The Booker T. Washington Social and Industrial Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, advertised for “Men!!” through The Chicago Defender in December of 1917. They promised that potential workers would find affordable housing and wages ranging from $2.50 a day to $6.00 a day.
Between 1915 and 1930, 1.5 million black Americans moved from their homes in the South to live in the Northeast, the Midwest, and California. For many, the decision to leave the South was difficult. The expensive train fares were hard to manage, and this often meant that some family members had to be left behind, at least temporarily. Still, there were compelling reasons to make the move, and Ruth alludes to some of these. She refers to her brother-in-law who made the move from Savannah, Georgia, to New York, where he could earn many times the wages that he had earned in the South. Ruth also learned that people did things differently in the South, that white people and black people did not share public spaces. As Ruth explains it, “Then I learned that there was a separation of the races. Race! It was done because of their race, not because they were bad or rebellious or anything.” Hoping to find freedom in other parts of the country, many African Americans decided to leave behind the South and its traditions of segregation.
With a couple of suitcases and a few extra coats, this family, newly arrived “in Chicago from the rural South,” posed for a group portrait. Their picture appeared in The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot published in 1922.
Prior to 1922, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations polled African Americans who had migrated to Chicago, to find out why they had come north, and what their experience in the city had been. Most respondents said that they had moved to Chicago to earn more money. Some said that they had been persuaded by friends and relatives. Most said yes when asked “Do you feel greater freedom and independence in Chicago?” Many people valued their increased voting privileges in Chicago and felt more freedom in public places. One person remembered having “to take any treatment white people offered me there [in the South and being] compelled to say ‘yes ma’am’ or ‘yes sir’ to white people, whether you desired to or not. If you went to an ice cream parlor for anything you come outside to eat. Got off sidewalk for white people.” The change in climate and the crowded housing conditions were what most interviewees believed were the difficulties that “a person from the South meets in coming to Chicago.” While some people felt that they could earn more money in fewer hours in their new home town, others felt that because of the increased cost of living, they had to work harder in the North. One person thought the trains could be difficult, “Just the treatment some of the white people give you on the trains. Sometimes treat you like dogs.” Another reported having “more money to spend but when you have to live in houses where landlord won’t fix up you can’t have much comfort.”
W.E.B. Du Bois posed for a group portrait with the Junior Auxiliary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Cleveland, in 1929. Ruth remembers saving her pennies so that she could afford a youth membership to the NAACP.
In 1903, Civil Rights activist and author W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, a reflection on the situation of African Americans in the United States during the progressive era. He set out his intent for the book in “The Forethought” which began,
HEREIN lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line…. Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,-the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.
Ruth was about six years old when she learned that the color line would not be tolerated in her family. It was a lesson that has remained with her throughout her life. One day, Ruth protested when Tony, her brother’s white friend, sat down to eat dinner with her family. As she and her mother stood in the kitchen discussing the girl’s outburst, Ruth’s mother was clear: “Any body can eat at our table, okay?” she said. “Anybody. Anybody.” As she grew, Ruth became aware that not all people held her mother’s attitude. She remembers hearing, “these people down South…’cause they weren’t treating us like that up in New Haven, Connecticut. I could…hear…to ’em saying that they to go back doors to eat, they couldn’t eat at restaurants. I could eat down in Newberry’s and …the five-and-ten cent store, to the Kresge’s, et cetera, and I couldn’t understand then at uh…eight, nine, ten, … I couldn’t understand until I got older this discrimination.”