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 lat-
er 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 an-
tebellum migrations through escape, manumission, and colonization; the near-con-
stant movement of the Civil War years; and, finally, widespread post-emancipation
migrations driven by the economic exploitation, political disfranchisement, and ra-
cial 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 be-
comes 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 migra-
tion 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 rel-
atively 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.

421

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422 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, includ-
ing migration to towns and settlements west of the Mississippi River, especially
Kansas, Indian Territory, Oklahoma, and California; and the growth of black trans-
nationalism 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 move-
ments 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. Build-
ing 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 Trou-
bled 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 methodolo-
gies of biography, family history, and microhistory. First, scholarly attention to the
Atlantic world has shed new light on freedpeople’s embrace of black transnation-
alism 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 Free-
dom: 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 423

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 motivat-
ing 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 reuni-
fication”—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 mo-
bility 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 Od-
yssey in the Age of Emancipation (2012) have employed microhistory and fami-
ly 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 do-
mestic 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 se-
ries 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 illus-
trate “the instability of black privilege in societies rooted in slavery.” In so doing,

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424 The Journal of African American History

she situates the U.S. Great Migration within the context of a “longer history of At-
lantic 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 of-
fers 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 Ameri-
can 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 “exo-
dus,” 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 con-
ception 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 proper-
ties, 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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Introduction: African American Migration and Mobility After the Civil War, 1865–1915 425

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 Di-
mensions 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 Whit-
tingham 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 mi-
gration, 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 “Un-
finished 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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426 The Journal of African American History

5
For Atlantic and diasporic perspectives on African American migrations, see, for instance: Tiffany Ruby Patter-
son 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 Mid-
dle 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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