduced, and northern industrialists turned to the surplus of southern black labor to man their mills.51

  By 1919, an observer of the Great Migration claimed that in the movement of black southerners to the North could “be seen the effects of the loss resulting from the absence of immigrants from Europe.”52 Black southerners wanted the jobs made available by the cessation of European immigration, and they moved north to fill the need.53 In 1914, one of America’s premier capitalists, Henry Ford, announced that his workers would earn at least five dollars per d
ay, and he began hiring black workers for his assembly lines. Trade journals such as Industrial Management began to explore the benefits of hiring blacks, and northern labor scouts toured the South, hoping to entice southern black workers to head to Chicago, Detroit, and other industrial centers.54 After the war ended, a severe drop in cotton prices—from one dollar per pound in 1919 to ten cents per pound in 1920—ensured that southern farmers would continue to abandon agricultural work for industrial pursuits.55 The opening of northern industrial jobs to nonwhites allowed many more southern blacks to join their white counterparts in the general population drift toward the cities; the “pull” of northern jobs applied more equitably to southerners of both races. Likewise, the slackened southern agricultural economy ensured that black and white southerners alike felt a similar “push” from the countryside. But “Jim Crow Blues,” recorded by blues pianist “Cow Cow” Davenport, communicated the peculiar and difficult reality that separated black emigrants from their white counterparts.

  I’m tired of being Jim Crowed, gonna leave this Jim Crow town,

  Doggone my black soul, I’m sweet Chicago bound,

  Yessir, I’m leavin’ here, from this ole Jim Crow town.56

  Davenport’s song, recorded in Chicago, illustrated black frustration with Jim Crow custom and law but as a public “record” (in both senses of the term) was limited in its expressiveness. A letter from an aspiring emigrant from Lexington, Mississippi, so effectively conveyed the overwhelming disadvantages faced by plantation-district blacks—even those with advanced education—that it merits inclusion here. The anonymous author had become a teacher, it appears, because his disability precluded him from agricultural labor—physical disability was the root of many bluesmen’s careers as well—but his exemption from the tough life of sharecropping failed to produce an easier lifestyle. He wrote to an agent in the North:

  Lexington, Miss., May 12-[19]17.

  My Dear Mr. H.——: —I am writing to you for some information and assistance if you can give it.

  I am a young man and am disable, to a very great degree, to do hard labor. I was educated at Alcorn College and have been teaching a few years: but ah: me the Superintendent under whom we poor colored teachers have to teach cares less for a colored man than he does for the vilest beast. I am compelled to teach 150 children without any assistance and receives only $27.00 a month, the white with 30 get $100. I am so sick I am so tired of such conditions that I sometimes think that life for me is not worth while and most eminently believe with Patrick Henry “Give me liberty or give me death.” If I was a strong able bodied man I would have gone from here long ago, but this handicaps me and, I must make inquiries before I leap.

  Mr. H——, do you think you can assist me to a position I am good at stenography typewriting and bookkeeping and any kind of work not too rough or heavy. I am 4 feet 6 in high and weight 105 pounds.

  I will gladly give any other information you desire and will greatly appreciate any assistance you may render me.57

  But if the unequal pay scale and bigoted bosses were troublesome to southern blacks, there were more pressing and treacherous concerns that pushed them out of the region.

  After a fifteen-year decline in racial violence, cases of blacks lynched by southern whites rose dramatically during the World War I years as economic and social turbulence threatened to destabilize the established customs and institutions of legalized white supremacy.58 Vigilante murderers acted on a variety of motives, to be sure, but the economic independence afforded blacks by migration, as well as the notion—or sight of—southern black laborers turned U.S. soldiers in the worldwide struggle for democracy, contributed heavily to radical whites’ willingness to enforce the southern caste codes with fatal violence. In 1915, the second year of the wartime migration, sixty-seven southern blacks were lynched; that number rose to eighty-three in 1919, and ten World War I veterans were among the victims.59 An African American in Palestine, Texas, wrote, “Our southern white people are so cruel we collord people are almost afraid to walke the streets after night.”60 T. Arnold Hill, executive secretary of the Chicago Urban League, saw a direct correlation between southern racial violence and the Great Migration. “Every time a lynching takes place in a community down South,” he noted, “you can depend on it that colored people will arrive in Chicago within two weeks.”61

  Assessing the poor outlook facing blacks in the Deep South, African American leaders urged the black laborers there to “vote with their feet.” Serials such as Ida B. Well’s Memphis Free Speech, the NAACP’s the Crisis, and Robert Abbott’s Chicago Defender all urged southern blacks to leave the South.62 The Defender, the most militant organ promoting a black exodus from the South, persistently advertised the “Great Northern Drive.” The paper meant to encourage southern blacks to leave the South on a daily basis but, more specifically, advocated a mass migration to take place throughout the month of May 1917. Abbott beseeched the African Americans of the South, writing:

  To die from the bite of frost is far more glorious than that of the mob. I beg of you, my brothers, to leave that benighted land. You are free men. Show the world that you will not let false leaders lead you. Your neck has been in the yoke. Will you continue to keep it there because some “white folks Nigger” wants you to? Leave to all quarters of the globe. Get out of the South. Your being there in the numbers you are gives the southern politician too strong a hold on your progress.63

  And leave they did. With so much of its land dedicated to plantation agriculture, especially in the western regions of the state, Mississippi became one of the more demographically unstable regions within the Deep South, and activist Emmett Scott estimated that at least half of Mississippi migrants had left because of some solicitation or correspondence through friends or newspapers.64

  White landowners in the sharecropping South were aware of their dependence on black labor and urged African Americans to resist the entreaties of labor scouts and other northerners. Most whites seemed to agree with the standard “creed of racial relations”: “Negroes are necessary to the South and it is desirable that they should stay there and not migrate to the North.”65 Some black leaders favored this approach as well. In Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Isaiah T. Montgomery—a follower of Booker T. Washington—urged his black neighbors to stay in the South and advance within the confines of institutionalized white supremacy. During and after the 1910s, however, the desire to leave the South was strong in tens of thousands of African Americans: “Our pepel are tole that they can not get anything to do up [North] and they are being snatched off the trains,” a black resident of Greenville claimed; “but in spite of all this, they are leaving every day and every night.”66

  Advances in music recording, the coming of radio in the 1920s, and the circular migration of bluesmen and other southern blacks to the North, back south, and to the North again, ensured that the black newspapers were not the only means by which southern African Americans could access the culture of migration. The traveling bluesman and his music created something of a public message board allowing members of the southern black underclass to communicate and share their individual experiences of migration. Travel themes recurred in the blues culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley, and highway names (actually, numbers) were particularly important. Willie “61” Blackwell took his name from the famous U.S. Highway 61, the “River Road” linking New Orleans to Memphis and the upper Mississippi Valley, which included a long stretch through the Mississippi Delta. Blackwell earned the nickname after leaving Memphis and hitting the road. He had been a pianist in Memphis until he took on a rival musician in a piano duel. Blackwell won the contest, but his opponent’s friends attacked him and seriously injured his hands, preventing him from playing the piano again. Not wanting to give up music, “61” Blackwell became an itinerant guitarist moving up and down the Mississippi Valley.

  Many other blues musicians took nicknames associated with highways and railroads, as well as other geographic place names, a
nd in his research of blues nicknames, David Evans discovered that these geography-inspired monikers were twice as common during the Great Migration years, up to World War II, as they were after.67 The preoccupation with geography—an indicator of a people on the move—also showed up in songs titled after the roads that carried Missis-sippians and Louisianans north out of the Delta. Highway 51, like 61, connected New Orleans to Chicago via Memphis, and Tommy McClennan, the bluesman who had “left [his] babe in Mississippi, picking cotton down on her knees,” popularized “New Highway 51 Blues” after the original “Highway 51 Blues” by Curtis Jones in 1938. Finally, Big Joe Williams dedicated “Highway 49 Blues” to the road that ran north from Biloxi on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to the capital, Jackson, before shooting northwest across the Delta to Helena, Arkansas. Later, Howlin’ Wolf regularly featured “Highway 49 Blues” in his repertoire.68

  Of course, many southerners made their migration north on the steel rails of locomotives, and the Illinois Central Railroad (I. C.), like Highway 61 a symbol of freedom to black Mississippians, appeared in blues songs such as Tampa Red’s “I.C. Moan.”

  Nobody knows that I. C. like I do,

  Nobody knows that I. C. like I do,

  Now the reason I know it I ride it through and through.

  His lyrics revealed the important symbolism that these railroads represented to dissatisfied southerners who were eager to find greener pastures.

  I got the I. C. blues and boxcars on my mind,

  I got the I. C. blues and boxcars on my mind,

  I’m gonna pack my grip and beat it on down the line.69

  That these railroads leading out of the Jim Crow South grabbed the imagination and attention of black southerners is not surprising, but what happened when they arrived in the North seeking those manufacturing jobs?