Race, river, and the railroad: Black Huntington, West Virginia, 1871-1929

Significant numbers of studies have elevated the African American experience in Central Appalachia, the Ohio River Valley, and the rural-industrial circumstance of the black coal miner in southern West Virginia. Yet, stories unearthing black migrant life in urban-industrial settings in this region have been largely neglected. Examining the experiences of black migrants and residents in the embryonic urban-industrial environment of Huntington, West Virginia, during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, my dissertation contributes to recent literature refuting the myth of black invisibility in Central Appalachia. Founded in 1871 as a trans-shipment point for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, Huntington's burgeoning economy and comparatively tolerant racial climate attracted increasing numbers of black migrants drawn to the socio-cultural and economic opportunities for African Americans not found further south. Yet, by the early twentieth-century black aspirations became increasingly constrained as white Huntingtonians, emblematic of deep southern practices, embraced and implemented the tenets of Jim Crowism. My study compliments works within the new urban history paradigm elevating the purposeful nature of black agency in the migratory process, the development of a black working-class, community development, and black response to Jim Crowism. By focusing explicitly on the multi-layered transition of southern rural and semi-rural black migrants to life in the urban-industrial enclave of Huntington, West Virginia, between 1871 and 1929, this study adds to our knowledge of southern black migration and the migrant experience, the nature and parameters of community, and the extent and character of black response to Jim Crowism.;Strategically located adjacent to the Ohio River in the Tri-state region of southwestern West Virginia, southeastern Ohio, and eastern Kentucky, and founded as a transshipment station by financier Collis P. Huntington for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in 1871, Huntington grew from a non-descript village to the state's most populated city by 1930. Huntington's black population grew in concert, so much so that by 1930, the city's black population comprised the second largest in the state, behind Charleston, the state capital. Black migrants, drawn by the promise of jobs linked to the C & O's construction through the primeval New River Valley, the completion a decade later of the Norfolk and Western Railroad line southwest of the C & O, and Huntington's attendant rise as a commercial, manufacturing, and industrial center, increasingly settled within its confines throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Here, they navigated the socioeconomic and political dynamics of race, space, class, gender, and region.;Examination of the black experience in Huntington provides an alternative to the southern-rural or northern-urban understanding of black life. Unlike the massive inter-regional migration that transformed the urban north during the Jim Crow era and the inter-war years, Huntington's urban-industrial growth, like that in the rural-industrial southern West Virginia coalfields, resulted from the intra-regional migration of southern blacks. Though commonalities linked the two experiences, the urbanization process posed different challenges, burdens, and opportunities to the black migrant. Unlike the autonomy black coal miners' experienced in the mines, direct and intensive supervision marked the urban industrial workplace. This study compliments recent literature de-emphasizing the ghettoization paradigm. While socioeconomic forces and racism constrained black ability to live where they wanted, no ghetto existed in Huntington for the length of this study. Part of this development can be traced to growing black residential concentration within the city and the multi-class (and in some places) interracial character of predominately black neighborhoods. Unlike studies asserting proletarianization as a conceptual model to encapsulate the black working class experience, race, not class served as the primary foundational and operative of the Afro-Huntingtonian experience. However, this conclusion does not mitigate the development of class fissures within black Huntington. The rise of a professional class during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century marked an important milestone in the maturity of black Huntington, one that challenged the status quo of white Huntingtonians and complicated black aspirations. A study of Huntington's black population provides insight into the adaptive techniques and strategies---the strength of kin and social networks, gainful employment, institutional development, property acquisition, and legal challenges---used to confront the manifestations of segregation in an evolving urban-industrial southern environment.