How Did Rubie Bond Cause The Great Migration?

It has been over fifty years since slavery had ended in the South with the enactment of the 13th amendment, leaving all former slaves and African-Americans free. The Great Migration, which started in the 1910s, was seen by African-Americans as a new hope, a chance to leave what they saw as the restricting rural South to find better opportunities, jobs, and the private life in the North. In 1917, when most of the migrations occurred, ten-year-old Rubie Bond and her parents left Mississippi to travel to Wisconsin. Fifty years later, in “Beloit Bicentennial Oral History Project” (1976), Rubie Bond was interviewed as part of Beloit College Archives’ project to document the history of the Great Migration. In her interview, Bond recollected why her family and many others left the South. She recounted the fear they had, both when they left and at the thought of what would have happened if they had stayed, for slavery never truly ended in the South; it was merely reconstructed. The ongoing slavery in its new form directly caused the Great Migration.

To replace slavery, the South created sharecropping, the act of a landowner permitting someone to farm his or, rarely, her land in exchange for a portion of the produced crops. Bond stated that sharecropping was what had happened to her family, that the plantation owner whom she worked for had given her family so many materials that the materials might as well have gone to waste (119). These materials were neither free nor cheap, coming at inflated prices much higher for workers than for nonworkers, which Bond said forced the workers to always be in debt (119). Landowners could now have a legal basis for forcing their workers into an indefinite loop, where they could pile up their workers’ debts while simultaneously having their land tended to and receiving crops. These workers, instead of being slaves to their owners, were now slaves to their own