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Negro Migration during the War (Revised and Updated)

The Great Migration, Labor, and the South

By Emmett J. Scott; Edited by Elias Rowan Hartwell

Imprint: American Source Editions

Emmett J. Scott’s 1920 study follows the wartime movement of Black people from the South to northern, eastern, and midwestern cities. This edition preserves Scott’s evidence and period language while adding a critical orientation, chronology, glossary, reader context, and four supplied newspaper scans alongside Scott’s original migration map.

Publication status
Coming soon
Source publication
1920

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Negro Migration during the War

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What makes a family leave everything they know? During the First World War, Black Americans left the South in search of work, safety, and a different future. Letters carried news. Newspapers carried arguments. Railways carried families toward northern cities. But arrival did not end the struggle. In Negro Migration during the War, Emmett J. Scott gathers the voices, reports, and numbers behind a movement that reshaped America. Hear the account through an original documentary narrator and distinct quotation readings. A history of movement, told through its evidence. Negro Migration during the War. Written by Emmett J. Scott. Edited by Elias Rowan Hartwell. Published by Horn and Hickory Press.

About this edition

Emmett J. Scott’s study is both a report on wartime migration and a record of how the movement was explained in 1920. It gathers investigator reports, newspaper claims, migrant testimony, tables, and arguments about labor, violence, education, policing, and public policy. The book’s numbers are important but uneven. Scott repeatedly warns that rural movement is difficult to count and that estimates drawn from cities, employers, churches, newspapers, and officials do not measure the same population. The edition therefore keeps competing figures visible rather than converting them into one falsely exact total. The supplied archive adds a modernized web edition, Scott’s map, and four newspaper pages. The print and ebook derivative preserves the historical source text while treating those additions as clearly labeled editorial and documentary material. Black newspapers and migrant letters are read as evidence of agency and debate, not as decorative supplements to an institutional report.

Source edition
Emmett J. Scott’s 1920 Oxford University Press edition, from Project Gutenberg ebook 29501 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29501). The historical chapters, tables, notes, bibliography, and index are retained, with documented corrections and new editorial context. Scott’s migration map and four contemporary newspaper pages are identified as documentary supplements.
Source publication
1920
Topics
Negro Migration during the War, Emmett J. Scott, Great Migration, Black migration 1916 1919, African American labor history, World War I home front
Source basis
Emmett J. Scott’s 1920 Oxford University Press edition, from Project Gutenberg ebook 29501 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29501). The historical chapters, tables, notes, bibliography, and index are retained, with documented corrections and new editorial context. Scott’s migration map and four contemporary newspaper pages are identified as documentary supplements.
Edition by
American Source Editions, Horn & Hickory

Contents

  1. Edition notice
  2. A Movement Measured Through Testimony and Power
  3. How to read this edition
  4. Reader context
  5. Figures and documentary evidence
  6. Foreword
  7. Chapter I: Introduction
  8. Chapter II: Causes of the Migration
  9. Chapter III: Stimulation of the Movement
  10. Chapter IV: The Spread of the Movement
  11. Chapter V: The Call of the Self-Sufficient North
  12. Chapter VI: The Draining of the Black Belt
  13. Chapter VII: Efforts to Check the Movement
  14. Chapter VIII: Effects of the Movement on the South
  15. Chapter IX: The Situation in St. Louis
  16. Chapter X: Chicago and Its Environs
  17. Chapter XI: The Situation at Points in the Middle West
  18. Chapter XII: The Situation at Points in the East
  19. Chapter XIII: Remedies for Relief by National Organizations
  20. Chapter XIV: Public Opinion Regarding the Migration
  21. Bibliography
  22. Index
  23. Edition apparatus

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