First, tobacco planters in Southern New England recruited Southern African Americans to replace the Eastern European immigrants who had been working their crops. Next, the Pennsylvania and Erie Railroads recruited large numbers of African American men in Florida, offering them free transportation to Pennsylvania, only to have them quickly scatter to jobs in other industries. They headed for Philadelphia and New York, and to East St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit. Soon their wives and children were coming North, too, and Preachers followed their congregations. Eager to escape the interminable hours of domestic work and the tensions of the servant-mistress relationship, African American women took industrial jobs whenever they could find them. Their journey, beginning, in 1916, has become known as the Great Migration.1

In previous years, southern African Americans had not been welcome in the North. European immigrants filled the available jobs before the outbreak of war. But with immigration from Europe cut off, employers in the North welcomed labor from the South for the first time to satisfy the soaring demand for American food and ammunition.

Armorers posing for the picture in Federal Square, circa 1918

Because an army “travels on its stomach,” in 1917 meat packing became a war industry.  The European war created huge demand for American meat products. Now, with the United States entering the war, they would have to feed the American armies as well. Packing houses began by transferring workers from their Southern plants to the higher volume Northern plants. By 1917, more than 10,000 African Americans had found work in the packing plants of Chicago, and 3,000 of them were women.

Outside the stockyards, other kinds of factory work also opened up. As African American men and white women moved up and out of the lowest-paying jobs, African American women moved in--doing work, the employer said, "that no white women would do." In factories with no hot and heavy labor, they swept the floors and picked up refuse. In Newark, New Jersey, African American women found work loading shells at a munitions factory. In Philadelphia, they were employed at the big government arsenals and warehouses.