The Immigration of Freedmen from South to North

In considering all of the immigrant groups that comprise the United States of America, it is interesting to me to consider that there is a group that went through 2 complete phases of the immigration experience.  African Americans experienced their first complete phase when they were forced to America for slavery.  Their second phase occurred when they were suddenly freed and many moved to the North to escape the ongoing tyranny of white Southerners who still supported slavery.  I will concentrate on the second phase: that of immigration to the North and assimilation to the new Northern culture.

            Before slaves were freed, they had to undertake a very dangerous journey of escape from the Old World (the South) to the New World (The North).  Many of them escaped via the Underground Railroad, through a series of safe-houses that provided temporary shelter and hiding from authorities and slave hunters.  Once in the North, slaves could still be caught and sent back to their Southern owners.  Knowing this, I was curious in how things changed for the slaves once they were officially freed by the government.  I expected to find that the way north became much more open to them and that most slaves took advantage of the opportunity to assimilate and make a new life in the New World of the North.  However, what I expected was not always what I found to be the case.

            Considering class Objective 2, the journey for freedmen (former slaves) followed all the basic stages 1–3 quite succinctly.  One thing that surprised me in my research was that most freedmen did not even begin stage 1.  That is, they never left the Old World of the South.  According to John Smith, author of Black Voices from Reconstruction, “The vast majority of the freedpeople refused to leave the South.  It was the land of their slave ancestors and the only land they knew” (87). 

Those who did choose to go faced a long and costly journey.  They undertook the journey, like most immigrants before them, to escape an oppressive past and to forge a new life in the North.  Other than that, there is little information regarding stage 2, the journey to the New World.  Compared to pre-emancipation, when former slaves were hunted, arrested, tortured, killed, and returned to their owners, post-emancipation journeys seem to have been of little interest.  After emancipation, there really was no legal way to stop a freedman from traveling north.  The journey would have been long, but not nearly as dangerous, and probably not as eventful, as in the past.  One point that did surprise me regarding stage 2 is that the New World was not always in the North.  For some freedmen, the New World was in the West.  In 1879, approximately 15,000 former slaves immigrated to Kansas (Smith, 85).  In fact, so many people went to the West that they were named “Exodusters.”  Apparently, they never achieved great riches in Kansas, but did achieve their coveted freedom.

Once in the North, slaves took to freedom almost immediately.  Often, the first thing they did was change their names (Levine, 60).  This was a symbol of their new life and a denial of the names they were given by their masters when they were slaves.  This is similar to what other immigrants did when they came to America.  Names were “Americanized” to symbolize a new life in a new world, and to throw off the old identities of the Old World. 

I had a very naïve idea that once in the North, freedmen were accepted and able to live out their lives as white men’s equals.  One of the books I read simplistically said that “free blacks found jobs, earned money, and raised their families” (Levine, 61).  Although this may have been the case in absolute terms, and may still be widely believed, none of that came easily to freedmen who immigrated to the North.  Stage 3, especially regarding exploitation and discrimination is represented abundantly in the research information that I found.  Freedmen in the North still faced much discrimination.  Although most northerners officially endorsed freedom for the black people, they did not necessarily support equality.  Like most immigrants, blacks faced a period of assimilation.  Changing their names and taking on jobs is evidence that the freedmen were willing to assimilate to Northern culture.  However, unlike most other immigrant groups, freedmen had dark skin.  While they were willing to assimilate, many whites refused to accept their assimilation.  Harriet Jacobs, a former slave mentioned in Seth Stern’s article, went so far as to say that the “dominant race” did not even care about the “blood they were crushing out of trampled hearts” with their bigotry and discrimination (Stern).  Blacks were denied civil rights, were segregated in most public places, and were often denied access to public transportation (Race-based legislation).  As a result, many freedmen did what other immigrants had done.  They began to develop racial enclaves within major northern cities.  They “founded their own churches, schools, and orphanages.  They created mutual aid societies to provide financial assistance to those in need” (Race-based legislation).

One other unexpected thing that I uncovered was individual slave narratives.  Many freedmen wrote or dictated the things they experienced once free.  Because my research was initially only to include freedmen immigration as a group, the individual narratives did not fit the scope of my project.  However, I think it would be interesting to do further study in the future that would include those narratives. 

Although immigration of freedmen is different from other immigrants in that the former slaves migrated within the same country, the journey north entailed all of the stages of the classical immigrant story.  Freedmen left the Old World (the South) to escape persecution.  They journeyed to the New World (the North) and attempted to assimilate into the dominant culture.  Compared to European immigrants, however, assimilation took much longer due to freedmen’s dark skin color and the bigotry of the “dominant race.”  Only recently have we seen complete assimilation by black people, although discrimination still exists.  Even more recently we have seen a reassertion of African-American ethnic identity.  It has taken a long time, but the descendants of former slaves have finally begun the completion of the five stages of the immigrant narrative.

Works Cited

Levine, Ellen. …If You Traveled on The Underground Railroad. New York: Scholastic Inc, 1993.

“Race-based legislation in the North.” Judgement Day. Companion Web site to Africans in America. WGBH, Boston. 1998. PBS Online. 29 April 2006. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2957.html.

Smith, John. Black Voices from Reconstruction, 1865-1877. Connecticut: Millbrook Press, 1996.

Stern, Seth. “Digging into the lives of slaves.” The Home Forum. Companion Web site to The Christian Science Monitor. 2006. csmonitor.com. 25 April 2006. http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0226/p22s02-hfks.html. 

[BF]