Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Cleveland, 1915-1929
Author(s): Kimberley L. Phillips
Source: Journal of Social History, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter, 1996), pp. 393-413
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3789386
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"BUT IT IS A FINE PLACE TO MAKE MONEY": MIGRATION
AND AFRICAN^AMERICAN FAMILIES IN CLEVELAND,
1915-1929
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394 journal of social history winter 1996
Hine has asserted that for many migrants, women especially
the South was an "incomplete process" because they had le
members behind.3 She suggests that when migrants left lov
"psychological and emotional relocation was much more c
haps more complicated than heretofore assumed."4 Many m
and children behind, sometimes taking years to reassembl
tionships change? If so, how? What, if any thing, can we l
the migration process?
The new studies on African-American migration to citi
family and household reformation in the North and the c
family and households in the South provided critical resou
they moved out ofthe South. Works by Peter Gottlieb, Ea
Clark Hine have documented the ways kin and friend con
initiators and maintainers of the process.6 The richness of
W Trotter recently concluded, pointed to new avenues for
Americans' experiences as families in an urban context. Bu
black family as a dynamic and changing institution is an u
dimension of black urban history."7 The recent scholarshi
the United States, for example, has focused on the shiftin
relationships between men and women, parents and childre
wake.8 These works have not spawned a similar effort in s
Americans. Instead, scholars have been primarily concern
ing the intactness of black families, rather than the chan
occurred.9
Migrants' narratives about their moves to and lives in Cleveland reveal that
families remained remarkably intact, but their relationships were not static. This
essay adds to the recent efforts to document the importance of kin and friendship
networks in the migration process, giving greater attention to the differing roles
and experiences of black men, women and children. Migrants created a variety
of household arrangements, yet close attention to first person narratives reveal
that the migration process to the North challenged many of their assumptions
about and patterns of kinship, household, and friend obligations. In addition,
the sometimes long process of reassembling family and friend networks in the
city frequently changed social, gender, and generational relations in African-
American families.
The availability of jobs in Cleveland made it attractive to blacks leaving the
South to find work. By the beginning of the Great Migration in 1915, Cleve?
land possessed a diverse industrial base with a large metals processing section.
Automobiles and auto parts, paints, varnishes, chemicals, garment making, and
machine-tool manufacturing provided a variety of semi-skilled and unskilled
jobs.1 Wartime production, declining immigration, and market imperatives to
cut production costs led to increased demands for unskilled workers for a variety
of industrial, transportation, and service jobs. While postwar competition, lay-
offs and inflation meant that the availability of jobs in industry fluctuated widely,
the expansion of the building, service, and transportation trades throughout the
1920s provided additional job opportunities for unskilled and temporary work.11
Until the early 1910s, Cleveland employers relied on a large population of
immigrant workers, particularly southern and eastern European immigrants, to
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BUT IT IS A FINE PLACE TO MAKE MONEY 395
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396 journal of social history winter 1996
By 1910, black farm families in Cleveland, Mississippi, fou
maintain their self-suflficiency. At the urging of several y
cant portion of the community made their way to the coal
eventually, several ofthe families migrated together to Cle
examples reveal that chain migration?where one family m
and then other members followed with assistance from the
based on age and gender, with oldest single men moving firs
The census data indicate that women came to Cleveland a
playing critical roles in the impetus for and the maintenance
ies show that women participated in the migration process
gender.19 Young women tended to accompany others, rathe
because, as Darlene Clark Hine has found, women were "su
than a man."20 Along with a young friend, sixteen year-old
Lynchburg, Virginia, for Cleveland, in late 1917. Both wo
work, but they found only domestic work in wealthy white ho
demands for cleanliness were greater than in the South. B
higher wages, which enabled her to visit her family with "
and went back all polished." Impressed with her success, a st
ily and friends followed, settling in Cleveland permanently.
and friends viewed her as the authority, and she became th
being the leader. This is when the South all came up here
a new world." Bertha Cowan's experience of guiding famil
not unusual, but her acquisition of authority suggests how m
inverted family roles, with young women key to the process.2
While many families decided to leave the South because o
those in the North, sometimes black men and women reluc
the urging of those left behind. John Malone joined other bla
1910 to work for the Illinois Central Railroad in Louisville, K
laborers. In 1916, recruiters from the New York Central Railr
and other black men to Cleveland. Many of the workers v
permanent, but Malone intended to return to Louisville, de
his family. A prolonged illness brought his wife north to care f
recovery, she persuaded him to stay. She, too, found a job as a
yards. They soon earned enough to bring their children; b
worked for the railroad" and lived in Cleveland.22 While J
north as a result of labor recruiters, he stayed because of t
took place with his wife, underscoring that the family made
The ability to find work played a key role in initially lur
women to Cleveland, with family and friends providing the
mation. Just how much African Americans could secure wo
remains a debated issue.23 Yet many of the first person acco
and friend networks passed on more than information abou
jobs to would-be migrants. Men working in steel mills and for
jobs for others during and after World War I, a pattern more p
places known to hire blacks.24 Because the majority of blac
private domestic work, the opportunities to secure work for o
as great. But black women?and occasionally men?set up fo
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BUT IT IS A FINE PLACE TO MAKE MONEY 397
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398 journal of social history winter 1996
only by industrial or commercial enterprise."31 Studies by K
Lawrence Cuban detail how casual policies hardened into ri
tions. Residents in the areas that ringed the city quickly ere
Jews, Italians, and African Americans.32
Kin and friend networks proved critical in expanding hous
grants by locating better rentals. Just as other migrants en
Murdock's parents discovered that high rents, and bouts of
them in homes "worse than those" in the South.33 Through
decades in the city, the Murdocks depended on kin to help
housing; as relatives and friends bought or moved into bette
docks joined them.34 Other migrant families also appeared t
choices based on household connections and needs. This sugg
family ties, in addition to race, shaped decisions in subtle wa
father worked for the railroad on the westside, but her moth
near other newly arrived relatives and friends from Georgia
While some migrants felt like intruders in neighborhoods
clusively immigrant, other evidence suggests that, at least
neighborhood level, blacks often had cordial and even deep
relationships with other groups. Despite the increased con
migrants in particular neighborhoods, Cleveland's near east
ulations of Jewish and Italian immigrants, two groups who
bitions as well. Indeed, while 90 percent of the black popula
Central Area by 1930, tens of thousands of working-class imm
as well.37 The common experiences of migration and immigrat
adequate housing and irregular employment, forged connect
and their immigrant neighbors. Elmer Thompson remembe
seemed like a foreign country?everybody was speaking Itali
jokingly noted that each time a boat or train arrived, more r
with immigrants or blacks.38
Women often acted as links in cross-cultural exchange as t
bles, shared produce from gardens, and exchanged homema
effort to stretch limited household budgets. Women share
endless effort to keep rundown homes clean. Some black m
personal relationships with immigrant landlords to keep ren
access to better housing and jobs. Migrant and immigrant
played together on the streets, even as schools and clubs ru
agencies became more segregated along racial lines. These i
ships caused some black migrants to communicate with the
immigrants* native tongue rather than English.39
Many African-American migrants created living arrangem
wages, irregular employment and limited housing choices, bu
light their desire to retain and recreate familial and comm
structures, and values.40 Elizabeth Rauh Bethal has noted tha
migration patterns made black households quite elastic, as
contracted according to various needs.41 Historians generally
long-distance migration and increased urban residency that
1880 and 1930 changed the size of black families and the con
households. Households based on marital and blood ties pre
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BUT IT IS A FINE PLACE TO MAKE MONEY 399
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400 journal of social history winter 1996
school, they returned each summer to Alabama to help on th
common pattern for other migrants, too.48 In 1923, young
from Alabama to visit her grandfather, but the visit soon
because of the better schools. Later, three unmarried uncles
cities to join their father and niece in establishing a househ
this household eventually drew other members ofthe family to
and other instances, however, the move north meant that
lost authority over their children.
Migrants without kin and friends in the city could not
households. Few employers maintained company-owned bu
black men; those who did have access to beds found the con
deplorable. Charles E. Hall, supervisor of Negro Economics
war, reported that black men on the night shift typically r
houses maintained by large companies to sleep in beds "jus
men going on the day shift."50 Black women found it especial
affordable rooms. Contemporary observers generally agreed
race, most women could not live on their own because of lo
population of detached women living in Cleveland grew in
the war, a number of low-cost boarding houses were constru
Because of race and gender, however, single black women
these boarding houses closed to them. In 1905, young and
Hunter arrived in Cleveland with little money and few pa
housing. Her first tentative inquiry led her "unknowingly
house of prostitution." After a prolonged search, Hunter fi
that consumed most of her weekly wages; she had to pay extra
privileges, or clean the place in exchange. Women rarely ha
facilities and instead turned to the dangerously unsanitary
Hunter concluded what other women soon discovered that
large city must ... know the dangers and pitfalls awaiting he
found temporary accommodations when she received a job
when her patient got better, Hunter soon found herself o
respectable place to live.53
Educated in racial uplift at Hampton Institute, Hunter lat
Phiilis Wheatley Association in 1911. The PWA provided te
sive lodging for single black women and helped them find
Hunter battled against a restrictive labor market is unclear
placed black women in household work.54 As executive sec
accommodationism with the new professions of social wel
management. Throughout the 1920s, Hunter repeatedly so
cient household workers, instill habits of accommodation,
women with inexpensive household workers. She pursued po
beliefs that marriage and living-in with a "private family" w
able options for unattached black women. Many women foun
the board on meager salaries; many women also desired gre
finding Hunter's criteria for admittance too stringent and t
intrusive in their private lives.55
Black women pursued day work in the 1920s because they fo
conditions, particularly the low wages and long hours in hou
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BUT IT IS A FINE PLACE TO MAKE MONEY 401
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402 journalof social history winter 1996
Johnson and her two small children as well. This expanded
was apparently not simply an impersonal economic arrang
known the family of Davenport's uncle's wife. By 1924,
William Davenport.61
Children old enough to work sometimes minimized the ne
ers, provided a safety net during periods of parents' unempl
black mothers out of wage employment. In a recent analys
between black and immigrant working-class households b
Griswold asserts that black parents encouraged their childr
more than immigrant parents did. Griswold points to the
privation of African Americans generally and that black
offer their children except these values. Evidence from C
this conclusion needs reassessment, taking into account th
poses behind migration. Black parents encouraged their ch
school and have a job; this dual expectation simultaneously
and family economic intradependence. Elmer Thompson an
to work at a young age, but their parents insisted that t
long as possible.62 These experiences suggest that the pres
children was fundamental to the maintenance ofthe househ
of hard work and economic intradependence, while simult
parental authority.
Once in the city, migrants hoped to return home for vis
this goal to be impossible. Because of their higher incom
grants often had more opportunities to travel south, as seen
the city's black newspapers. Earl Lewis, in his study of life a
Virginia, calls the retention of these patterns "adaptive str
African Americans to make the transition between rural a
abrupt.63 The trip from Cleveland to the South, however, w
distance and therefore more expensive. Because many mig
gets, many could not make frequent visits "down South" to
sudden death or illness of a loved one made the grief and
the more difficult. Conversely, some migrants died alone in
church society providing for a burial.
The inability to visit reinforced many migrants' desire t
ways to retain ties to family members still in the South. Man
with the hope to make at least one trip home. Willa Daven
that her mother, Ocelie Johnson Davenport, could not af
home to see relatives, but she and her other sisters helped
one of them made a trip. They also pooled their resource
aging mother north. Willa Thomas only saw her grandm
many richly detailed stories that her mother recounted ab
reinforced family connections.64 Taking and sending pictu
means to document family and instill memories. The brisk
Cole and other black photographers acquired in the 1920s
in which black Clevelanders marked and maintained famil
Many adults found it difficult to return to the South, but t
children instead. The continued presence of relatives in t
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BUT IT IS A FINE PLACE TO MAKE MONEY 403
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404 journal of social history winter 1996
households as women turned to wage labor. These varied ex
the differing experiences of caring for children as work m
examined.71
In more subtle ways, many black men carefully weighed
tionship to the needs of their children. In a study on Bo
found that black men had a higher rate of being absent fr
because of their more limited job opportunities, though bl
children were the least likely to leave.72 Robert Griswold
than immigrant working-class fathers, black men were more
figures in their children's lives. Kenneth Kusmer has note
a greater rate of occupational stability in Cleveland than di
cities.73 On the other hand, numbers of black men found t
milis, though higher paying than other jobs, could also b
the needs of a family may have impacted job choices, mig
terns may never be clearly revealed, but first person narr
suggestive. Black men expressed a great deal of grief wh
their children to find work. Elmer Thompson recalled th
well-paying, year-round job as an asphalt layer because it d
children for extended periods of time. Other black men m
choosing jobs in the service and transportation trades wh
vided steady employment, which they viewed in relation t
families.74
The 1920s' economy in Cleveland periodically put many black men out of
work, necessitating married black women's movement in and out of paid work.
Though many married African-American men insisted that their wives not work
for wages, the experience of black male unemployment meant that this goal often
got renegotiated. Henry Pointer's mother, for example, insisted in 1925 that her
husband buy a Maytag washer instead of a "shiny black Ford." Her fear of losing
her husband's wages proved prescient: suddenly widowed four years later and
left with two small children, she stayed at home and used the washing machine
to do the nurses' uniforms from a hospital near her home. Many black women
became the primary wage earners in their households, despite the presence of
husbands and sons, necessitating new reproductive relationships.75
The move north and the creation of new family networks enabled some black
women to redefine their roles as daughters, wives and mothers. As Darlene
Clark Hine has noted, some black women found that family migration provided
them an opportunity to free themselves from the abuse in households in the
South.76 Undoubtedly, the experiences of Flowree Robinson were not uncom-
mon. Estranged from her husband and left to care for her children on her own,
Robinson found that the migration of her brother, gave her new choices. More-
over, as with Robinson, the earlier departure of other family members provided
many women with the financial and emotional support necessary to leave the
South. Others had little more than family support, but even the encouragement
and relatives' willingness to take care of children was enough to propel many
abandoned or abused women northward.77
For some women, paying jobs encouraged reassessment of marital and maternal
roles. Pressured to protect her propriety, vaudeville performer Carrie Davenport
married another performer. Although unhappy for several years, she did not end
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BUT IT IS A FINE PLACE TO MAKE MONEY 405
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406 journalof social history winter 1996
were apparent in the marriage of Chester Himes' parents;
disappointed to discover the continuities of racial relations
South in a northern setting. After years of unhappiness, the
unemployment led some men to disappear.85
Though historians agree that African-American migratio
half of the twentieth century was more than an economic
and was also a social and political movement, we have yet t
behavior and choices migrants made about their lives outsi
migrants' efforts to form and sustain households in the u
patterns established in the Black South, where heavy migr
and urban areas began before 1915. Historians have argue
black households has been impacted by the economic needs
household formation, kin and friend relationships that de
also emerged out of economic and non-economic goals an
households often mediated the vagaries of the economy, w
appreciate the non-economic priorities of migrants and how
their creation of households and notions of family obligatio
had to be fulfilled over a distance.
The oral narratives of black migrants in Cleveland reveal m
family networks were recast during and after migration.
expanded to include extended family and friends; others cr
of family, as distance made it impossible to continue pat
established in the South. Family and friend networks encou
African-Americans' move north, and provided for them once
city. While the expansion and contraction of these networ
of economic strategies African Americans created to mee
goals, such as the care and education of children, the aid an
adult siblings, the use of boarding to fill social and emotio
to be near kin and friends from the South, and the need t
patterns of visiting, also significantly influenced black h
The effort to more fully integrate the range of migrants
process suggests that historians need to more fully explore t
black men, women and children. This task necessitates gre
differences and similarities gender played for migrants, as w
and time of migration. To do so would give further insight
connections that black migrants maintained across the mil
they created once they arrived in the urban north.
Department of History
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795
ENDNOTES
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BUT IT IS A FINE PLACE TO MAKE MONEY 407
4. Ibid., 134.
5. Trotter and Gottlieb, eds., The Great Migration; James R. Grossman, Land of Hope:
Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989); Carole Marks,
Farewell?We're Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington, IN, 1989);
Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburgh (Urbana,
1987); Joe William Trotter, Black Milwaukee: The Making ofan Industrial Proktariat,1915-
45 (Urbana, 1985).
6. Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way; Earl Lewis, In Their Own lnterests: Race, Class,
and Power in Twentieth Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley, 1991); Hine, "Black Migration
to the Urban Midwest"; Shirley Ann Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The Black Community
in Richmond, California (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming); Kimberley L. Phillips,
Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in
Ckveland, 1915-1945 (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).
7. Joe W. Trotter, Jr., "African Americans in the City: The Industrial Era, 1900-1950,"
Journal of Urban History 21 (May 1995): 452.
9. See the following in this extensive literature: Herbert Gutman, The Black Family
in Slavery and Freedom 1750-1920 (New York, 1976); Michael Katz, ed., The Underclass
Debate: Views From History (Princeton, 1993); Andrea G. Hunter, "Making a Way: Strate-
gies of Southern Urban African-American Families, 1900 and 1936," Journal of Family
History 18 (Summer, 1993): 231-248; Henry M. McKiven, "The Household Composition
of Working Class Families in the Birmingham District, 1900," Southern History 6 (1985):
40-52; Claudia Goldin, "Family Strategies and the Family Economy in the Late Nine-
teenth Century: The Role of Secondary Workers," in Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family,
and Group Expenences in the Late Nineteenth Century, ed. Theodore Hershberg (New York,
1981), 277-310.
10. Harold C. Livesy, "From Steeples to Smokestacks: The Birth of the Modern Cor-
poration in Cleveland," in The Birth of Modern Ckveland, eds., Thomas E Campbell and
Edward M. Miggens, (WRHS, 1988), 54-62; John Grabowski and David Van Tassel,
eds.,The Encyclopedia of Ckveland, (Cleveland, 1987); Ckveland, Some ofthe Features of
the lndustry andCommerce ofthe City (Cleveland, 1917), 18; 34-35.
11. David Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860-1915 (Urbana, 1976); Kenneth
Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Ckveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana, 1976); Kimberley
L. Phillips, "Heaven Bound: Black Migration, Community, and Activism, Cleveland,
1915-1945," (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1992), chapter 2.
12. Kusmer, Ghetto, 190-205; for a particular focus on gender and black women's em-
ployment experiences between 1915-1929, see Phillips, "Heaven Bound," chapter 2.
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408 journalof social history winter 1996
14. United States, Fourteenth Census ofthe United States, 1920:
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), 1084; United States,
United States, 1930: Population4 (Washington D.C.: Government
1085-1087. Kusmer, Ghetto, 160-161, see fn.6. Kenneth Kusmer
black school population from 5,078 in April, 1921, to 7,430 in O
that the black population overall may have have grown by 50 per
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BUT IT IS A FINE PLACE TO MAKE MONEY 409
32. Larry Cuban, "A Strategy For Racial Peace: Negro Leader
1919," Phybn 28 (Fall 1967): 301.
34. lbid,
40. This argument has been shaped by Kusmer's cail for the
lationship between external forces and internal forces. See K
Experience in American History," in Darlene Clark Hine, ed. The
History: Past, Present, and Future (Baton Rouge, 1986), 105-106
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410 journal of social history winter 1996
cultural deficiencies in the black family, see E. Franklin Frazier, T
United States (Chicago, 1939).
46. Interview with Geneva Robinson, St. James A.M.E, November 4, 1986.
50. Charles E, Hall, "Report from the Supervisor of Negro Economics," in George
Haynes, The Negro at Work During the World War and Reconstruction (Washington, D.C.,
1921),114.
51. Consumers* League of Ohio, "Report on Housing Survey Made by the Boarding
Homes Commission, Cleveland Girls Council" (Cleveland, c. 1926); for the problems
black women faced as boarders, see Jane Edna Hunter, A Nickle and a Prayer, (Cleveland,
1940); Joanne Meyerowitz,Wbmen Adrift: Wage-Eaming Women Apart From the Family in
Chicago (Chicago, 1988), 73-74 and 80-82.
53. Jbid.,150-165.
54. Hunter received sharp criticism that the PWA provided little more than a "jane
crow" employment agency. She made much of the fact that the majority of the employ-
ment agencies showed little concern for the plight of black women. Publicly she countered
such criticism by claiming that the PWA provided important services in a restricted labor
market and trained future black housewives. Although reluctant to admit that the PWA
supplied white women with black household workers, Hunter nonetheless viewed the
ready supply of unemployed black women as a means to solve white women's demand
for household labor. At the same time, Hunter sought to alleviate some of the finan-
cial problems that constantly plagued the PWA by forming a relationship with wealthy
white women interested in trained live-in servants. See: Adrienne Lash Jones, Jane Edna
Hunter: A Case Study of Black Leadership, 1910-1959 (New York, 1990), 111-113. For
an extended discussion of Hunter and her labor policies, see Phillips, "Heaven Bound,"
chapter 2.
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BUT IT IS A FINE PLACE TO MAKE MONEY 411
63. See the Cleveland Gazette and the Cleveland Advocate; also,
Buckeye State" in the Chicago Defender; Earl Lewis, "Afro-Amer
The Visiting Habits of Kith and Kin Among Black Norfolkian
Migration," Journal of Family History 12 (1987): 409; Gutman, The
and Freedom, 432; personal interview with Linton Freeman; pers
Davenport Thomas.
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412 journal of social history winter 1996
Kennedy, Peopk Who Led to My Plays (New York, 1987), 33-34. As
Adrienne Kennedy made yearly trips to her grandmother's home in G
these trips were fraught with contradictory emotions of visiting h
mother and encountering legal segregation. Her memory of these tri
length. "Although I loved my grandparents immensely, 1 hated th
that my brother and I took every June, especially the ride from Cin
in the dirty Jim Crow car. ... [My brother] was about seven then, a
pulled out of the Cleveland Terminal Tower he started to cry and
Cincinnati. Night would come while we rode into the South and h
on my shoulder.... I tried to interest my brother in the magazine,
want to go home.' I put my arm around my brother, looked out of th
windows and clutched the Modern Screen magazine with [Clark] G
69. Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out, 79-83; Hine, "Black Mig
Midwest."
73. Griswold, Fatherhood in America, 5 2-56. Griswold only considers Pleck's study, which
concludes in 1900. For a more useful look at data on African-American households in
Cleveland and other cities, see Kusmer, Ghetto, 224-225.
74. The role of fathers appears to have taken on a more pronounced role in the 1920s,
evidenced by the emphasis on black men's roles in churches and voluntary associations. In
the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) thousands of working-class black
men participated in numerous gatherings where they were called on to assume their roles
as fathers, husbands, and breadwinners.
75. Interview with Henry Pointer, St. James A. M. E.; personal interview with Willa
Thomas, December 1, 1989.
7 7. Personal interview with Flowree Robinson; interview with Melvia Green, conducted
by Patricia Miles Ashford, n.d.; personal interview with Josephus Hicks; interview with
Murtis Taylor, St. James A. M. E., October 17,1986. Taylor's mother divorced her husband
in Georgia and migrated to Cleveland where she remarried. She returned south in 1917,
and through the help of a judge that her mother worked for, obtained custody of Murtis.
Other relatives also moved to Cleveland and were eniisted to help watch over Murtis
because her mother now feared that her father would kidnap her.
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BUT IT IS A FINE PLACE TO MAKE MONEY 413
84. Interview with Louise Pattengal, St. James A. M. E., September 29, 1986.
85. Hughes, The Big Sea, 35; Chester Himes, The Quality ofHurt, The Early Years: The
Auytobiography of Chester Himes (New York, 1971, 1972), 26.
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