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INTRODUCTION: AFRICAN AMERICAN MIGRATION AND MOBILITY AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, 1865–1915 Kendra Field Two years into the First World War, historian Carter G. Woodson commented on the “steady stream of Negroes into the North,” in what American historians later termed the Great Migration. Woodson noted that, “The migration of the blacks from the Southern States to those offering them better opportunities is nothing new.” With his 1918 work, A Century of Negro Migration, Woodson upended the supposed “newness” of African American migration, narrating African American migration from 1815 through World War I (ongoing as he wrote), including northern, western, and transnational migrations before and after the Civil War. He detailed willful antebellum migrations through escape, manumission, and colonization; the near-constant movement of the Civil War years; and, finally, widespread post-emancipation migrations driven by the economic exploitation, political disfranchisement, and racial violence that accompanied the end of Reconstruction. Upon reading Woodson’s analysis, historian Charles Wesley responded, “One ceases to speak of ‘a’ migration, or of ‘the’ migration, for Negro migration ceases to be a new development. It becomes an old movement, begun a century ago, but now heightened and intensified.”1 In the decades that followed the publication of A Century of Negro Migration, the “steady stream” Woodson observed in 1918 grew into the First and Second Great Migrations, whose scale and intensity quickly overwhelmed that of previous migrations. With few exceptions, scholarly attention to African American migration followed suit, arguably obscuring the historical imagination for the diversity of its origins to which Woodson once pointed. At the same time, historians intent on explicating the origins of the Jim Crow era—the period Rayford Logan termed “the nadir” and John Hope Franklin called “the long dark night”—produced a relatively static portrait of the lives of freedpeople between Reconstruction and the Great Migration. In fact, these years were marked by a steady wave of African American emigration activity that had, until recently, failed to make a lasting mark on the historiography of the period.2 Kendra Field is Assistant Professor of History at Tufts University in Medford, MA.

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The Journal of African American History

In the last half-century, scholars have interrupted this portrait with increasing regularity. The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s saw the publication of numerous case studies—from Nell Painter’s classic Exodusters (1977) and Norman Crockett’s Black Towns to Willie Lee Rose’s Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1999) and Kenneth Barnes’ Journey of Hope (2004)—of individual movements, migrations, and places. Together these works engaged the meaning of wartime movements; the rise of black emigrationism after Reconstruction, including migration to towns and settlements west of the Mississippi River, especially Kansas, Indian Territory, Oklahoma, and California; and the growth of black transnationalism at the turn of the 20th century, including migration to West Africa, Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean.3 While such studies were sometimes received as isolated, exceptional movements of limited demographic significance, the 21st century has seen a growing number of monographs spanning multiple migrations in the post-emancipation South. Such works take seriously the “unfinished migrations” and “overlapping diasporas” that are part and parcel to the history of the African Diaspora. Building upon older models such as Edwin Redkey’s Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910 (1969) and Wilson Jeremiah Moses’s Golden Age of Black Nationalism (1988), Steven Hahn’s Nation Under Our Feet (2003), James Campbell’s Middle Passages (2006), and Chandra Manning’s Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (2016) have revealed that the scope of freedpeople’s aspirations for leave-taking was far more significant than the numerical impact of any single movement would suggest.4 At least three factors have shaped historians’ increasing capacity to engage the breadth and depth of African American migration and mobility before the Great Migration. These include increased scholarly attention to black transnationalism and the Atlantic world; to women, gender, and kinship; and historical methodologies of biography, family history, and microhistory. First, scholarly attention to the Atlantic world has shed new light on freedpeople’s embrace of black transnationalism and Pan-Africanism during this period, as well as the origins and meaning of African American emigration. As Rashauna Johnson notes, “From an Atlantic perspective, there was no single transition from slavery to freedom, nor was there a single Great Migration.” Instead, Johnson writes, “the history of black modernity is a series of circulations.”5 Second, groundbreaking scholarship by Stephanie Camp, Darlene Clark Hine, Tera Hunter, and Heather Williams, among other historians, on women, gender, and kinship in the post-emancipation era has transformed scholarly understanding of African American migration and mobility. Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004) revealed the ways in which “antebellum gender patterns” shaped migration from

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Introduction: African American Migration and Mobility After the Civil War, 1865–1915

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slavery to freedom “as if it were a place,” after the war. Darlene Clark Hine (1989) and Tera Hunter (1997) illustrated the role of racial and sexual violence in motivating freedwomen’s migrations away from rural homeplaces to southern towns and cities, as well as western and northern destinations. And Heather Williams’s Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (2012) revealed the centrality of family and kinship—“personal missions of reunification”—to the pursuit of freedom in the post-emancipation era.6 Finally, growing openness to historical methodologies, of microhistory and family history, have enriched scholarly understanding of black migration and mobility in the Atlantic world. Recent works such as Mary Frances Berry’s We Are Who We Say We Are: A Black Family’s Search for Home across the Atlantic World (2014) and Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard’s Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (2012) have employed microhistory and family history to document experiences of slavery, freedom, and mobility across the African Diaspora. As historian Joe W. Trotter noted as early as 1991, scholarly attention to “the forces that produce migration” have been replaced by interest in “the migrants themselves,” including their everyday experiences of geographic movement.7 Because the form lends itself to capturing multiple migrations within a single narrative, family histories and microhistories may be uniquely positioned to illuminate the interconnectedness of the U.S. South, connections between domestic and transnational emigration movements, and between histories forcibly separated by spatial and temporal conventions. Building upon these recent developments, this Special Issue of The Journal of African American History explores patterns of migration and mobility from the end of the Civil War to the early years of the Great Migration. The articles by Johnson, Cooper, Caddoo, and Stuckey included here urge a closer examination of the scale, scope, and significance of African American migration and mobility in the post-emancipation era. Together they illuminate the role of migration and mobility in the transition from slavery to freedom; the meaning and origins of black towns, settlements, and place-making in the U.S. South and West; the role of media and circulation of knowledge in post-emancipation migrations; and the familial, transnational, and diasporic origins of the post-emancipation movement. Moreover, their examination goes beyond the movement of people to include the circulation of ideas about migration and mobility. Rashauna Johnson’s article, “From Saint-Domingue to Dumaine Street: One Family’s Journeys from Haitian Revolution to the Great Migration,” traces a series of migrations over nine generations of the Frère-Sacriste family, from the 18th-century French and Spanish Caribbean to 19th-century New Orleans and the 20th-century American West. Johnson employs this family history in order to illustrate “the instability of black privilege in societies rooted in slavery.” In so doing,

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she situates the U.S. Great Migration within the context of a “longer history of Atlantic circulations that included the Haitian Revolution and its diasporas.” Atlantic circulations and diasporic identities such as these shaped the desires and actions of freedpeople during and after the Civil War. Abigail Cooper’s “‘Away I Goin’ to Find My Mamma’: Self-Emancipation, Migration, and Kinship in Refugee Camps in the Civil War Era” takes up the role of migration in the transition from slavery to freedom. Like Johnson, Cooper offers a microhistory of a single family: a mother and daughter once-separated by the domestic slave trade, seeking familial reunion in the midst of war. While Civil War historians have many times over “drawn the maps and movements of armies,” including scores of African American men who sought citizenship in soldiering, Cooper aims to map instead the migration paths by which many African American women sought freedom on their own terms. Between 1860 and 1870, Cooper suggests, African American refugees became “a force in recolonizing the southern states of America,” such that “the South moved within itself.” This wartime “exodus,” Cooper argues, “sought to transform the Egypt of the Slave South into a New Canaan.” Too often dismissed as “scattering” and “chaos”—or, in Woodson’s 1918 telling, “confusing movement,”—in fact, such movement was driven by kinship ties. Building upon groundbreaking works such as Heather Williams’s Help Me to Find My People, Cooper argues that Mary Armstrong’s migration “embodies a version of black politics that put kin before nation” as the foundation of freedom and citizenship. When white northerners and southerners repealed Reconstruction’s political gains in favor of disfranchisement and segregation, black southerners focused increasingly on black community formation, including autonomous institutions, property, and places they might call “their own.” They did this in southern cities like Atlanta, as Tera Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom attests, as well as Memphis and, then, black towns and settlements like Mound Bayou, Mississippi; Nicodemus, Kansas; and Boley, Oklahoma. Cara Caddoo’s article, “Black Newspapers, Real Property, and Mobility in Memphis after Emancipation” documents the ways in which African Americans in post-emancipation Memphis created “a shared conception of place,” however momentary, within and beyond the city. In the face of segregation and racial violence, black Memphians used the tools of real estate and mass media—black newspapers, schoolhouses, churches, shops, and saloons—in order “to stake claim to the locations they viewed as their own.” Church properties, for instance, the “single largest repositories of black public wealth,” were “beacons for resettlement,” serving as “public spaces for turn of the century black life.” When white southerners systematically destroyed such properties and places in the 1880s and 1890s, many black Memphians moved on to the black towns and settlements of the American West.

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In this spirit, Melissa Stuckey’s article “Boley, Indian Territory: Exercising Freedom in the All-Black Town” employs the biographies of three of Boley’s founders to illustrate the intersection of nationalist black freedom ideologies and the availability of Indian land. Following the life paths and choices of Thomas Haynes, a black Texan, Oniel H. Bradley, a child of the 1879 Exodusters migration to Kansas, and Creek Freedman James Barnett, this study engages the complexities of racial and ethnic identities in Indian territory, alongside the racial and national symbolism of Boley as an idea and a place. Together, these articles attest to the myriad ways in which African-descended women and men “voted with their feet,” creating a wave of domestic and transnational movement that demands collective analysis amidst the many “first fruits” of freedom.8 NOTES 1 On the Great Migration, see especially Joe William Trotter, Jr., The Great Migration in Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington, IN, 1991) and Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York, 2010). Carter Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration (Washington, DC, 1918), 66; Charles Wesley, Review of Century of Negro Migration, Journal of Negro History, 4 (January, 1919). 2 John Hope Franklin stated in 1961 at the Sidney Hillman Lectures at Howard University that “The Long Dark Night” continued until 1923; Leon Litwack dated the nadir as 1890 through the Great Migration. Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (New York, 1954), 52; John Hope Franklin, Sidney Hillman Lectures, 1961; Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979). 3 On Civil War migration and mobility, see also Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (New York, 2016); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York, 2008) and “‘Invisible Disabilities’: Black Women in War and in Freedom” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 160, no. 3 (2016): 237; Yael Sternhell, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 2015); David Silkenat, Driven from Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis (Athens, GA, 2016); Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Athens, GA, 1999). On northern and western migration, see also Steven Hahn, A Nation under our Feet: Black Political Struggle in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York, 1998); Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009); Nell Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York, 1977); Edwin S. Redkey, Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910 (New Haven, CT, 1969); Norman Crockett’s The Black Towns (Lawrence, KS, 1979); Kenneth Marvin Hamilton’s Black Towns and Profit: Promotion and Development in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1877–1915 (Urbana, IL, 1991). On transnational migration, see also James Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York, 2007); Kenneth Barnes’ Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); and Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York, 1988) and Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (New York, 1998). 4 On “unfinished migrations” and “overlapping diasporas”: Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review, 43, no. 1 (Apr. 2000): 11–45. Redkey, Black Exodus; Wilson Jeremiah Moses’s Golden Age; Hahn, Nation under Our Feet. See also Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Barnes, Journey of Hope; Campbell, Middle Passages; Woodson, Century of Negro Migration; Eddie S. Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago, IL, 2000).

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5 For Atlantic and diasporic perspectives on African American migrations, see, for instance: Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review, 43, no. 1 (Apr. 2000): 11–45; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Barnes, Journey of Hope; Campbell, Middle Passages. 6 Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); 10, 118. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs 14 (Summer 1989): 912–920. Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA, 1997). Heather Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012), 145. See also Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York, 2008) and “‘Invisible Disabilities’: Black Women in War and in Freedom’” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 160, no. 3 (2016): 237; Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York, 2009); Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, 2003). 7 Mary Frances Berry, “We Are Who We Say We Are”: A Black Family’s Search for Home Across the Atlantic World (New York, 2015); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Trotter, The Great Migration, 68–69. 8 “First fruits”: Janette Greenwood, First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862–1900 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009)

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