'But it is a fine place to make money': migration and African-American families in Cleveland, 1915-1929.

At the peak of the World War I movement of Southern blacks to Cleveland, a migrant wrote a letter to relatives in the South informing them he found the city "a fine place to make money." But the letter also expressed his reservations about what the city had to offer his children: he could not care for them "like they should be" since he now lived in a city of strangers. He lamented that he lacked "surrounding friends" to help him and he had "seval nochants (sic) of" returning south. While he and his wife earned good wages in the North, leaving the South had torn him away from those who had given him support, comfort and advice.(1) No evidence remains about how this migrant resolved the struggle between higher wages and the needs of his children, or how he recreated the dense networks of support. But his letter provides important insight into the concerns that migrants faced beyond their search for work, as they sought to care for families and retain kin and friend connections which had shifted, or had been lost during long moves north.

The experience of Flowree Robinson and her family amply displays the intricate work of caring that extended across regions and the resulting changes in family dynamics over the course of two decades. After her mother died in 1915, Robinson's father moved his children from the rural town of Edwards, Mississippi, to nearby Greenville. Leaving twelve year-old Flowree in the care of an older daughter, he took his older sons and their young families to Gary, Indiana, where they found work. Despite the higher wages, Robinson's father grieved over the separation from his youngest child and constantly worried about her well-being. He returned to Mississippi gravely ill and soon died. Robinson married at sixteen and moved away from her sister; her brothers migrated to Cleveland, though the family remained connected through letters. While the vagaries of the early 1920s' economy made visiting impossible, the siblings used the mail to loan money, dispense advice, and offer support. When Flowree's husband suffered from alcoholism and became abusive, her brother urged her to join him in Cleveland. Despite the drain on his own limited resources, over several years he shared his small home, gave her money, helped her find a job, and introduced her to a fellow worker from the South, whom she later married.(2)

The oral histories, narratives, and autobiographies of migrants to Cleveland, a primary destination for African Americans between 1910 and 1930, richly demonstrate the role of kin and friendship networks during and after the move north. Once migrants became established in Cleveland, connections with families and friends served as adaptive strategies to offset the precarious economic conditions that many regularly faced; these networks lessened the sense of isolation from the South. But these accounts also reveal that this process of family and household formation and adaptation was often a long process. Darlene Clark Hine has asserted that for many migrants, women especially, relinquishing ties to the South was an "incomplete process" because they had left immediate family members behind.(3) She suggests that when migrants left loved ones in the South, "psychological and emotional relocation was much more convoluted and, perhaps more complicated than heretofore assumed."(4) Many migrants left parents and children behind, sometimes taking years to reassemble, but did their relationships change? If so, how? What, if anything, can we learn from revisiting the migration process?

The new studies on African-American migration to cities have shown how family and household reformation in the North and the continued links with family and households in the South provided critical resources for migrants as they moved out of the South.(5) Works by Peter Gottlieb, Earl Lewis, and Darlene Clark Hine have documented the ways kin and friend connections served as initiators and maintainers of the process.(6) The richness of these studies has, Joe W. Trotter recently concluded, pointed to new avenues for research in African Americans' experiences as families in an urban context. But he noted that "the black family as a dynamic and changing institution is an uneven and incomplete dimension of black urban history."(7) The recent scholarship on immigration to the United States, for example, has focused on the shifting, often contentious relationships between men and women, parents and children that emerged in its wake.(8) These works have not spawned a similar effort in scholarship on African Americans. Instead, scholars have been primarily concerned with documenting the intactness of black families, rather than the changes that might have occurred.(9)

Migrants' narratives about their moves to and lives in Cleveland reveal that families remained remarkably intact, but their relationships were not static. This essay adds to the recent efforts to document the importance of kin and friendship networks in the migration process, giving greater attention to the differing roles and experiences of black men, women and children. Migrants created a variety of household arrangements, yet close attention to first person narratives reveal that the migration process to the North challenged many of their assumptions about and patterns of kinship, household, and friend obligations. In addition, the sometimes long process of reassembling family and friend networks in the city frequently changed social, gender, and generational relations in African-American families.

The availability of jobs in Cleveland made it attractive to blacks leaving the South to find work. By the beginning of the Great Migration in 1915, Cleveland possessed a diverse industrial base with a large metals processing section. Automobiles and auto parts, paints, varnishes, chemicals, garment making, and machine-tool manufacturing provided a variety of semi-skilled and unskilled jobs.(10) Wartime production, declining immigration, and market imperatives to cut production costs led to increased demands for unskilled workers for a variety of industrial, transportation, and service jobs. While postwar competition, layoffs and inflation meant that the availability of jobs in industry fluctuated widely, the expansion of the building, service, and transportation trades throughout the 1920s provided additional job opportunities for unskilled and temporary work.(11)

Until the early 1910s, Cleveland employers relied on a large population of immigrant workers, particularly southern and eastern European immigrants, to fill the expanding number of unskilled jobs. Both the war and restrictions on immigration in the 1920s forced employers to seek new sources for such jobs. While white women and the children of immigrants provided some of the labor, many employers looked south and specifically recruited black workers. By 1920, some employers publicly acknowledged that black workers were the largest "available class" of labor and moved to incorporate them into the industrial setting, but only in specific jobs with limited mobility. By the end of the decade, black male workers found work in steel mills, railroad yards, and transportation; despite some expansion in women's wage opportunities generally, black women, married and single, remained concentrated in household employment.(12)

Already on the move away from rural work in the South, African Americans responded to the availability of industrial and service work in the Midwest in increasing numbers after 1915. Until 1910, Cleveland's black population numbered less than 8,500; by 1920 it had increased 308 percent, swelling the population to over 34,000. This enormous expansion propelled the city into second place behind Detroit for the largest percentage growth in the black population. At the start of the next decade, the black population had again more than doubled to over 71,000, with much of this expansion taking place between 1923 and 1930. Over half of these new arrivals came from Alabama, with the remainder arriving from other states in the Deep South.(13)

The shifting demographic character of the black population between 1910 and 1930 reveals how the availability of jobs appealed equally to men and women and their families. The 1920 census shows a preponderance of workers between 18 and 54 years old, with nearly sixty-seven percent over the age of 21. Throughout the two decades of population growth, men predominated, but unlike Pittsburgh, women made up a significant portion of the new arrivals after 1920. By 1930, the population of black women roughly equaled that of men. Adult blacks had slightly higher rates of marriage than did native-born whites or immigrants; black women were less likely than white women to be single (19 percent as compared to 27 percent). On the other end of the marital spectrum, black women showed the highest rate of widowhood of all groups. Between 1920 and 1930, the number of households with children under the age of ten increased significantly from the previous decade. While the possibility of higher paying work provided a particular lure, many black men and women also intended to settle permanently.(14)

Leaving the South and settling in Cleveland became a family decision, requiring emotional and material support, even when only an individual made the move.(15) This pattern of extensive family involvement had its origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century South, as thousands of rural blacks migrated to cities and towns to work in Southern steel mills and coal mines.(16) As blacks moved, some families became physically separated for long periods of time, necessitating new strategies to maintain economic and emotional connections. Other migrants drew family and friends into the new work settings, establishing households and community ties in the new location. Thornton D. simultaneously lost his parents to death and the family farm to debt in Boligee, Alabama. He made his way to Kentucky to work in the coal mines and within a year his younger siblings and other extended kin joined him. This pattern of movement brought the extended family to Cleveland during World War I. By 1910, black farm families in Cleveland, Mississippi, found it impossible to maintain their self-sufficiency. At the urging of several young men, a significant portion of the community made their way to the coal fields of Kentucky; eventually, several of the families migrated together to Cleveland.(17) Both these examples reveal that chain migration - where one family member moved first and then other members followed with assistance from the first - was frequently based on age and gender, with oldest single men moving first.(18)

The census data indicate that women came to Cleveland as readily as men, playing critical roles in the impetus for and the maintenance of migration. Studies show that women participated in the migration process in ways shaped by gender.(19) Young women tended to accompany others, rather than travel alone, because, as Darlene Clark Hine has found, women were "surely at greater risk than a man."(20) Along with a young friend, sixteen year-old Bertha Cowan left Lynchburg, Virginia, for Cleveland, in late 1917. Both women hoped to find work, but they found only domestic work in wealthy white homes, where women's demands for cleanliness were greater than in the South. But Cowan received higher wages, which enabled her to visit her family with "the city show on us and went back all polished." Impressed with her success, a steady stream of family and friends followed, settling in Cleveland permanently. Though young, kin and friends viewed her as the authority, and she became the guide: "I accepted being the leader. This is when the South all came up here and it turned into a new world." Bertha Cowan's experience of guiding family to Cleveland was not unusual, but her acquisition of authority suggests how migration sometimes inverted family roles, with young women key to the process.(21)

While many families decided to leave the South because of the success of those in the North, sometimes black men and women reluctantly migrated at the urging of those left behind. John Malone joined other blacks from Alabama in 1910 to work for the Illinois Central Railroad in Louisville, Kentucky as common laborers. In 1916, recruiters from the New York Central Railroad brought Malone and other black men to Cleveland. Many of the workers viewed this move as permanent, but Malone intended to return to Louisville, despite pressure from his family. A prolonged illness brought his wife north to care for him and, after his recovery, she persuaded him to stay. She, too, found a job as a cook in the railroad yards. They soon earned enough to bring their children; by 1917 "everybody worked for the railroad" and lived in Cleveland.(22) While John Malone came north as a result of labor recruiters, he stayed because of the negotiations that took place with his wife, underscoring that the family made decisions together.

The ability to find work played a key role in initially luring black men and women to Cleveland, with family and friends providing the most reliable information. Just how much African Americans could secure work for one another remains a debated issue.(23) Yet many of the first person accounts attest that kin and friend networks passed on more than information about the availability of jobs to would-be migrants. Men working in steel mills and for the railroad found jobs for others during and after World War I, a pattern more pronounced in workplaces known to hire blacks.(24) Because the majority of black women labored in private domestic work, the opportunities to secure work for one another were not as great. But black women - and occasionally men - set up formal and informal mechanisms to inform others about agreeable homes for day work.(25) While many black women turned to laundry work to combine productive and reproductive labor within their households, it appears that the desire to set up more favorable work conditions informed some choices. Contemporary observers noted that some migrant women started home laundries together, successfully competing with industrial laundry work. Sallie Hopson remembers that the married women in her neighborhood gathered together to take in 'daywash' - hand laundry at 75 cents a wash. Others washed and hired help for the ironing.(26)

Migrants' search for a place to live depended on the knowledge and support of kin and friend networks. They looked for housing in a tight and increasingly segregated market as the war greatly exacerbated the already limited choices. Unlike other cities that had experienced similar explosions of wartime population, few of Cleveland's business owners provided housing for workers. Because of the tight market, property owners subdivided older homes into smaller spaces; large tenements never appeared in any great significance, though overcrowding became common. Through the war years, blacks and immigrants competed for scarce rentals clustered in older neighborhoods on the near eastside of the city.(27)

While most unskilled workers found it particularly difficult to find adequate and affordable housing because of low wages, blacks encountered prohibitions because of race as well. Landlords became aware that racial proscriptions limited blacks' choices and they responded by increasing the rent for the new arrivals. As Langston Hughes recalled of his youth in wartime Cleveland:

White people on the east side of the city were moving out of their frame houses and renting them to Negroes at double and triple the rents they could receive from others. An eight-room house with one bath would be cut up into apartments and five or six families crowded into it, each two-room kitchenette apartment renting for what the whole house had rented before.(28)

Wartime surveys found that blacks paid a disproportionate share of their income in rent when compared with native-born whites and immigrants in similar housing. In an apartment house on Central Avenue, for instance, blacks rented five room suites for $31 a month; in contrast, whites paid $22 for similar space. This dissimilarity led some migrants to designate the high rents as "the colored tax."(29)

Contemporary observers and historians have documented settlement of African Americans in the city between 1915 and 1929, noting their confinement to the Central Area. With the rapid growth of the city's population after 1915, black neighborhoods expanded northward between Central and Euclid Avenues and to the south and east along Scovill and Woodland Avenues. As migration continued, blacks fanned out to every ward in this area, but the majority clustered between East 55th Street and Euclid Avenue.(30) Howard Whipple Green, a longtime statistician of the changes in Cleveland's demographics, found an important difference between the residential patterns of black migrants and white immigrants after the First World War. Immigrant populations gradually moved into less populated areas with better housing. In contrast, blacks became increasingly concentrated in adjoining neighborhoods in older industrial areas. Blacks' residential patterns, Green found, mirrored those in other cities where "the colored populations are the last to inhabit an area, and . . . they are replaced only by industrial or commercial enterprise."(31) Studies by Kenneth Kusmer and Lawrence Cuban detail how casual policies hardened into rigid racial proscriptions. Residents in the areas that ringed the city quickly erected barriers against Jews, Italians, and African Americans.(32)

Kin and friend networks proved critical in expanding housing options for migrants by locating better rentals. Just as other migrants encountered, William Murdock's parents discovered that high rents, and bouts of unemployment kept them in homes "worse than those" in the South.(33) Throughout their first two decades in the city, the Murdocks depended on kin to help find more adequate housing; as relatives and friends bought or moved into better housing, the Murdocks joined them.(34) Other migrant families also appeared to have made housing choices based on household connections and needs. This suggests that class and family ties, in addition to race, shaped decisions in subtle ways.(35) Sallie Hopson's father worked for the railroad on the westside, but her mother insisted on living near other newly arrived relatives and friends from Georgia on the eastside.(36)

While some migrants felt like intruders in neighborhoods that had been exclusively immigrant, other evidence suggests that, at least on an informal and neighborhood level, blacks often had cordial and even deeply intimate social relationships with other groups. Despite the increased concentration of black migrants in particular neighborhoods, Cleveland's near eastside had large populations of Jewish and Italian immigrants, two groups who faced housing prohibitions as well. Indeed, while 90 percent of the black population resided in the Central Area by 1930, tens of thousands of working-class immigrants lived there as well.(37) The common experiences of migration and immigration, along with inadequate housing and irregular employment, forged connections between blacks and their immigrant neighbors. Elmer Thompson remembered that "Cleveland seemed like a foreign country - everybody was speaking Italian or [Yiddish]." He jokingly noted that each time a boat or train arrived, more relatives came to live with immigrants or blacks.(38)

Women often acted as links in cross-cultural exchange as they canned vegetables, shared produce from gardens, and exchanged homemade wine in a mutual effort to stretch limited household budgets. Women shared childcare and the endless effort to keep rundown homes clean. Some black migrants relied on personal relationships with immigrant landlords to keep rents lower, or to gain access to better housing and jobs. Migrant and immigrant children regularly played together on the streets, even as schools and clubs run by social welfare agencies became more segregated along racial lines. These intimate relationships caused some black migrants to communicate with their neighbors in the immigrants' native tongue rather than English.(39)

Many African-American migrants created living arrangements to offset low wages, irregular employment and limited housing choices, but such choices highlight their desire to retain and recreate familial and communal connections, structures, and values.(40) Elizabeth Rauh Bethal has noted that in the rural South, migration patterns made black households quite elastic, as they expanded and contracted according to various needs.(41) Historians generally agree that both the long-distance migration and increased urban residency that took place between 1880 and 1930 changed the size of black families and the configuration of black households. Households based on marital and blood ties predominated, but the presence of non-related members remained high, making the average number per household higher than for other groups.(42)

Though African Americans had a higher population of non-related people in their households, this along with their rapid movement into the urban north did not significantly change the structure of their families. Urban black households remained overwhelmingly headed by men.(43) Significantly, Kenneth Kusmer noted that between 1920 and 1930, the percentage of female-headed households rose only slightly higher than that of other groups, and nearly equaled the percentage of second-generation immigrants with female heads. The percentage of northern black female-headed households remained equal to or lower than the percentages in the urban South. Finally, the 1930 census for Cleveland showed only a 2 percent increase of black female-headed households in the city from the 1870 census. Black women who headed households were more frequently widowed, divorced, or deserted women and not women who had borne children out of wedlock.(44)

Though working-age black men predominated as heads of households and households typically included non-family members, the composition of these households were shaped by patterns of migration and a variety of economic and non-economic needs. The need to care for children and aging parents, for example, had to be balanced against a family's ability to stretch incomes; the desire to maintain family connections and to help kin moved blacks to create a variety of flexible housing arrangements. A close look at why and how African-American migrants pursued household arrangements will reveal a range of goals and values that informed their individual and collective decisions.

The particular need to care for children motivated some migrants to encourage either younger or older female relatives to join them.(45) First person narratives and social welfare records reveal that single black women with children found it especially difficult to work and they often had limited access to private and public charity. Instead, they needed to work for wages, which necessitated help with childcare, frequently drawing other family members from the South. Geneva Robinson left Hodges, South Carolina, in 1921, accompanied by her grandmother. The women's trip had been arranged by other family members in response to a cousin in Cleveland who needed to work, and requested household and child care help.(46) Ray Dennis was just four years old when his widowed father sent for him to come to Cleveland. Dennis' father turned to the sister of his father's brother's wife to accompany his son to the city and care for him. Once in Cleveland, Dennis lived with this woman and her family; a year later she became his step-mother.(47)

Without migrating themselves, many Southern blacks sent children north to take advantage of better education offered in Cleveland, necessitating some elaborate household arrangements. Families with older wage-earning children made calculated decisions to send younger children north to live with siblings or other relatives. In the late 1920s, fourteen year-old Linton Freeman and his twin brother left rural Alabama to attend high school in Cleveland. The two boys had three older sisters living in the city, all of whom were single and employed as live-in household workers. The arrival of the boys, however, necessitated the establishment of a permanent household. The boys lived alone, but their sisters moved in and out of the household on their days off. Until the boys finished school, they returned each summer to Alabama to help on their parents' farm, a common pattern for other migrants, too.(48) In 1923, young Margie Glass arrived from Alabama to visit her grandfather, but the visit soon became permanent because of the better schools. Later, three unmarried uncles arrived from other cities to join their father and niece in establishing a household. The presence of this household eventually drew other members of the family to the city.(49) In these and other instances, however, the move north meant that parents sometimes lost authority over their children.

Migrants without kin and friends in the city could not immediately form households. Few employers maintained company-owned bunkhouses for single black men; those who did have access to beds found the conditions crowded and deplorable. Charles E. Hall, supervisor of Negro Economics in Ohio during the war, reported that black men on the night shift typically returned to boarding houses maintained by large companies to sleep in beds "just vacated by the men going on the day shift."(50) Black women found it especially difficult to find affordable rooms. Contemporary observers generally agreed that regardless of race, most women could not live on their own because of low wages. But as the population of detached women living in Cleveland grew in the decade before the war, a number of low-cost boarding houses were constructed.(51)

Because of race and gender, however, single black women found most of these boarding houses closed to them. In 1905, young and single Jane Edna Hunter arrived in Cleveland with little money and few palatable options for housing. Her first tentative inquiry led her "unknowingly [to] the door of a house of prostitution." After a prolonged search, Hunter finally found a place that consumed most of her weekly wages; she had to pay extra for laundry and gas privileges, or clean the place in exchange. Women rarely had access to bathing facilities and instead turned to the dangerously unsanitary public bathhouses. Hunter concluded what other women soon discovered that "a girl alone in a large city must . . . know the dangers and pitfalls awaiting her."(52) She eventually found temporary accommodations when she received a job as a live-in nurse; when her patient got better, Hunter soon found herself once again without a respectable place to live.(53)

Educated in racial uplift at Hampton Institute, Hunter later established the Phillis Wheatley Association in 1911. The PWA provided temporary, inexpensive lodging for single black women and helped them find work. How much Hunter battled against a restrictive labor market is unclear, but she primarily placed black women in household work.(54) As executive secretary, she fused accommodationism with the new professions of social welfare and personnel management. Throughout the 1920s, Hunter repeatedly sought to train efficient household workers, instill habits of accommodation, and provide white women with inexpensive household workers. She pursued policies based on her beliefs that marriage and living-in with a "private family" were the most suitable options for unattached black women. Many women found it difficult to pay the board on meager salaries; many women also desired greater independence, finding Hunter's criteria for admittance too stringent and the PWA policies too intrusive in their private lives.(55)

Black women pursued day work in the 1920s because they found that the work conditions, particularly the low wages and long hours in household labor, undermined any advantages of living-in.(56) The majority rejected live-in positions for a variety of reasons, but many cited their desire to live in the black community. Because a significant portion of black women wage workers had households of their own, they found that the long hours, close proximity to employers and the distance from the black community inhibited care of their households and families. For Emma Thomas, live-in work prevented spending holidays with her children. Similarly, single women found that live-in work isolated them from the black community. Bertha Cowan wanted to be close to friends, church activities, and social events during time off. By the mid-1920s increasing numbers of white employers did not have room or money for live-in domestic workers.(57)

Boarding arrangements provided black households and single migrants a variety of opportunities and relationships not offered by employers. Unattached migrants, in particular, rented rooms in black homes that needed extra income. A 1919 investigation of thirty families by the local Urban League found that twenty-two depended on boarders who paid $2 to $5 per week for a shared room. By 1930, over one-third of black households had boarders, compared to less than ten percent for native-born white and seventeen percent of immigrant households. The arrangements in African-American households arose partly from the economic need to offset higher rents and precarious employment through paying household members.(58) Given the prevalence of boarding in black households, scholars have established the variety of economic roles non-related household members played, and have now turned their attention to the non-economic roles they may have occupied.(59)

For some families, the presence of newly arrived migrants provided more than much needed income. Many migrants missed the patterns of visiting, reciprocity, and familiarity of Southern households; they eagerly welcomed visitors from the South. In one household for almost two decades a parade of boarders passed through, some related, others merely friends and acquaintances. These boarders provided companionship for a family homesick for the rhythms of Southern visiting patterns, and few of the sojourners paid rent. Conversely, leaving kin in the South and arriving alone in a city was often emotionally traumatic for migrants. Some eased these difficulties through the creation of surrogate families that sometimes grew out of economic relationships forged through boarding. Older women in particular became absorbed into households as fictive aunts, godmothers, and grandmothers, to help care for children and allow mothers to work for wages outside the home. These fictive ties appear to have subtly shifted relationships which began as economic exchanges. In turn, these new relationships enabled the exchange of monetary and household help during times of unemployment.(60) Thus, impersonal economic ties transformed to include emotional and reciprocal ties of surrogate family.

Census data alone do not capture the complexities and subtleties in African-American household and family arrangements which emerged in the wake of migration. Indeed, what census enumerator could recreate the route and meanings of family ties and boarding relationships in the Davenport household from one census to the next? William Davenport left Montgomery, Alabama, in 1919 to work in a Cleveland foundry. On his arrival he settled with his father's brother and wife, both of whom had migrated some years earlier. By 1923 the household included not only Davenport, but pregnant and recently widowed Ocelie Johnson and her two small children as well. This expanded household, however, was apparently not simply an impersonal economic arrangement: Johnson had known the family of Davenport's uncle's wife. By 1924, Johnson had married William Davenport.(61)

Children old enough to work sometimes minimized the need to take in boarders, provided a safety net during periods of parents' unemployment and kept some black mothers out of wage employment. In a recent analyses of the differences between black and immigrant working-class households before 1930, Robert Griswold asserts that black parents encouraged their children to be independent more than immigrant parents did. Griswold points to the greater economic deprivation of African Americans generally and that black parents had little to offer their children except these values. Evidence from Cleveland suggests that this conclusion needs reassessment, taking into account the process of and purposes behind migration. Black parents encouraged their children both to attend school and have a job; this dual expectation simultaneously instilled work habits and family economic intradependence. Elmer Thompson and his siblings began to work at a young age, but their parents insisted that they attend school as long as possible.(62) These experiences suggest that the presence of wage-earning children was fundamental to the maintenance of the household, instilling habits of hard work and economic intradependence, while simultaneously reinforcing parental authority.

Once in the city, migrants hoped to return home for visits, but many found this goal to be impossible. Because of their higher incomes, middle-class migrants often had more opportunities to travel south, as seen in the social pages of the city's black newspapers. Earl Lewis, in his study of life and work in Norfolk, Virginia, calls the retention of these patterns "adaptive strategies" that enabled African Americans to make the transition between rural and urban living less abrupt.(63) The trip from Cleveland to the South, however, was of a much greater distance and therefore more expensive. Because many migrants had tight budgets, many could not make frequent visits "down South" to visit loved ones. The sudden death or illness of a loved one made the grief and sense of distance all the more difficult. Conversely, some migrants died alone in the city, with only a church society providing for a burial.

The inability to visit reinforced many migrants' desire to seek a variety of ways to retain ties to family members still in the South. Many worked and saved with the hope to make at least one trip home. Willa Davenport Thomas recalled that her mother, Ocelie Johnson Davenport, could not afford frequent trips home to see relatives, but she and her other sisters helped to insure that at least one of them made a trip. They also pooled their resources and brought their aging mother north. Willa Thomas only saw her grandmother once, but the many richly detailed stories that her mother recounted about family members reinforced family connections.(64) Taking and sending pictures became an urgent means to document family and instill memories. The brisk business that Allan Cole and other black photographers acquired in the 1920s testifies to the ways in which black Clevelanders marked and maintained family.(65)

Many adults found it difficult to return to the South, but they often sent their children instead. The continued presence of relatives in the South meant that many children were sent to stay during the summer months, providing parents with child care and relatives with much needed labor. The experience of Linton Freeman and his brother, both of whom returned to their parents' farm each summer to help with the planting and harvesting, was not uncommon. Their regular return home suggests the economics behind the return to the South.

Those migrants who returned to the South viewed their trips as a paradoxical reminder of what had been left behind: loved relatives and hated jim crow. Thus visits "Down South" could be fraught with ambiguity.(66) Migrants left the South to escape segregation, and thus many were unwilling to return, even for short periods. Henry Pointer's mother, for example, "never lost anything after leaving Nashville, Tennessee. She never went to visit relatives."(67) Others insisted, instead, that relatives visit Cleveland, often with the hope that the visit might become permanent.

Within this context, migrants made great efforts to maintain their southern connections in Cleveland. Some sustained links by living close to relatives who also migrated. S. Davis recalled that the people on her block had lived in the same town in Alabama. Patricia Ashford's relatives lived in apartments in a building owned by a relative. After each family found a home, another family of relatives arrived from Bessemer, Alabama, and they, too, moved in to start the process of settlement. This practice began before World War I and continued until the 1960s. But shared blood ties and origins moved beyond residential proximity and included the retention of southern values and practices around kinship obligations. Families continued to take and raise each other's children and it was not uncommon for people from the same place to marry one another after arrival in the city. They joined the same social organizations and became members of the same churches where migrants quickly organized Southern state clubs. All of these associations became an important part of establishing ties in the North and retaining ties to the South. These social organizations created around household, neighborhood, church and work connection, recreated emotional ties previously filled by families. Though Henry Pointer's mother never willingly returned to the South, she sought other migrants from Nashville. Through these new relationships, migrants re-established support networks and retained their sense of southernness.(68)

The process of migration and the distance from kin in the South tested familial relationships, often resulting in altered, severed, or new perceptions of family relationships and connections. As numerous studies have shown, individuals within black families often occupied gendered roles, with women perceived as caretakers and men as wage-earning heads of households.(69) In the northern context, however, black men and women frequently encountered new demands as workers and caretakers, altering previous productive and social reproductive relations. While the care of children was often the work of women, migration thrust many men into similar roles. Some men became the sole caretakers of children sent by family members in the South to attend school in Cleveland. In 1923, young Margie Glass arrived from Alabama to visit her grandfather, but the visit soon became permanent. Later, three unmarried uncles arrived from other cities to join their father and niece in establishing a household.(70) During times of prolonged unemployment, some men took on the care of children and households as women turned to wage labor. These varied examples suggest that the differing experiences of caring for children as work must be more carefully examined.(71)

In more subtle ways, many black men carefully weighed job choices in relationship to the needs of their children. In a study on Boston, Elizabeth Pleck found that black men had a higher rate of being absent from their households because of their more limited job opportunities, though black men with young children were the least likely to leave.(72) Robert Griswold has noted that more than immigrant working-class fathers, black men were more likely to be shadowy figures in their children's lives. Kenneth Kusmer has noted that black men had a greater rate of occupational stability in Cleveland than did black men in other cities.(73) On the other hand, numbers of black men found that work in the steel mills, though higher paying than other jobs, could also be sporadic. Just how the needs of a family may have impacted job choices, migration and work patterns may never be clearly revealed, but first person narratives are nonetheless suggestive. Black men expressed a great deal of grief when they had to leave their children to find work. Elmer Thompson recalled that his father quit a well-paying, year-round job as an asphalt layer because it demanded he leave his children for extended periods of time. Other black men made similar choices, choosing jobs in the service and transportation trades which sometimes provided steady employment, which they viewed in relation to the needs of their families.(74)

The 1920s' economy in Cleveland periodically put many black men out of work, necessitating married black women's movement in and out of paid work. Though many married African-American men insisted that their wives not work for wages, the experience of black male unemployment meant that this goal often got renegotiated. Henry Pointer's mother, for example, insisted in 1925 that her husband buy a Maytag washer instead of a "shiny black Ford." Her fear of losing her husband's wages proved prescient: suddenly widowed four years later and left with two small children, she stayed at home and used the washing machine to do the nurses' uniforms from a hospital near her home. Many black women became the primary wage earners in their households, despite the presence of husbands and sons, necessitating new reproductive relationships.(75)

The move north and the creation of new family networks enabled some black women to redefine their roles as daughters, wives and mothers. As Darlene Clark Hine has noted, some black women found that family migration provided them an opportunity to free themselves from the abuse in households in the South.(76) Undoubtedly, the experiences of Flowree Robinson were not uncommon. Estranged from her husband and left to care for her children on her own, Robinson found that the migration of her brother, gave her new choices. Moreover, as with Robinson, the earlier departure of other family members provided many women with the financial and emotional support necessary to leave the South. Others had little more than family support, but even the encouragement and relatives' willingness to take care of children was enough to propel many abandoned or abused women northward.(77)

For some women, paying jobs encouraged reassessment of marital and maternal roles. Pressured to protect her propriety, vaudeville performer Carrie Davenport married another performer. Although unhappy for several years, she did not end the marriage until she arrived in Cleveland. Davenport's decision appears to have been motivated by her ability to acquire steady work, which gave her a new economic autonomy previously unrealized.(78) Another woman, however, did not have such an easy time extricating herself from a marriage: when she announced the intention to depart once she arrived in the city, her husband stabbed and killed her.(79) Some women left children with relatives and went in search of the highest wages elsewhere. Others abandoned children and simply disappeared, only to be found later, traveling from one northern city to another.(80)

In many instances, migration reinforced familial roles based on gender and age. Distance and the inability to visit did not diminish grown children's emotional and financial obligations to parents. Myrtle Wiggins, for example, wanted to marry, but her aging and ill parents required frequent care. Because she was the only child, Wiggins called off her engagement and moved her parents from Birmingham to Cleveland. In addition, she changed her work, moved closer to a street-car line, and ceased to travel with a musical group.(81) Gender hierarchy did not allow William Murdock's mother an opportunity to dispute or prevent her husband's decision to migrate. Murdock recalled that his mother "was displeased about leaving a good home in Montgomery and moving to Cleveland." He recalled that while she did not openly quarrel with her husband about the move, her anger "was reflected in her thinking a long time." On the other hand, Murdock's mother appreciated that the move allowed her children to have a better education and perhaps her sense of providing for them, a sensibility that her husband shared, united them in the end.(82)

Migration sustained, rather than severed, economic obligations and emotional connections between family members. Again the claim of some historians, who have noted that unlike immigrants African Americans learned economic independence from parents because of their more limited resources, needs reassessment.(83) While low wages often limited what adult children might offer parents or siblings, evidence shows that many sought, when possible, to offer money and other resources. Chain migration brought family members to the same or nearby cities precisely because they could share resources. Louise Pattengal's mother and two brothers followed Louise's father from Birmingham to Pittsburgh in 1916, though he died not long after. Pattengal's mother struggled to provide for her family, depending on her two teenage sons' wages from the mills. The death of one son forced the mother to think about returning to the South; her mother's sister and family had migrated from Birmingham to Cleveland, however, and Louise and her mother soon joined them. Though the house was crowded, family became all "those who lived together" and both families shared their resources, enabling Louise to complete high school and her family to stay together. Pattengal's family did not sever emotional ties to those still in the South - they maintained these connections through letters. Louise's mother and her sister maintained an interdependence, sustaining ties throughout their adult lives.(84)

The strain of finding work and reestablishing a life in Cleveland frayed the bonds of some families. For some men, the inability to find work and maintain a sense of dignity often led to marital strain and dissolution. Langston Hughes' mother and step-father went through years of upheaval due to the difficulty of maintaining a household in a period of economic precariousness. Similar strains were apparent in the marriage of Chester Himes' parents; both became bitterly disappointed to discover the continuities of racial relations characteristic of the South in a northern setting. After years of unhappiness, they separated. Repeated unemployment led some men to disappear.(85)

Though historians agree that African-American migration during the first half of the twentieth century was more than an economic response to poverty and was also a social and political movement, we have yet to fully document the behavior and choices migrants made about their lives outside workplaces. Black migrants' efforts to form and sustain households in the urban north extended patterns established in the Black South, where heavy migration between rural and urban areas began before 1915. Historians have argued that the shape of black households has been impacted by the economic needs. But the patterns of household formation, kin and friend relationships that developed in Cleveland also emerged out of economic and non-economic goals and values. While black households often mediated the vagaries of the economy, we need to more fully appreciate the non-economic priorities of migrants and how these goals affected their creation of households and notions of family obligations, which frequently had to be fulfilled over a distance.

The oral narratives of black migrants in Cleveland reveal myriad ways in which family networks were recast during and after migration. Some black families expanded to include extended family and friends; others created new definitions of family, as distance made it impossible to continue patterns of reciprocity established in the South. Family and friend networks encouraged and supported African-Americans' move north, and provided for them once they arrived in the city. While the expansion and contraction of these networks suggest the range of economic strategies African Americans created to meet their needs, other goals, such as the care and education of children, the aid and support offered to adult siblings, the use of boarding to fill social and emotional needs, the desire to be near kin and friends from the South, and the need to continue cultural patterns of visiting, also significantly influenced black household formation. The effort to more fully integrate the range of migrants' experiences in this process suggests that historians need to more fully explore the differing roles of black men, women and children. This task necessitates greater attention to the differences and similarities gender played for migrants, as well as attention to age and time of migration. To do so would give further insight into the complicated connections that black migrants maintained across the miles and the new ones they created once they arrived in the urban north.

Department of History Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795

ENDNOTES

1. Emmett J. Scott, "Additional Letters of Negro Migrants," Journal of Negro History 4 (1919): 460-61.

2. Personal interview with Flowree Robinson, November 29, 1989.

3. Darlene Clark Hine, "Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: the Gender Dimension, 1915-1945," in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender, eds., Joe William Trotter, Jr. and Peter Gottlieb, (Urbana, 1991), 133.

4. Ibid., 134.

5. Trotter and Gottlieb, eds., The Great Migration; James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989); Carole Marks, Farewell - We're Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington, IN, 1989); Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburgh (Urbana, 1987); Joe William Trotter, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (Urbana, 1985).

6. Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way; Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley, 1991); Hine, "Black Migration to the Urban Midwest"; Shirley Ann Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The Black Community in Richmond, California (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming); Kimberley L. Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945 (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).

7. Joe W. Trotter, Jr., "African Americans in the City: The Industrial Era, 1900-1950," Journal of Urban History 21 (May 1995): 452.

8. Robert L. Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York, 1993), 69-77; Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986); Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven, 1985); Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York, 1985).

9. See the following in this extensive literature: Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750-1920 (New York, 1976); Michael Katz, ed., The Underclass Debate: Views From History (Princeton, 1993); Andrea G. Hunter, "Making a Way: Strategies of Southern Urban African-American Families, 1900 and 1936," Journal of Family History 18 (Summer, 1993): 231-248; Henry M. McKiven, "The Household Composition of Working Class Families in the Birmingham District, 1900," Southern History 6 (1985): 40-52; Claudia Goldin, "Family Strategies and the Family Economy in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Role of Secondary Workers," in Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experiences in the Late Nineteenth Century, ed. Theodore Hershberg (New York, 1981), 277-310.

10. Harold C. Livesy, "From Steeples to Smokestacks: The Birth of the Modern Corporation in Cleveland," in The Birth of Modern Cleveland, eds., Thomas F. Campbell and Edward M. Miggens, (WRHS, 1988), 54-62; John Grabowski and David Van Tassel, eds., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland, (Cleveland, 1987); Cleveland, Some of the Features of the Industry and Commerce of the City (Cleveland, 1917), 18; 34-35.

11. David Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860-1915 (Urbana, 1976); Kenneth Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana, 1976); Kimberley L. Phillips, "Heaven Bound: Black Migration, Community, and Activism, Cleveland, 1915-1945," (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1992), chapter 2.

12. Kusmer, Ghetto, 190-205; for a particular focus on gender and black women's employment experiences between 1915-1929, see Phillips, "Heaven Bound," chapter 2.

13. Kusmer, Ghetto, 157-173; Phillips, "Heaven Bound," Chapter 2; U.S. Department of Commerce, Negroes in the United States 1920-1932 (Washington, D.C., 1935), 55.

14. United States, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), 1084; United States, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Population 4 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932), 1085-1087. Kusmer, Ghetto, 160-161, see fn.6. Kenneth Kusmer used the increase of the black school population from 5,078 in April, 1921, to 7,430 in October, 1923 to suggest that the black population overall may have have grown by 50 percent during these years.

15. See Phillips, Alabama North.

16. Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out, African American Domestics in Washington, D. C., 1910-1940 (Washington, D. C., 1994), 62; Joe William Trotter, Jr., Coal, Class,and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia 1915-1932 (Urbana, 1990), 63-101; Elizabeth Rauh Bethal, Promiseland, A Century of Life in a Negro Community (Philadelphia, 1981). Also see the numerous oral narratives such as Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York, 1974); and Sara Brooks, You May Plow Here: The Narrative of Sara Brooks, Thordis Simonsen, ed. (New York, 1986).

17. Lewis, In Their Own Interests, 86; M. Davis, "Davis Family Oral History," (unpublished undergraduate essay, Cleveland State University, 1988).

18. For an important framing of chain migration, see Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way, 49-51.

19. Clark-Lewis, Living-in, Living Out, 79-82; Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way, 46-49.

20. Hine, "Black Migration to the Urban Midwest," 132.

21. Interview with Bertha Cowan, St. James A. M. E., January 16, 1987, St. James A. M. E. Oral History Project, Western Reserve Historical Society.

22. Patricia Blackmon, "The Black Railroad Worker," (Unpublished undergraduate essay, Cleveland State University), 3-4.

23. John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 (Urbana, 1982), 91.

24. Dona Gallo Brady, "The History and Development of the West Park Black Community," (unpublished essay, in Second Calvary Baptist Church, unprocessed manuscript, WRHS); Blackmon, "The Black Railroad Worker."

25. Interview with Bertha Cowan; Interview with Marie Crawford, St. James A. M. E.; Sara Brooks, You May Plow Here, 196-197.

26. Interview with Sallie Hopson, St. James A. M. E., August 26, 1986; personal interview with Willa Thomas, December 1, 1989.

27. Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War, (New York, 1920, r. 1969), 148-149; Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, An Investigation of Housing Conditions of War Workers in Cleveland (Cleveland, 1918); Ronald R. Weiner, "A History of Civic Land Use Decision Making in the Cleveland Metropolitan Area, 1880-1930," (unpublished manuscript, WRHS, 1974), 257-66; 277-79; Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, Meeting of the Directors of the Cleveland Real Estate and Housing Committee, July 11, 1918, Records of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, WRHS. The Cleveland Chamber of Commerce sent out questionnaires inquiring if companies would be interested in investing in housing for their employees. Out of 138 responses, only 10 companies said they made efforts to secure housing for their employees.

28. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York, 1941), 27.

29. Cleveland Urban League, "Report of Executive Secretary, April 9th to May 6th, 1919," Cleveland Urban League Records, WRHS; Monthly Labor Review 9 (July 1919): 260-262; V. Davis, "Family Oral History."

30. Edward Miggins and Mary Morgenthaler, "The Ethnic Mosaic: The Settlement of Cleveland by the New Immigrants and Migrants," in The Birth of Modern Cleveland, 129.

31. Howard Whipple Green, A Study of the Movement of the Negro Population of Cleveland (Cleveland, 1924), 14-15; also see Eleanor K. Caplan, Non-White Residential Patterns: Analysis of Changes in the Non-white Residential Patterns in Cleveland, Ohio, from 1910-1959 (Cleveland, 1959), 6.

32. Larry Cuban, "A Strategy For Racial Peace: Negro Leadership in Cleveland, 1900-1919," Phylon 28 (Fall 1967): 301.

33. Interview with William H. Murdock, St. James A. M. E., September 19, 1986.

34. Ibid.

35. Personal interview with Jean Murrel Capers, August 8, 1991; interview with Hazel Murray Burnett, St. James A. M. E., January 11, 1987.

36. Interview with Sallie Hopson, St. James A. M. E, August 26, 1986.

37. Green, A Study of the Movement of the Negro Population of Cleveland.

38. Interview with Elmer Thompson, Cleveland Heritage Project, February 1981, Cleveland Public Library.

39. Personal interview with Natalie Middleton, February 21, 1989; Personal interview with Willa Davenport Thomas, December 2, 1989; Personal interview with Beatrice Stevens Cockrell, September 27, 1991; Interview with Henry Pointer, St. James A. M. E., October 30, 1986; Edward M. Miggens, "Oral History and Multicultural Education: Finding Our Place in the Global Village," in Communities of Memory: Oral History, Ethnic Folklore, and Multicultural Education, Edward M. Miggens, ed., (forthcoming), 28-29. One African-American recalled his neighborhood as "white and colored . . . mixed together . . . We all lived together." When he was a child, this man's parents rented an apartment from a German immigrant who also taught him German. "When I got older they took me to school. The teacher looked at me and talked to me, but I wouldn't answer. . . . She called my mother, 'He won't answer, he won't talk.' My mother said to her, 'Well, I did forget to tell you one thing - he doesn't understand English.' My mother said she knew German . . . and I heard my folks talk English, but they never said anything to me. I always talked German." (Quoted in Miggens, 28-29).

40. This argument has been shaped by Kusmer's call for the consideration of the relationship between external forces and internal forces. See Kusmer, "The Black Urban Experience in American History," in Darlene Clark Hine, ed. The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future (Baton Rouge, 1986), 105-106.

41. Bethel, Promiseland, 119.

42. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985), 112-123.

43. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 432; Bethel, Promiseland, 127; Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., Theodore Hershberg, and John Modell, "The Origins of the Female-Headed Black Family: The Impact of the Urban Experience," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1975): 211-233. For a classic study on the perceived social and cultural deficiencies in the black family, see E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago, 1939).

44. Kusmer, Ghetto, 224-225; Fifteenth Census, 1930. Feminists have long eschewed the scholarly preoccupation with the focus on who heads a family, or household, which obfuscates the issue of gender economic parity. See, for example, Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Our Mothers' Grief: Racial Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families," Journal of Family History 13 (1988): 415-431; James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington Family, Community, Religion and Folklife in the City, 1850-1970 (Urbana, 1982), 65. James Borchert has cautioned historians to avoid playing the "historical numbers game" to determine which group had higher rates of female-headed households. He has suggested, instead, that historians turn their attention to the various forms households took in the urban arena as well as how these households "related to one another" in such close proximity. His own work has pointed out the limitations of using census data collected in ten-year increments. He documented how respondents often used terms of relation to describe non-related members of a household. Moreover, questions that were replete with assumptions of "normality" often received responses based not on reality but on perceived ideas of what the interviewer might have wanted to hear.

45. Elizabeth Clark Lewis found this pattern in Washington, D. C., see Living In, Living Out, 79-83.

46. Interview with Geneva Robinson, St. James A.M.E, November 4, 1986.

47. Personal interview with Ray Dennis, September 27, 1989.

48. Personal interview with Linton Freeman, March 7, 1991.

49. Interview with Margie Glass, St. James A.M.E.

50. Charles E. Hall, "Report from the Supervisor of Negro Economics," in George Haynes, The Negro at Work During the World War and Reconstruction (Washington, D.C., 1921), 114.

51. Consumers' League of Ohio, "Report on Housing Survey Made by the Boarding Homes Commission, Cleveland Girls Council" (Cleveland, c. 1926); for the problems black women faced as boarders, see Jane Edna Hunter, A Nickle and a Prayer, (Cleveland, 1940); Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Wage-Earning Women Apart From the Family in Chicago (Chicago, 1988), 73-74 and 80-82.

52. Hunter, A Nickel and a Prayer, 70, 77.

53. Ibid., 150-165.

54. Hunter received sharp criticism that the PWA provided little more than a "jane crow" employment agency. She made much of the fact that the majority of the employment agencies showed little concern for the plight of black women. Publicly she countered such criticism by claiming that the PWA provided important services in a restricted labor market and trained future black housewives. Although reluctant to admit that the PWA supplied white women with black household workers, Hunter nonetheless viewed the ready supply of unemployed black women as a means to solve white women's demand for household labor. At the same time, Hunter sought to alleviate some of the financial problems that constantly plagued the PWA by forming a relationship with wealthy white women interested in trained live-in servants. See: Adrienne Lash Jones, Jane Edna Hunter: A Case Study of Black Leadership, 1910-1959 (New York, 1990), 111-113. For an extended discussion of Hunter and her labor policies, see Phillips, "Heaven Bound," chapter 2.

55. Jones, Jane Edna Hunter, 35-58; Personal interview with Natalie Middleton; personal interview with Josephus Hicks, November, 1990. Hunter admitted that she "kept a vigilant ear at the switchboard in my office to catch conversations of a doubtful character, and to intercept assignations." Such diligence also led her to "sometimes follow couples to places of assignations, rescue the girl, and assist in the arrest of her seducer (128-129)."

56. Equally important, black women also rejected live-in work because it so closely resembled personal relationships with whites in the South. Many women hoped that several employers, rather than one employer, would allow them flexibility in hours while at the same time minimize contact with work conditions that they found particularly distasteful. See Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out; David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York, 1978), viii; ix, 51-52, 87; Consumers' League of Ohio, "Findings of the Conference on 'The Problems of Domestic Work,"' May 7, 1925, Consumers' League of Ohio Records, WRHS; Elizabeth Ross Haynes, "Negroes in Domestic Service in the United States," Journal of Negro History 8 (1923): 395-98; Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, 27; Emma Thomas, interview, St. James A. M. E. Church, October 5, 1986. For an excellent discussion of the politics of relationships of household service see Tera W. Hunter, "Domination and Resistance: The Politics of Wage Household Labor in New South Atlanta," Labor History 34 (Spring-Summer): 205-220.

57. See Phillips, "Heaven Bound," chapter 2.

58. "Report of the Executive Secretary," April 9th to May 6th, 1919, Urban League Records, WRHS; Fifteenth Census, 1930.

59. For a tendency to overlook the non-economic roles, see John Bodnar, Michael West, and Roger Simon, "Migration, Kinship, and Urban Adjustment: Blacks and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1930," The Journal of American History 66 (December 1979): 548-565.

60. D. Clark, "Family Oral History," (unpublished undergraduate essay, Cleveland State University, nd); S. Davis, "Family Oral History (unpublished undergraduate essay, Cleveland State University, March, 1984); M. Davis, "Family Oral History," (unpublished undergraduate essay, Cleveland State University, 1988); V. Dulaney, "Family Oral History," (unpublished undergraduate paper, Cleveland State University, 1984). These patterns appear to duplicate patterns in other migrant communities. See Borchert, Alley Life, 157-99; and James Borchert, "Urban Neighborhood and Community: Informal Group Life, 1850-1970," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (Spring 1981): 620; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 189-190.

61. Personal interview with Willa Thomas, December 1, 1989.

62. Personal interview with Ruth Freeman, March 7, 1991.

63. See the Cleveland Gazette and the Cleveland Advocate; also, the weekly column, "The Buckeye State" in the Chicago Defender; Earl Lewis, "Afro-American Adaptive Strategies: The Visiting Habits of Kith and Kin Among Black Norfolkians During the First Great Migration," Journal of Family History 12 (1987): 409; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 432; personal interview with Linton Freeman; personal interview with Willa Davenport Thomas.

64. Personal interview with Willa Davenport Thomas.

65. Allen E. Cole Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society; personal interview with Willa Thomas; Samuel W. Black, "African American Photographers in Cleveland, 1920 to 1960," (unpublished article).

66. Personal interview with Beatrice Stevens Cockrell, September 28, 1991; Adrienne Kennedy, People Who Led to My Plays (New York, 1987), 33-34. As a child, playwright Adrienne Kennedy made yearly trips to her grandmother's home in Georgia. For Kennedy, these trips were fraught with contradictory emotions of visiting her dearly loved grandmother and encountering legal segregation. Her memory of these trips is worth quoting at length. "Although I loved my grandparents immensely, I hated the train ride to Georgia that my brother and I took every June, especially the ride from Cincinnati to Montezuma in the dirty Jim Crow car. . . . [My brother] was about seven then, and as soon as the train pulled out of the Cleveland Terminal Tower he started to cry and he cried all the way to Cincinnati. Night would come while we rode into the South and he cried with his head on my shoulder. . . . I tried to interest my brother in the magazine, but he kept sobbing, 'I want to go home.' I put my arm around my brother, looked out of the dirty double-paned windows and clutched the Modern Screen magazine with [Clark] Gable