As a result, in the early years of the 20th century a small number of blacks began migrating North and West, looking to escape the desperate hopelessness and every-present risks that dominated their lives in the South. Though traveling for blacks remained unpleasant - and far from risk-free - the extreme dangers that had earlier led to the creation of the Underground Railroad were now largely a thing of the past.

In one critical sense, however, things had changed dramatically for the former slaves: they now had freedom of movement.

Factor in the ever-present risk of generally unprosecuted beatings and lynchings, and the situation for blacks in the south was little better than the slavery they had nominally escaped just a few decades before. Thus, as the 20th century opened, extensive legal restrictions and deeply entrenched social proscriptions constrained most blacks in the South to a life as share croppers or day laborers. Du Bois wrote in the opening lines of his celebrated work The Souls of Black Folk ( my review here) that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” From that prophetic observation, Du Bois proceeded over the course of fourteen powerful essays to describe the crippling social, political and economic situation faced by freed slaves in the South in the final decades of the 19th century, a period during which the short-lived promise of Reconstruction evaporated as Northerners’ interest shifted to the greater perceived economic benefit promised by reconciliation with the white South.īy the time Du Bois’ book appeared in 1903, politicians in the states of the former confederacy were aggressively codifying a separate and unequal situation for their black citizens in the form of Jim Crow laws. And Indians, far from moving about as they wanted, were often corralled in reservations or subjected to forced migrations.The renowned historian W.E.B. Until the 19th century the majority of immigrants to North America arrived as slaves or indentured servants. And yet liberty of movement, unrestricted by master or state, was for much of the nation's past a luxury reserved for the privileged few. There is one meaning of the word, though, on which almost everyone has agreed: moving about the land as one pleases. In the decades after the war, workers saw freedom as the right to organize and demand a fair wage business owners believed freedom meant an unregulated marketplace. Before the Civil War, Southern plantation owners thought freedom meant the right to own slaves antislavery Northerners understood freedom as the ability to enjoy the fruit of one's labor. ILLUSTRATION: Buyenlarge/Getty ImagesĪmericans cherish the idea of freedom, but they have embraced it in different ways throughout the country's history. one of the destinations for a mass movement of Southern blacks in the 20th century.

Review the warmth of other suns