The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh

In Short

This 1918 sociological study examines the sudden influx of Southern Black laborers into Pittsburgh's wartime steel mills and neighborhoods. Based on door-to-door interviews, factory statistics, public health records, and labor union surveys, Abraham Epstein documents how systemic housing shortages, institutional racism, and police prejudice undermine these newcomers' efforts to establish stable lives. Rather than presenting the migration as a failure of the workers, the text argues that northern industrial society treats Black migrants as disposable labor. It remains a crucial historical document because it captures the Great Migration in real time through clear empirical data and passionate civic advocacy.

The Story

The narrative begins in the spring and summer of 1917, as Pittsburgh's steel mills face an unprecedented labor shortage caused by the total halt of European immigration during the First World War. To keep furnace output expanding, industrial concerns and railroads send recruiting agents into the South, luring thousands of Black farmhands and industrial workers North with promises of high wages, freedom, and civic equality. Most migrants arrive independently, paying their own train fares in pursuit of better social and economic opportunity. A majority hail from industrial centers like Birmingham, Alabama, or rural districts devastated by crop failures and the boll weevil.

Upon arrival, the dream of northern opportunity collides with a harsh urban reality. Epstein traces how migrants encounter immediate, severe structural barriers, starting with housing. The city offers no accommodation for the influx. Renters find themselves squeezed into single rooms, condemned shanties, or overcrowded quarters without indoor plumbing or gas, paying inflated rents for uninhabitable spaces. Single men wander from job to job searching for fair treatment, while married men struggle to bring their families North because family-sized housing is practically non-existent.

In the workplace, the situation proves equally fraught. While steel mills depend entirely on Black labor supply to maintain wartime production, employers offer little structural support or long-term job security. Migrants, accustomed to agricultural labor, face dazing mill conditions without proper training or orientation. Concurrently, organized labor actively shuts them out. The trade union movement in Pittsburgh largely refuses to admit Black workers, using technical hurdles or outright racial prejudice to deny them entry, which forces skilled Black artisans into low-paying, non-union manual labor.

The study broadens its scope to evaluate the community’s systemic failures in public health, law enforcement, and education. Local police view the newcomers with hostility, making sweeping arrests without evidence and penalizing migrants who are struggling under the disruption of family life. High mortality and infant death rates mirror the unsanitary, neglected living conditions to which the city condemns them. Meanwhile, public schools struggle to accommodate Black children who have been deprived of equal education in the South. Epstein concludes not with despair, but with an urgent call for race cooperation and civic intervention, warning that neglecting the migrant population will destabilize the entire city.

How It Unfolds

The call to the North Driven by crop failures, economic exploitation, and Jim Crow violence in the South, thousands of Black laborers move to Pittsburgh to fill severe industrial labor shortages created by World War I.

The housing crisis Newcomers encounter severe overcrowding, exorbitant rents, and unsanitary conditions, with nearly half of surveyed families forced to live in single rooms lacking indoor plumbing or gas.

Barriers in the mills and unions Although steel mills desperately need workers, Black migrants face heavy, unfamiliar mill labor without institutional support, while local white trade unions actively exclude them from organized trades.

Criminalization and police hostility Law enforcement treats the growing Black population with suspicion, conducting mass arrests without evidence and attributing urban crime to newcomers while ignoring the breakdown of social structures caused by migration.

Public health and civic neglect Neglected housing conditions and lack of civic resources lead to alarming infant mortality rates and disease, prompting a call for public health interventions and mutual aid from local Black institutions.

The challenge of public education Pittsburgh schools witness a surge in Southern Black children who suffer from past educational denial in the South, revealing deep structural challenges in urban education that require targeted support.

A plea for race cooperation Epstein concludes by urging Pittsburgh’s white and Black leaders to abandon laissez-faire indifference and build cooperative programs, warning that ignoring the community's welfare will ultimately harm the entire city.

The People

• Abraham Epstein — A student researcher in Social Economy at the University of Pittsburgh who conducts this study as a volunteer to foster civic consciousness. He wants to expose the empirical reality of the migration to force urban leaders to build housing, reform labor practices, and support the newcomers.
• The Southern Black Migrants — Industrious, ambitious, and temperate workers, mostly from Alabama and Georgia, who leave the South to escape lynching, economic disenfranchisement, and poor schooling. They seek fair wages and stable family homes, but end up trapped in cramped single rooms and unstable, non-union jobs.
• Pittsburgh Industrial Employers and Labor Agents — Mill owners and recruiters who view Black workers primarily as a temporary solution to war-driven labor shortages. They bring thousands North but fail to provide adequate housing or fair treatment, resulting in high worker turnover.
• Local White Trade Union Leaders — Complacent or openly prejudiced labor officials who refuse to organize Black artisans. By barring Black painters, engineers, and tradesmen, they force skilled workers into low-wage common labor and entrench racial divisions within the working class.

In Its Own Voice

"Democracy we have learned in this struggle, no longer means 'each for himself, and the devil take the hind-most.'"

This warning reminds Pittsburgh's leadership that wartime national unity requires protecting all workers rather than abandoning newcomers to predatory economic forces.

"The roar and clangor of our mills make these newcomers a little dazed and confused at first."

Epstein highlights the psychological and physical shock experienced by agrarian Southern laborers who are suddenly thrust into high-intensity Northern steel manufacturing.

"'Let them alone today, permit them to be retired to over-crowded shacks and shanties where sanitation is an unuttered word, and tomorrow, contagions, arising from these congested, unsanitary shanties and shacks, will fly, like the black bat of night, over our fair city...'"

A quoted African American journalist from Cleveland warns that civic neglect of Black living conditions will inevitably result in widespread public health crises affecting the entire metropolis.

What It's Really About

At its core, the book is an argument against the policy of laissez-faire in urban governance and race relations. It contends that economic migration cannot be left entirely to the unregulated forces of corporate recruitment and landlord speculation. Epstein demonstrates that racial inequality is not merely an abstract southern issue, but a structural northern problem embedded in housing markets, labor union policies, and municipal services.

The study challenges the prevailing racial prejudices of white Pittsburghers by proving that high crime rates and health problems among migrants stem directly from severe overcrowding, municipal neglect, and law enforcement bias. Ultimately, the book asks whether an industrial democracy can profit from the labor of a marginalized group while systematically denying them equal access to housing, healthcare, fair wages, and civic respect.

Why Read It Today

Readers interested in urban history, labor economics, and African American history will find this brief, data-dense survey fascinating. Written in 1917, it captures the Great Migration as an unfolding event rather than a distant historical subject. Epstein writes with the concise clarity of an economist and the moral urgency of an early 20th-century social reformer, filling his chapters with stark statistical tables detailing rents, wages, mortality causes, and regional origins.

The book is exceptionally brief and accessible, but it does reflect its era. Readers will encounter period-specific sociological phrasing, historical trade union jargon, and statistical charts embedded directly in the text. It does not offer personal memoirs or narrative storytelling from individual migrants; instead, its weight comes from cold, hard evidence collected on the ground. What stays with you is how modern Epstein's diagnosis feels. The housing crises, labor barriers, and municipal neglect he documents in 1917 mirror urban policy debates that continue to shape American cities today.