The Great Migration

This digital map drawn from the 1940 U.S. Census shows the racial/ethnic configuration of the Mill Creek neighborhood before World War II. In 1940, the African-American population of West Philadelphia was concentrated within a few blocks north of Market St. Mill Creek was located at the center of that area.  About 70 percent of the adult African Americans were born in southern states and moved north as part of the Great Migration.

Just under half of Mill Creek was white. Twenty-one percent of the adults were foreign-born. The majority was born in Ireland.  Many of the Irish-born were Catholics, living near Cathedral Park Cemetery.

As shown here, the neighborhood is properly described as racially/ethnically “mixed.” Yet while blacks and whites lived relatively close to one another, Brown Street (visible though unnamed on this map) divided the predominately white—i.e., native-white and Irish-born—blocks above that street from the predominately black blocks below it.  

By the 1950s, vintage rowhouses of this kind on the 5501 block of Vine Street were decaying or abandoned. The Public Housing Authority proposed to conserve 200 single homes to be occupied by single families, in the Authority’s first experiment with used housing.

In 1940, 5533 Vine St., the house shown at right in this photo, was the home of Robert Jones, age 49, an African American laborer in building and construction, whose family had resided here as early as 1935. Jones and his wife, Eleonora, age 42, were participants in the Great Migration, born in Georgia and Virginia respectively.  Both had seven years of education. Likely a victim of the era’s depressed housing market, in which blacks were the last hired, Robert was unemployed throughout 1939 into 1940. Eleonora was employed for 60 hours weekly throughout 1939 as a maid. Her earnings of $600 for the year ($11,057 in 2019 dollars) may have been this poor family’s only source of income. Their daughter, Eleonora, age 14, was born in Pennsylvania, a fact that suggests the Joneses had migrated north at least by the mid-1920s.

Philadelphia's Hog Island Shipyard recruited workers of all races for the from across the United States.

A stamp created by the Armstrong Association of Philadelphia as part of a 1917 campaign to raise funds for education initiatives.

A postcard advertising rowhouses for sale in 1914, just two years before Philadelphia experienced a severe housing crisis.

A segregated waiting room crowded with travelers at the Jacksonville railroad depot.