A Little Colony of Mississippians
If you really want to understand Jim Crow — what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it — you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. There you can see remnants of the shops and churches where, amid the violence and humiliation of segregation, men and women gathered to build a remarkable community. In Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White, William Sturkey introduces us to both old-timers and newcomers who arrived in search of economic opportunities promised by the railroads, sawmills, and factories of the New South. He also takes us across town and inside the homes of white Hattiesburgers to show how their lives were shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South. Hattiesburg traces the story of the Smith family across multiple generations, from Turner and Mamie Smith, who fled a life of sharecropping to find opportunity in town, to Hammond and Charles Smith, in whose family pharmacy Medgar Evers and his colleagues planned their strategy to give blacks the vote.
At about noon on December 7, 1916, one hundred black employees at Hattiesburg’s J. J. Newman Lumber sawmill received their biweekly paychecks and walked out of the mill. When the whistle blew signaling the end of lunch, the rough sheds, box factory, and docks remained unmanned and were forced to cease operations for the rest of the day. White employees at the mill, who “announced that it would be impossible for them to continue their work without assistance from the negroes,” managed to keep the planers and kilns operating for a few hours, but the entire mill shut down the following day and remained closed for two weeks. The black workers never returned. By the time J. J. Newman finally reopened, they had already left for Chicago.
An exodus had begun that autumn. In October, between one hundred fifty and two hundred black Hattiesburgers boarded a special midnight train to Chicago. On December 11, another group of thirty-seven left. During the next month, additional groups of thirty-one and forty also went north. The following spring, other large groups of thirty, twenty-eight, eighty, one hundred twenty, and one hundred forty-seven left Hattiesburg for the Windy City. “It was considered ‘fashionable’ to go,” reported one migrant. “Anybody that had any grit in his craw, went.” Over the span of about sixteen months, an estimated 2,500 African Americans — roughly half the city’s black population at the time — packed up and left Hattiesburg for good.
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The Hattiesburg News, which did not typically run stories about the black community, paid close attention to the departures. Many local whites were deeply concerned about the loss of the city’s black labor force. “No body of men can be found,” the paper cautioned readers, “who will work as long and at as small wages and do it as uncomplainingly, in forrests and lumber camps and the mills of the South as the negro does.” “[White] Housekeepers are not taking at all kindly to the activities of the labor agents,” another article noted, “and are trembling lest they will soon have to build their own fire in the kitchen stoves on wintry days and cook breakfast.”
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The Hattiesburg News reassured white readers that the departures would soon end and promised the return of black migrants. The black migrants, they argued, were victims of corrupt labor agents who made false promises of jobs and housing in Chicago. […] Other writers concluded that the black migrants would return simply because of how much they would miss the South. […]
Of course, the papers were wrong. Hattiesburg’s black men and women kept leaving, and local whites could do very little to slow their departure. At one point, one of the local sawmill owners reportedly became so desperate to keep his black workers that he “ran down to the station and begged the men not to leave his place, offering more money.” “The negroes refused,” reported a witness. Those black men would never again abide by the white sawmill owner’s demands or the rules of the Jim Crow society from which they fled.
[…]The departures sparked several significant developments. First, local white leaders began paying more attention to the condition of African Americans. 0As a correspondent for the Defender reported, “White people are paying more attention to the race in order to keep them in the South.” The fundamental characteristics of Jim Crow remained unchanged, but the 1920s would see numerous examples of local white leaders supporting black community initiatives. This increased interest led them to work with local black community leaders. Businessmen and clergy who remained in the Mobile Street District increasingly began to serve as intermediaries between working-class African Americans and white city leaders who were interested in making token gestures to help curb the exodus. In 1919, the Hattiesburg American (previously the Hattiesburg Daily News, which had changed its name early in World War I) even started a new series on local black life titled the “Colored Column,” marking the first time in Hattiesburg history that the city’s largest newspaper included regular discussions of life in the Mobile Street District. This fairly short-lived column was by no means revolutionary, but along with the increased support of black community initiatives, it represented a growing recognition of the concerns of an oppressed but much-needed black population that had proven it could at any time simply pack up and leave.
The second development was that many local firms raised wages to try to keep black workers. According to a national study conducted by the scholar Emmet J. Scott, a former aide to Booker T. Washington, the average wages in Hattiesburg sawmills increased from $1.10 per day to “$1.75 and $2” during World War I. Another historian recently estimated that statewide industrial wages for African Americans increased between 10 and 30 percent. African Americans still worked in the city’s worst jobs and earned far less than their white counterparts, but they also earned more than they had before the departures.
The third and most important result of the departures was that the city decided to build a black high school in the Mobile Street District. In 1919 or 1920, William H. Jones, principal of the local black school, was invited to address a contingent of the city’s leading white businessmen at a banquet concerning the status of Hattiesburg’s black school district. From this meeting, local white leaders urged Hattiesburg citizens to pass a $75,000 bond to build a new high school for African Americans. Subsidized by the Rosenwald Fund, a national foundation that supported the improvement of black schools, Hattiesburg’s first high school for black students opened in September of 1921. William Jones decided to name the new school Eureka, meaning “I have found it.” Shortly after Eureka opened, a story in the Los Angeles Times featured Hattiesburg’s new black high school in an article titled “Schools Stop Negro Exodus,” which concluded, “[White] Citizens here say the school has undoubtedly served to stabilize colored labor.”
These new developments helped generate a resurgence in the local black population. In the wake of the departures, thousands of new black migrants came to Hattiesburg to take wage-labor jobs, start new businesses, and send their children to the new school. “The town has been almost depopulated of Negroes and repopulated again,” reported the Urban League of Hattiesburg. “The towns were first drained of the available laborers,” observed the black historian Carter G. Woodson in 1930. “Then the farm Negroes were brought in to take the places vacated by those who had left for Northern points.” Woodson concluded, “Especially was this the case in cities like Birmingham and Hattiesburg.” Despite losing more than half its members,
Hattiesburg’s black population over the long run continued to grow steadily.
