The Exodus North

Between the years 1910 and 1920, the United States began to experience a major shift in the African-American population. During this period, it is estimated that a half million to a million African-Americans left the rural agricultural South, heading for urban and industrialized centers in the North and West. This mass exodus of the African-American population is commonly referred to as "The Great Rural to Urban Migration." A number of Push/Pull factors, both economic and social, prompted the movement of African-Americans. White residents of Waterloo witnessed the effects of the migration firsthand as the African-American population in Black Hawk County increased from 29 in 1910 to 856 a decade later.
 

The rise in the African-American population in Black Hawk County, and particularly Waterloo, can be in part attributed to the Illinois Central Railroad strike of 1912. In the 1870s, the Illinois Central Railroad established its headquarters in Waterloo, building a large maintenance shop (complete with roundhouse and turntable) used to repair locomotives and boxcars. In late 1911, the skilled shopmen and many of their unskilled assistants (mainly Italian and Bulgarian immigrants) walked out as part of a national labor dispute with the Harriman lines over wages and union recognition. Besides bringing in professional "strikebreakers" to replace the skilled shopmen, the Illinois Central announced that it would also recruit African-Americans from the South to replace the striking Italians and Bulgarians (Neymeyer 1970).

Some of these African-Americans had previously worked for the Illinois Central in Mississippi, while others came looking for a better life in the North. The railroad provided free passes to those willing to move to Waterloo and work for the company there. Like J.W. Childers who arrived in the 1912, a third of those who came to Waterloo left from areas in Mississippi where the Illinois Central Railroad had a strong presence (see map). Due to a lack of available housing for African-Americans, a number of the workers that arrived in 1912 lived in box cars provided by the Illinois Central as a temporary measure (Neymeyer 1970). By 1914, housing was becoming available as workers began to move their families North.

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