Great Migration Lesson Plan
Central Historical Question:
Why did African Americans migrate to Newark
at the beginning of the 20th century?
Materials:
• Great Migration PowerPoint
• Copies of Documents A-E
• Copies of Guiding Questions
• Copies of Graphic Organizer
Plan of Instruction:
Note: Prior to this lesson, students should be familiar with Jim Crow laws,
sharecropping, and lynching. The PowerPoint slides do not provide comprehensive
information on these topics. Instead, these slides are intended to refresh students’
memories about these topics. If students are already well versed on these topics, this
background information can be skipped.
1. Introduction: Great Migration PowerPoint.
• Slide 2: Newark on a Map. We’re going to explore the dramatic movement of
African Americans from Southern states to Northern cities at the beginning of the
20th century. Although African Americans migrated to cities all across the country,
we’re going to focus on Newark, New Jersey, as a case study of the forces that
pushed and pulled African Americans to migrate. In order to understand why this
migration occurred, we first need to consider the historical context in which it took
place.
•
Slide 3: Disenfranchisement. In 1867, African American men voted for the first
time in the South. More than 1,500 African Americans were elected to office from
1865 to 1876. However, beginning in the late 1860s, white Southern vigilante
groups, most notably the Ku Klux Klan, used violence and intimidation to prevent
African Americans from voting. Poll taxes and grandfather clauses also
effectively disenfranchised freedmen and future generations of African
Americans.
•
Slide 4: Sharecropping. After emancipation, previously enslaved African
Americans sought employment, and Southern plantation owners sought cheap
labor. Laws barred African Americans in the South from most occupations other
than agricultural labor. Sharecropping became the dominant economic system in
Southern agriculture. In this system, landowners signed agreements with farmers
to work the land in exchange for a share of the harvested crop. Landowners or
local merchants often sold or leased farming supplies, such as seeds, fertilizer,
and farming tools to sharecroppers on credit. The sharecroppers would then
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repay the landowners after the crops were harvested. However, high interest
rates, unfair contracts, and unpredictable harvests often led sharecroppers to
become deeply indebted to landowners. Laws often made it difficult for
sharecroppers to sell their crops on the open market and prevented them from
moving if they were in debt. Approximately two-thirds of sharecroppers were
white and one-third were African American.
•
Slide 5: Jim Crow Laws. After Reconstruction, with federal oversight gone and
African Americans barred from the polls, state and local governments in the
American South enacted laws mandating racial segregation. These laws required
African Americans to use separate public facilities. In the Plessy v. Ferguson
decision of 1896, the Supreme Court upheld Louisiana’s segregation laws and
established the “separate but equal” doctrine, which held that segregation was
constitutional as long as the separate facilities were equal. In reality, facilities for
African Americans were grossly underfunded and far from equal.
•
Slide 6: Lynching. Lynching is a term used to describe a public killing carried out
by a mob. Following the end of the Civil War, lynching emerged as a tool to
intimidate freedmen and their supporters in the South. Although it is difficult to
track exactly how many individuals were lynched in the U.S. because there are
no official records of these illegal acts, estimates of the number of African
Americans lynched in the South range from three to four thousand. Lynching
victims were often falsely accused of committing a crime. Sometimes they were
accused of minor offenses, such as testifying against a white person or trying to
vote. Lynchings sometimes attracted hundreds of spectators and photographs
like this one were sometimes even sold as postcards.
•
Slide 7: Distribution of African American population in 1900. This map, produced
by the U.S. Census Bureau, depicts the distribution of African Americans in the
U.S. at the time of the 1900 census. At that time, the vast majority of African
Americans in the U.S. lived in Southern states.
•
Slide 8: The Great Migration. This began to change during World War I. During
the war, approximately half a million African Americans moved to urban areas in
the North. This trend grew during the following decades.
•
Slide 9: Newark’s Population. At the end of the 19th century, Newark began to
grow rapidly, as a variety of industries were established in the city. Between 1890
and 1920, the city’s population grew 129 percent.
•
Slides 10: Newark’s African American Population. As Newark’s population grew,
so did its African American population. However, you’ll notice that the African
American population grew particularly rapidly between 1910 and 1920.
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•
Slide 11: Central Historical Question. Today we are going to analyze a series of
historical documents in order to answer this question: Why did so many African
Americans migrate to Newark at the beginning of the 20th century?
2. Hand out Documents A and B and have students complete the corresponding
sections of the Guiding Questions and Graphic Organizer.
3. After students have completed the corresponding sections of the Guiding Questions
and Graphic Organizer, ask them to share their responses.
4. Hand out Document C and have students complete the corresponding section of the
Guiding Questions and Graphic Organizer.
5. After students have completed the corresponding section of the Guiding Questions
and Graphic Organizer, ask them to share their responses.
4. Hand out Documents D and E and have students complete the corresponding
sections of the Guiding Questions and the Graphic Organizer.
Note: You can listen to the audio recording of the interview in Document E at
https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/48881/
5. Whole class discussion:
•
What were some of the reasons African Americans migrated to Newark?
•
Which of those reasons had to do with Newark and which had to do with
conditions in the South?
•
Do all of the documents present a similar picture of conditions in Newark for
migrants? Why might they differ?
•
Which of the documents did you find to be the most credible sources for
understanding why African Americans migrated to Newark at the beginning of the
20th century?
•
What other documents would you want to examine to better answer this
question? What voices are missing from this document set?
6. Final writing assignment.
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Sources
Document A
Newark Sales and Advertising Co., Official guide and manual of the 250th anniversary
celebration of the founding of Newark, New Jersey, Newark, N.J.: 1916.
Retrieved from: http://lccn.loc.gov/17019460
Document B
Great Ship Plant Needs Steel Men, New York Times, October 22, 1917, p. 18.
Document C
Helen B. Pendleton, “Cotton Pickers in Northern Counties,” Survey, February 1917.
Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/surveyoctmar1917surv.
Document D
The Atlanta Constitution, Penalties of Migration, December 14, 1916.
Document E
Interview with Annie Rose Johnston, November 13, 1995, The Krueger-Scott Oral
History Collection, Rutgers University Libraries.
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