ABSTRACT
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Southern black population found itself immobilized and denied economic opportunity by an oppressive system of debt peonage. Landed whites survived the scourge by planting food crops and living on savings. Large numbers of blacks, however, nearly 90 percent of whom were landless, left the farms they worked. Animosity in the form of indignant landlords, dishonest merchants, hostile labor unions, and surly police officers awaited their arrival at the end of rail lines. The black response to mob violence changed, however, in the cities. Before the urban transformation, outnumbered and unarmed blacks had been hard-pressed to defend themselves against attacking mobs. Between 1915 and 1940, the black population living outside the South more than doubled to over 2.5 million. Blacks torched forty-nine houses in an immigrant neighborhood near the Stock Yards, leaving nearly a thousand homeless.
