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Emancipation Reclamation
The little-known story of how simply reducing immigration cleared the way for four decades of the greatest African American advancements in U.S. history
To request a copy, contact Andre Barnes at abarnes@numbersusa.com.
SOURCES & NOTES
CHAPTER ONE
1. Editorial, The Messenger, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January 1923).
2. The “Civil War Emancipation” was a collection of actions far greater than Lincoln’s Proclamation which began it. It was purchased and broadened by the blood, sacrifice, and victory of two million Union soldiers. The emancipation was then broadened further and the promises ratified in three Constitutional Amendments.
3. All immigration numbers in this book are from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
4. Editorial, The Messenger.
5. Philip S. Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2: Pre-Civil War Decade 1850-1860 (New York: International Publishers, 1950).
6. Editorial, The Messenger, Vol. 7, No. 7 (July 1925).
7. James P. Smith and Finis R. Welch, “Black Economic Progress After Myrdal,” Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 27, no. 2 (June 1989).
8. U.S. Census Bureau, We, the American Blacks, September 1993.
9. The years in immigration data from the Immigration and Naturalization Service end on June 30 of the named year and start on July 1 of the previous year. Thus, the 707,000 immigrants who are listed as coming in 1924 entered between July 1, 1923 and June 30, 1924.
10. Smith and Welch, “Black Economic Progress After Myrdal,” Journal of Economic Literature.
11. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Immigration Quota,” The Crisis, (August 1929).
12. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).
13. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, 1901.
14. In-depth research into industry in West and Central Africa before contact with Europeans has found skilled African ironworkers producing steel in the 1600s sometimes superior to the technologies in Europe. Advanced textiles at the time competed on the international market. Many of the enslaved Africans came from societies with centuries of experience in complex trade systems on their own continent and with other continents. In the 1700s, Philadelphia Quaker abolitionist leader Anthony Benezet studied the cultures of local slaves and found many came from self-governing villages and small kingdoms, and were “highly skilled and industrious” with a strong educational system teaching students to read and write in Arabic. David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Studies in Comparative World History), 2nd Edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
CHAPTER TWO
15. John E. Bodnar, “The Impact of the `New Immigration’ on the Black Worker: Steelton, Pennsylvania, 1880-1920.” Labor History 17, no. 2 (1976): 214-29.
16. Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
17. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Volume 4: 1864-80 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/s/digitaledition/item/17976.
18. Ron Chernow, Grant (New York: Penguin Press, First Edition, 2017).
19. Ena L. Farley, The Underside of Reconstruction New York: The Struggle Over the Issue of Black Equality (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993).
20. “1862–63 United States House of Representatives elections,” Wikimedia Foundation, last modified 10 July 2024, 19:34, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1862%E2%80%9363_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections.
21. Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
22. Chernow, Grant (New York: Penguin Press, 2018).
23. Bodnar, “The Impact of the `New Immigration’ on the Black Worker: Steelton, Pennsylvania, 1880-1920,” 214-29; Lindert and Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700.
24. Lawrence H. Fuchs, “The Reactions of Black Americans to Immigration,” in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
25. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988).
26. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume 6: 1901-2 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972-1989).
27. “Address By Booker T. Washington Before the National Negro Business League. Chicago, Wednesday Evening, August 21, 1912,” The Broad Ax, August 24, 1912, 2, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024055/1912-08-24/ed-1/seq-2/
28. Editorials, The Messenger, Vol. 6, No. 8 (August 1924).
CHAPTER THREE
29. Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns.
30. Harlan and Smock, eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume 6: 1901-2.
31. Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, The Impact of Immigration on American Labor Markets Prior to the Quotas, Working Paper No. 5185 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1995), 30.
32. Chicago Defender, December 17, 1921.
33. Figures 1-60, Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Casein tempera on hardboard, 1940-1941, is jointly owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
34. Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series.
35. Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns.
36. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1903).
37. Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns.
38. Fortune Magazine, Vol. 24, No. 5 (November 1941).
39. Opportunity, Vol. 4 (December 1926): 366-367.
40. Chicago Defender, December 17, 1921.
41. Peter H. Lindert, Fertility and Scarcity in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 233.
42. Daryl Scott, “’Immigrant Indigestion’ A. Philip Randolph: Radical and Restrictionist,” Center for Immigration Studies, June 1, 1999, https://cis.org/Report/Immigrant-Indigestion-Philip-Randolph-Radical-and-Restrictionist.
43. Editorial, Chicago Defender (January 5, 1924).
44. Arnold Shankman, Ambivalent Friends: Afro-Americans View the Immigrant (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982).
CHAPTER FOUR
Langston Hughes wrote the poem “Freedom Train” for Our World, a national Black-readership magazine: “Freedom Train” by Langston Hughes from Our World; 10/1947; Records Relating to the First Freedom Train, 1946 – 1950; Collection AHF: RECORDS OF THE AMERICAN HERITAGE FOUNDATION; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. [Online Version, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/freedom-train-langston-hughes-our-world, July 10, 2024]
45. Mark Woods, “Asa Philip Randolph: The often-overlooked inspiration for the March on Washington,” Florida Times-Union, August 24, 2013, https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/2013/08/24/asa-philip-randolph-often-overlooked-inspiration-march/15818661007/.
46. “A. Philip Randolph’s 1963 March on Washington speech,” The St. Augustine Record, August 20, 2013, transcript of speech delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC, August 28, 1963. https://www.staugustine.com/story/news/2013/08/20/philip-randolphs-1963-march-washington-speech/15818957007/.
47. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
48. Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns.
49. Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. 2: August 1919-August 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
50. The New York Age, February 8, 1919.
51. Editorials, The Messenger, Vol. 6, No. 8 (August 1924).
52. Pittsburgh Courier, March 24, 1928, sec. II.
53. Shankman, Ambivalent Friends: Afro-Americans View the Immigrant.
54. (Congressional Record 1898, 31:686), and Volume Title: The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy, Volume Author/Editor: Claudia Goldin and Gary D. Libecap, editors Volume Publisher: University of Chicago Press Volume ISBN: 0-226-30110-9 Volume URL: http://www.nber.org/books/gold94-1 Conference Date: May 20-21, 1993 Publication Date: January 1994 Chapter Title: The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890 to 1921.
55. “The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom – World War II and Post War (1940–1949),” Exhibitions, Library of Congress, accessed May 6, 2023, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/world-war-ii-and-post-war.html.
56. Paul Prescod, “A Religion of Unity,” Jacobin (June 30, 2019).
57. Bruce Fehn, “”The Only Hope We Had”: United Packinghouse Workers Local 46 and the Struggle for Racial Equality in Waterloo, Iowa, 1948-1960”, The Annals of Iowa 54, no. 3, (Summer 1995): 185-216, https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.9928.
58. Natalie Spievack, “Can labor unions help close the black-white wage gap?,” Urban Institute, February 1, 2019, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/can-labor-unions-help-close-black-white-wage-gap.
59. Steven A. Reich, ed., The Great Black Migration: A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2014); Talmadge Anderson and James B. Stewart. Introduction to African American Studies: Transdisciplinary Approaches and Implications (Baltimore: Inprint Editions, 2007).
60. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, “The Civil Rights Movement,” in Poor People’s Movements. Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
61. Editorials, “Migration Will Stop Lynching in the South,” The Messenger, Vol. 5, No. 8 (August 1923).
62. Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War.
63. Harry T. Oshima, “The Growth of U.S. Factor Productivity: The Significance of New Technologies in the Early Decades of the Twentieth Century,” The Journal of Economic History 44, no. 1 (March 1984), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700031429.
64. “Address By Booker T. Washington Before the National Negro Business League.” The Broad Ax, Aug. 24, 1912
65. Robert J. Norrell, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2011).
66. Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns.
67. “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” Wikimedia Foundation, last modified 06 August 2024, 10:48, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_on_Washington_for_Jobs_and_Freedom. In 2013, the Economic Policy Institute launched a series of reports around the theme of “The Unfinished March”. These reports analyze the goals of the original march and assess how much progress has been made. They echo the message of Randolph and Rustin that civil rights cannot transform people’s quality of life unless accompanied by economic justice.
CHAPTER FIVE
68. Hudson Institute, Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the Twenty-first Century, by Project Director William B. Johnston, (Indianapolis: commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor, June 1987).
69. A startling 2017 study by economists Kerwin Kofi Charles of the University of Chicago and Patrick Bayer of Duke University examined the median annual earnings by race of all prime-age men (25-54) regardless of education and whether or not they had a job. Patrick Bayer and Kerwin Kofi Charles, “Divergent Paths: A New Perspective on Earnings Differences Between Black and White Men Since 1940,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 3 (August 2018).
70. Lindert and Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700.
71. Lindert and Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700.
CHAPTER SIX
72. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, Population and the American Future, by Chairman John D. Rockefeller 3rd. (Washington, D.C., 1972) submitted to President Nixon on March 27, 1972.
73. Sponsors of the quota system stated their intent was for future immigration to continue the nation’s diversity by closely replicating the existing U.S. population which included the enormous mass immigration of the previous four decades from non-traditional countries. But it also would reflect the majority of the population with roots in Great Britain and Germany. To accommodate many cheap-labor employers, the authors excluded Latin American countries from the quotas and put no numerical limits on them. The result was that actual immigration numbers over the decades under-represented the European origins of the United States and far over-represented Latin American origins.
74. Randolph, A. Philip. A Philip Randolph to President Harry S. Truman, May 29, 1952. Letter. From the National Archives and Records Administration, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/randolph-truman, (accessed July 10, 2024).
75. J.A. Rogers, “Critical Excursions and Reflections: The Statue of Liberty and European Immigration,” The Messenger, Vol. 6, No. 2 (February 1924).
76. Otis L. Graham, Jr., Unguarded Gates: A History of America’s Immigration Crisis (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). Graham provides an especially detailed and textured account of the debates and process of immigration legislating in the 1917-24 period.
77. Despite all the promises that immigration numbers would not rise, the legislation did not enjoy popular support. A Harris Poll before the vote in 1965 found the public was opposed by a 2-to-1 margin. Stephen T. Wagner, “The Lingering Death of the National Origins Quota System: A Political History of United States Immigration Policy, 1952-1965” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1986).
78. “Population and the American Future,” The Report of The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, submitted to President Nixon on March 27, 1972 by Chairman John D. Rockefeller 3rd
79. Select Commission on Immigration Policy and the National Interest (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981).
80. “Immigration,” Gallup, 1965-2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx.
81. Hudson Institute, Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the Twenty-first Century.
82. Immigration Act of 1989: Hearings on S. 358, H.R. 672, H.R. 2448, H.R. 2646, and H.R. 4165, Before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and International Law, and the Immigration Task Force, 101st Congress (1990) testimony of Frank Morris, Dean of Graduate Studies and Urban Research, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD.
83. Reynolds Farley, “The Common Destiny of Blacks and Whites: Observations About the Social and Economic Status of the Races,” in Race in America, eds., Herbert Hill and James Jones, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).
CHAPTER SEVEN
84. Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, eds., The Negro and the New Social Order: A Reconstruction Program; The Messenger (Supplement, March 1919).
85. Editorials, The Messenger, Vol. 2, No. 10 (November 1920).
86. Editorials, “Migration Will Stop Lynching in the South,” The Messenger, Vol. 5, No. 8 (August 1923).
87. Angus Deaton, “Rethinking My Economics,” Finance & Development Magazine (International Monetary Fund), March 2024. Jeremy Beck, “An Economist Changes His Mind: Immigration Does Contribute to Inequality,” NumbersUSA, March 12, 2024, https://www.numbersusa.com/blog/an-economist-changes-his-mind-immigration-does-contribute-to-inequality/.
88. Lindert and Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700.
89. Roger House, “Race, the construction industry and the Francis Scott Key Bridge,” The Hill, March 27, 2024, https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/4559922-race-the-construction-industry-and-the-francis-scott-key-bridge/.
90. Pamela Denise Long, “Immigration Viewed from the Back of the Hiring Line,” American Affairs, Fall 2022, Volume 6, No. 3, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/08/immigration-viewed-from-the-back-of-the-hiring-line/
91. Joint Meeting: House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims and Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Immigration, 104th Congress (June 28, 1995) (testimony of Barbara Jordan, Chair, U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform).
92. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Immigration, 103rd Congress (August 3, 1994) (testimony of Barbara Jordan, Chair, U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform).
93. National Survey of 2,514 Black Likely Voters, conducted throughout 2023 by Rasmussen Reports Immigration Index. The respondents were 72% Democrats, 8% Republicans, and 20% Other, https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/archive/immigration_index/.
94. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on International Law, Immigration and Refugees, 103rd Congress (September 29, 1994) (testimony of Barbara Jordan, Chair, U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform).
