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This chapter discusses how the will to improve their lives propelled African Americans from the South to the urban North. Beginning with a steady trickle during Reconstruction and increasing through the turn of the twentieth century, the Great Migration swelled to a flood during the years around World War I. Women migrants, whether on their own or aided by family members, moved in the hope of enjoying freedoms denied them in the Jim Crow South. They found that freedom was incomplete and came at a price. Some made occupational or financial sacrifices. For example, the woman interviewed in 1919 was a trained teacher who had left her professional position in the South to work in New York City's garment industry. Still, she spoke for other black migrants as well as herself when she judged the move worthwhile.

This chapter describes the formation of northern racial liberalism and of black responses to this new racial ideology. Northern racial liberalism emerged alongside the beginning of the First Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the urban North, and subsequently developed as migration reshaped the city's housing market and racial geography. This ideology also coincided with a significant change in the city's white leadership, and is characterized by the growing power and popularity of urban reform. Urban reformers provided a language for explaining stratification and developed institutions for managing urban populations that white leaders then used, both ideologically and practically, to handle the influx of black newcomers. Finally, northern racial liberalism emerged as a response to an increasingly vocal and politically organized African American minority that was actively debating the meanings of full racial justice and challenging the racial hierarchies of the North.

This chapter focuses on the first recorded devil blues song, Clara Smith's "Done Sold My Soul to the Devil" (1924). Public anxiety about the moral hazards experienced by black female migrants to the urban North offers one context for the song, but so does the rejection of Victorian morality by a transracial cohort of Lost Generation youth for whom the devil was an admirable figure rather than fear-inducing phantom: a master of the revels and instigator of "bad behavior" of the sort playfully chastised by Fats Waller in "There's Gonna Be the Devil to Pay." Couples dancing was a key issue: both black and white ministers condemned it, along with the "devil dance dens" in which it supposedly thrived, but blues singers like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Sippie Wallace sang songs in which they partied with the devil—joyously in Rainey's case, uneasily in Wallace's.

This chapter talks about Edwin Rosskam, Russell Lee, and Lee's wife, Jean's visit to Chicago on a specific assignment. They were to take pictures of African-American life in the urban North to supplement the file's portrait of rural life in the South. The impetus behind the trip came from a project that Rosskam was coordinating with the black novelist Richard Wright. The pair had agreed to create a book that would tell the story of African Americans as they were transformed from slaves to sharecroppers to urban proletarians. Wright explained shortly after the publication of 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States that the book combined words and images to document that “the development of Negro life in America parallels the development of people everywhere.” For Wright, and indeed for anyone who sought to comment on “that which is qualitative and abiding in Negro experience,” black Christian practices required attention.

In the late 1930s, nearly everyone owned a radio. The radio helped create mass-market culture and established a new medium of power, a medium of disembodied speech and sound that, for many, seemed godlike and capable of literally hypnotizing the country. Another reason American literature's engagement with radio is important is that it records what many sensed was happening to the human voice. This chapter focuses on how one novel in particular, Richard Wright's Lawd Today!, figures radio in this way. Radio proves a powerful emblem for Wright, giving him a way to express the particular kinds of disempowerment experienced by blacks living in the urban North of the United States. This chapter claims that Lawd Today! makes the experience of radio emblematic of the patterning of cultural power by aligning it with the experiences of fascism and racism in the 1930s.

On the middle border, a half-century of politics, formally at the national and state levels and informally as innumerable, personalized war experiences retold by countless civilians and soldiers on both sides of the rivers, formed exclusivist cultural narratives of the bitterly lived war. Loss as much as victory thus defined the new regionalism on both sides of the rivers, less overwhelmed by outside forces than driven by internal conflicts framed against competing organizing principles known as sections. The West, a place of multiplicities imagined as individual and national possibilities, was pushed on rather than being been won or lost. In its place there would be two regions, two core communities created by exclusivist politics that imagined as much as they had experienced the war. The national confluence once represented as the West was remade as South and North, their great divide symbolized by the former region’s now-wide rivers.