1910: The First Great Migration
African Americans resisted Southern “Jim Crow” laws and moved north and west to escape them.
By 1910, white control of southern rural America, enforced by Jim Crow laws, made life for African Americans in the South intolerable. Hoping to find more freedom and better economic opportunity elsewhere, many African Americans moved with family and friends to the cities, especially northern cities and cities located in border states. This mass movement became known as the First Great Migration (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 23; Tolnay, 2003, p. 210). Sociologist Stewart Tolnay wrote of the tremendous impact of the Great Migration:
As the Great Migration proceeded, the South suffered substantial losses of its native-born black population, with over 2.5 million southern-born blacks living outside of the region by 1950 and over 4 million by 1980… Thus, in purely demographic terms, the Great Migration produced a dramatic geographic redistribution of the African American population. (p. 210)
As a Southern border city between the north and the south, St. Louis experienced an influx of African Americans during this period.
“[T]he African American population of the city of St. Louis grew from about twenty-two thousand in 1880 to almost seventy thousand in 1920” (Gordan, 2019, p. 8).
Map of Great Migration
Source: “The Great Migration,” Professor Caroline Mellinger
However, the increased African American presence in St. Louis was not welcomed and harsh zoning ordinances were established to control where Black families could live.
Campbell wrote that,
As in other Southern cities, [in St. Louis] African Americans could not live in white neighborhoods. Segregated neighborhoods provided the foundation for the separate schools and other separate public accommodations that were an essential aspect of the Jim Crow system (2013, p. 21).
As Southern Black families streamed into the city seeking to escape the Jim Crow laws of the south, they were met forced segregation. White communities, led by white political and business leaders, established rules and policies that strictly limited the access of Black people to many parts of the city and county (Cambria et al, 2018, p. 16). Black families were forced to live in areas north of what has become known as the Delmar Divide. White people lived south of the divide in the more desirable neighborhoods (Perry Abello, 2019, para. 3).
Unlike other U.S. cities, St. Louis became home to a higher number of African Americans during the first wave of the Great Migration. Such a sudden and large influx into an already racially charged environment created a strong backlash that “led the city to more aggressively impose segregation policies earlier in its development than other cities” (Cambria et al, 2018, p. 19). As Cambria et al noted, such an aggressive response was “particularly strong and damaging given their intensity and longevity” (p. 19).
The damage enacted through such segregation was not limited to housing. Along with limited housing came fewer resources offered to those living in these “Black ghettos.” Limited access to resources ”reproduce[d] unequal outcomes in health … housing, education, employment opportunities, transportation, and basic services. Access to all of these is patterned along segregated lines in St. Louis” (p. 7). While seeking to escape the deplorable living conditions of the South, many faced equally harsh choices in St. Louis.