4. City Hall attempts to stop the movement

Longshoremen working at the municipal docks. | JAXPORT

As thousands of underpaid African American laborers resisted local segregation by abruptly abandoning the city, Jacksonville’s economic backbone began to crumble. Soon, local turpentine and lumber companies complained that their cheap Black labor force was being lured away by the promise of better wages and improved working conditions in the North.

In an effort to stem the exodus, Mayor John E.T. Bowden and the Chamber of Commerce met with members of the Negro Board of Trade, urging them to help discourage migration. The Negro Board of Trade complied, publicly condemning the departure of Black workers. However, their words fell on deaf ears.

Within a week, eleven union leaders representing Black stevedores, plasterers, carpenters, painters, and bricklayers denounced the statement, arguing that it did not reflect the views of Black laborers in Jacksonville. Meanwhile, from New York, James Weldon Johnson publicly voiced his support for those choosing to leave, as he had done years earlier. Johnson believed migration benefited all and argued that if the South wished to retain its African American workforce, it needed to ensure fair treatment and impartial enforcement of the law.

5. Role of the Chicago Defender

A reprint of an article published in the Chicago Defender on December 23, 1916. | University of Florida

Established in 1905 and known as “America’s Black Newspaper,” The Chicago Defender quickly became the nation’s most widely circulated Black-owned newspaper. Its founder, Robert Abbott, was born just north of Jacksonville in St. Simons Island, GA.

African American Pullman porters played a crucial role in the paper’s expansion across the American South, distributing and smuggling copies on trains. By 1916, The Defender had reached a circulation of 50,000.

Initially, Abbott encouraged African Americans in the South to stay and fight for their rights. However, his stance shifted after learning about an incident in Jacksonville where an entire crew of stevedores abruptly abandoned their employer, leaving the city’s docks without a workforce the next day. Seeing this as a powerful economic tactic against the South, Abbott began using his newspaper to aggressively promote migration.

Credited with playing a major role in the Great Migration, The Defender saw its circulation soar past 200,000 by the early 1920s, helping to make Abbott one of the first self-made African American millionaires in the country.

6. Bound for the Promised Land

Portrait of Matthew R. Ward. | Ritz Theatre & Museum

“From Florida’s stormy banks I go; I’ll bid the South good-bye; No longer shall they treat me so, And knock me in the eye. The Northern States is where I’m bound…”

One could argue that poet Matthew Robert Ward’s Bound for the Promised Land was as influential in shaping the United States as James Weldon and John Rosamond Johnson’s Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.

Born in Pensacola, Ward lived in Jacksonville’s Historic Eastside for 32 years at 847 Oakley Street. On November 11, 1916, his poem Bound for the Promised Land was published in The Chicago Defender, the nation’s leading African American newspaper. The poem inspired a wave of migration, prompting more African Americans to leave the South than at any previous time in U.S. history.

Ward’s poem urged African Americans to escape the racial discrimination and rampant lynchings of the South and seek better jobs and living conditions in the North. The impact was profound. In Jacksonville alone, more than 6,000 African Americans left the city. In places like Savannah, authorities even arrested individuals for reading Ward’s poetry, accusing them of inciting riots by encouraging the mass departure of Black residents in search of a better life.

Despite efforts by Jacksonville’s leaders to curb the exodus, the Great Migration became one of the largest movements of people and acts of Civil Rights resistance in American history. Between 1916 and the 1970s, approximately six million Black Americans relocated from the South to the North, Midwest, and West, reshaping the nation’s social and economic landscape.

Editorial by Ennis Davis, AICP. Contact Ennis at edavis@moderncities.com