The Great Migration Comes to the Steel Valley
Near Youngstown, Ohio
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Youngstown was a destination. Word had spread through the Black communities of the American South that the steel mills here paid wages no Southern job would offer, and that Ohio at least had civil rights laws on the books, even if enforcement was uneven. The first wave of the Great Migration, roughly nineteen ten to nineteen thirty, brought more than twelve thousand African Americans to the Greater Youngstown area. In the single decade between nineteen ten and nineteen twenty, the Black population inside the city more than tripled, from under two thousand to over six thousand.
They came from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, the Carolinas. Men went to work in the mills alongside the Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Italian, and Croatian immigrants who had arrived before them. The work was brutal and hot and dangerous, and the social life outside the plant was usually segregated by custom if not always by law.
Discrimination was persistent. Black families were steered into specific neighborhoods. Many restaurants refused service. Theater seating was restricted. Idora Park, the beloved amusement park on the south end of the city, enforced a segregated policy in its ballroom, with a roped-off section that Black dancers were not permitted to leave.
Despite these conditions, African Americans built a resilient community. Churches, fraternal organizations, and the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People became anchors. By the nineteen-twenties, the NAACP was pressing restaurant owners to integrate, sometimes threatening them with prosecution under Ohio's own civil rights laws. Integration of some downtown establishments came slowly, fight by fight.
The second great wave of migration, from nineteen forty to nineteen sixty-five, brought another twenty thousand African Americans to Greater Youngstown, cementing the community's size and deepening its civic institutions.
