Migration was common for African Americans in the South. Most of the people interviewed and their relatives moved several times in their lives, sometimes over great distances, searching for a better life. Minnie Clark was among those who shifted from one place to another for economic reasons. She didn't know her exact age, she said, because her birth was never registered, but she estimated she was at least 70 years old.

Clark also recalled that her parents never told her about the facts of life. Instead, the little girl learned, "The baby was in a stump...they brought you a lil' sister or brother in the basket. Lil' boy came in a basket in some flour sack clothes. I can remember them days." Another memory from her youth was the time her family installed electric lights. "I didn't have lights till one morning. I was going to school. I got up and was dressing. We were so used to being [in the dark]. I said, 'Oh Lord, they done it [put in lights] and I didn't know it.'"

Raised on her grandfather's farm near Calhoun Falls, South Carolina, Clark fondly remembered childhood excursions to visit friends at Millwood Plantation and the wild plant foods she ate there. She and her playmates searched for the plants in and around the cotton patches, looking for tidbits like rabbit apple, "a little bush that grows little thorns on it and it's got little apples on it... and the huckleberry tree. Inside were the little hard nuts and we'd crack 'em. And 'simmons, the persimmons... I'd beat a dog to the 'simmon tree. And wild maypops. We don't call 'em maypops now. But we'd eat them like coming down to this time. They'd give you a chill."

She also recalled that the tenant farmers beautified their yards. "They did have what you call sunflowers. They loved sunflowers. And wild lilies, we'd get them off the branch. And you had pepper flowers, but they were beautiful. When you worked 'em, they were pretty." Also memorable was the old molasses mill, pulled "by the mule going round and around" as the machinery squeezed the sticky syrup from cane. "And they make that juice and they cook it in a vat. I call it syrup, homemade syrup."

As an adult, Clark moved to a big city and later back home again. This "in-out" pattern of migration as Eleanor Ramsey and associates termed the pattern was a means for African Americans to increase their earnings and assert more control over their lives.

Clark couldn't earn enough as a teacher to pay the mortgage on her South Carolina home, which she owned with her mother. At the time, most elementary and secondary schools for African Americans were limited to just three months a year and Clark's salary was only $35 a month during those three months. Even so, Clark observed, "You could take that $35, $40 and do more with it than you can with $500 [now]. I'd cash my 'lil check [and] I'd buy shoes, I'd buy a dress, I'd buy a hat."

Nonetheless, her salary was still insufficient to meet all her needs, and there weren't many other jobs she could find in the rural area where she lived, so Clark and her mother moved to Atlanta where she became a housekeeper and cook for a white family. She always intended, however, to return someday to South Carolina, where she left many of her belongings. She used part of her salary to continue payments on her house.

The family she worked for rented apartments near the State Capitol in Atlanta. They paid her three dollars a week. "That's all we could get and sometimes car fare. We lived in their house."

There were good and bad aspects to the job. "Got them big white aprons on...and talked half of the time," Clark recalled. "Now, them white people were nice. Everything was turned over to me. Whatever I wanted to cook, I'd cook it. But I didn't know too much about [cooking]...I had my cook book from school. I'd make Mammie's Minute Rolls, anything. I got tired one time. I said, 'I ain't going to make no more rolls. I'm going home.'

She worked in Atlanta for five years, discovering in her free time that the city offered interesting entertainments, including a chance to see the famous black performers of the day. "...we seen Bessie Smith singing... Yeah, and another Smith. Betty somebody... Betty Smith. Yeah, [she sang] 'I hate to see the evening sun go down.' And 'The Saint Louis Blues,' and I don't know what all. And I'd put on my clothes and split getting there. 'I hate to see the evening sun go down. It makes me look like I'm on my last go round.' Ah, they could sing them blues. They called [it] 'Our Show.' We went to 'Our Show.' Ole Bessie Smith would be singing and just be picking up more money. 'I hate to see the evening sun go....' And that boy be playing that piano. She [Bessie Smith] was a dark, great woman. But she could sing... .And Ma Rainey, yeah. And ole Cab Calloway."

African Americans in Elbert and Abbeville Counties also exhibited a great deal of mobility within their own counties. They moved from farm to farm, from farming to other jobs, from rural areas to small towns, and from town to town. When times became especially hard, some sneaked away from their rented farms. Lillie Pressley recalled, "Some of 'em run away from [their contracts]. They wasn't able to come up to it [the contract]. They didn't make what they were supposed to make to meet their contract at the end of the year, you see, and they just left. There was nothing they [the white landowners] could do, 'cause if they find 'em, ain't nothin' they could do about it."

But Randolph Davis, who also remembered that some African Americans broke their tenant contracts, stated that white response could be violent. "Something went wrong with the, ah, tenants, they ran, slipped away. You know, or go North, or go someplace [else] at night time. And course, the Cracker [sometimes] would take 'em out and beat 'em."
 

As people abandoned the land, buildings that once were the center of activity fell into ruin.

Nonetheless, the Russell studies documented that during the late 1800's and early 1900's many tenant farmers moved fairly freely from one landowner's property to another, seemingly indicating relatively smooth relations between most white landlords and their tenants. Several investigators, however, located sources who told of two wealthy white families who used extensive prison labor. One of the families used women prisoners to dig a millrace a mile long. Regarding the other family, there were reports of cruelty reminiscent of slavery.

Sources related that the family would pay bail for African-American prisoners who had no money to get out of jail. Often, their crimes were no more serious than drunkenness or gambling. The freed prisoners, and sometimes their families, were required to work off their bail debt by toiling on the land belonging to the white family. They also were obligated to buy all their food and supplies from the family on credit. Most of the African Americans soon found themselves helplessly mired in debt, with escape almost impossible because of guard dogs and armed men watching them. "Somebody told me that one fella got away, but before he left there at night he wiped the bottom of his shoes with turpentine [so pursuing dogs couldn't smell them]. And he got away. He swam the river and kept going," related one source.

Many other African Americans participated in another pattern when they moved North that researchers termed "out migration." This departure peaked in the 1890's and again in the 1920's and dramatically changed the local population. The biggest exodus came as a result of the invasion of the boll weevil, which began about 1919. Rufus Bullard was about 12 years old and living on his parents' tenant farm when the insects ate their way into Georgia. "And it was '19, I think, '21 or '23. It was close to that, anyway. I tell you, the weevils hit this country... Well, they hit this country and everybody made a shorter crop....And the people went broke, all the merchants. And the farmers picked up squares and burned 'em...the crop squares. [You] burn the grubs, keep the weevil from hatchin'."

Farmers also used arsenic poison. "It was already mixed. You just put it into a machine. You dry it and blow it out on the cotton," Bullard explained. But the boll weevils kept swarming and the price of cotton kept plunging. He remembered the price dropping from fifty cents a pound to five cents. "They sold that cotton for five cents, and they were pretty well broke, stranded.... See, people, they just left the farm, 'cause wasn't nothin' to do. Lot of 'em was broke up from farming, a lot of 'em just quit." Exasperated, Bullard's own father abandoned the South and headed North, along with thousands of others. "Well, that's the thing. Depression hits, and all the farmers quit.. .and then went North," Bullard explained.

The massive flight alarmed many in the South and provided a measure of greater economic power to the African Americans who remained. In discussing the migration, Phoebe Turman said, "After they left, things got a little better back in those places where they came from... .Think about it. That made it better for those that were left."

Left: The early schools for African Americans were often one or two rooms, like this one in Heardmont, Georgia.
 

Looking back over the years, Ursula Mae Haddon said, "And as I have lived here, so many other people have migrated, you know....The people who had always lived around us, none of them are around. None that's in this area. They are gone... They left to go elsewhere, better conditions."

Many whites expressed concern about the population loss, while the sentiments of others' were mixed. The editor of The Elberton Star newspaper wrote December 15, 1922: "The fact that a great many colored laborers have left Elbert County is a serious problem. They have gone north, east, and west. Many of them are worthy and have the respect of both races....It maybe that the landowner could not or would not furnish the rations. If he could furnish rations, it seems shortsighted not to do so, for if the exodus continues where can the landowner expect to get laborers....But if enough white labor can be secured to take their place then the county will be better off, for the negro cannot be used as profitably in diversified farming as the white man."

With his wife and four children, Rufus Bullard's father settled into a Chicago home on Prairie Avenue about 90 feet from the shop where he worked repairing railway cars and steam-powered locomotives for the Illinois Central Railroad. "It was what they call South Side of the city, in the Black Belt. Mostly colored was in that neighborhood." But his father found that the bustling city had its drawbacks, too. "He never did like the city too well and he just came back....My daddy was a country boy. He never did like the city."

In fact, as Edward Brownlee pointed out, many of those who moved away became disenchanted and eventually returned. "The boll weevils broke down the farming situation... .When the boll weevil came, that's what run a lot of people off the farm. That's when New York, Chicago, and all those places filled up...and a lot of them got discouraged and they thought they'd go to some of these places where the booms hit. They would go and for awhile...they make lots of money. But when the boom got over, they had to come back."

For some, the North offered a welcome measure of respect that they had never experienced in the South. Minnie Walker, visiting one of her eight grown children in 1946, experienced such a pivotal moment in New York City that changed her perception of herself and life in general. "I went in the shoe shop. A white man called me 'Miss.' And from then on, I wanted to get out [of the South]. In New York, everything was so different." She decided to live in Harlem, joined a union, and went to work as a hotel housekeeper. "I was the only black woman on the job... They called me 'Miss Walker,' they called me 'Miss Walker' all the time." Despite the new respect she enjoyed, however, she, too, grew unhappy with the city.

She loved her job, but encountered racism in other places she went and was also concerned about crime. "Wimmens couldn't go out hardly by themselves. My bag was snatched from me two different times. I wasn't hurt, they just snatched my bag and ran. And so,I got scared. Getting old and nervous, too, you know." She kept in touch with friends and family in the South and returned regularly for vacations, then, when she retired in 1968, moved back to Calhoun Falls permanently.

Researchers concluded that African Americans who left, then returned to the area, as well as those who remained, "made informed choices," eventually realizing "that no place was genuinely a mecca for Southern blacks." Perhaps another reason that blacks moved back South was that they missed the clubs, schools, and churches-the cherished institutions that fostered a sense of belonging. Both those who stayed and those who returned continued to improve and enjoy these organizations.

When Rufus Bullard returned to Georgia in 1928 after about seven years away, he discovered a great many people he had known earlier were gone. "Other people were moving out at the time we [first] moved out. And they ain't come back, they ain't been back yet. Sent some of them back dead, some of them. There wasn't nobody here... hardly... They all had done gone.

Bullard and his father resumed life as farmers, continuing to hang on to the land even during the Great Depression, when the young man saw many people "walking the railroads, looking for jobs. They come by  asking for a biscuit. It was rough." There was little organized relief for the poor in rural Georgia, Bullard said. "In the cities, they had soup lines. And here in the country they'd give you a little old bag of rough, unbleached flour." He also remembered watching the "hobos" hitch rides on freight trains. "They [would] just haul off and grab and get up on there.... See, ordinarily they [the police] didn't allow hobos [on the trains], but in them days, they'd just be ridin'. So many, they didn't bother 'em [much]. They scare 'em from one place to another."

In the early 1940's, another type of migration began when thousands of young men, including Bullard, left to fight World War II. He joined the military, trained in Texas, and served in Oregon, Hawaii, and Guadacanal, guarding planes and other equipment. Near the final stages of the war, he was shipped to Okinawa. "They were throwing shells and battlin'," he said. Although he survived the fighting without a scratch, he caught a fever that lasted for months. "It wasn't long, they dropped that bomb over there on Hiroshima. Our squadron  dropped it, the Seventh Air Force.... One of our comrades [was] flyin' the plane that dropped it, that bad bomb."

He returned to tenant farming in Georgia after the war and persisted, year after year, even though other farmers on small plots were abandoning the land all around him. Bullard blamed the post-war decline of many of the remaining tenant farms on the Federal Government, which paid landowners to plant fewer crops.

'Yeah, the tenant farmer, he didn't have anything to go on... .We had a lots of people that hung around in old   houses for a long time. But, you know, they finally had to get out and find something... That's why we got these towns. You run people off the farm that really was likin' it, making a livin', and now they up there on welfare."

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Developing New Skills

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