The 48 pages of historic Black American photographs and quotations tell the little-known story of how the 1924-65 period became the greatest era ever of African American economic progress.

It is an astounding story of how many of the broken promises of the Civil War Emancipation were reclaimed in 1924 when Congress slashed immigration numbers. 

The basic story has recently been re-discovered by many, including Nobel economist Sir Angus Deaton and New York Times Editorial Director David Leonhardt. They praise the role of those immigration cuts in advancing Black Americans economically, lending credence to the overall conclusion of the booklet:

“The Immigration Act of 1924 was the greatest federal action in U.S. history – other than the Civil War Constitutional Amendments – in advancing the economic interests of the descendants of American slavery, and perhaps of all American workers.”

The Times’ Leonhardt has written that the reduced immigration between 1924 and 1965 “contributed to the surge in working class incomes” in a period that saw “wages of black workers rising faster than those of White workers” with a shrinking of the pay gap “well before the great victories of the civil rights movement.”

Emancipation Reclamation recounts the role of Black heroes like A. Philip Randolph, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Frederick Douglass, and many other African American publishers and advocates across the ideological spectrum. All of them supported reducing the flow of foreign labor into U.S. jobs.

Here is the broad outline of the booklet’s dramatic story:

• Soon after the Civil War, northern employers turned their backs on freed slaves and filled their expanding jobs from the ever-larger, unrestricted streams of immigrant workers.
• 90% of freed slaves and descendants remained trapped under Jim Crow laws in former Confederate states because there were no jobs for them elsewhere.
• In 1924, Congress cut off most of the immigration flow.
• Immediately, Northern industrialists were forced to recruit among underemployed southerners, both Black and White.
• More than six million African Americans fled the segregationist South during the decades of low foreign immigration.

“This has been a little-taught history for too long,” NumbersUSA Founder Roy Beck says. “We are pleased to bring back these long-silenced voices of African American leaders so that today’s students can hear what the leaders did and had to say about one of the most important phases of United States history.”

Email Andre Barnes ([email protected]) for all classroom requests.

About NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation  
A nonpartisan 501(c)3 organization, NumbersUSA has educated voters since 1996 about immigration policies to lower numerical levels and protect America’s wage-earners, natural habitats, and local communities.

Media Contact
Andre Barnes
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SOURCE NumbersUSA.com