Definition
Old Settlers is the term Northern Black communities used for themselves and their parents — Black residents of cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York who arrived before the Great Migration's first wave (typically before 1900), as well as their U.S.-born children. They distinguished themselves, sometimes proudly and sometimes anxiously, from the much larger numbers of new arrivals who began pouring into Northern cities after 1915.
Old Settlers were often more educated, more economically secure, more integrated into Northern civic life, and more inclined to a respectability politics that emphasized formality of dress, speech, and church manners. Their relationship with the migrants was textured — solidarity in principle, friction in practice.
Why it matters
How it works
The friction had three sources.
Class and education
Old Settler families had a generation or two of Northern schooling behind them. Their children attended integrated public schools (in the days before Northern de facto segregation hardened), some attended college, and a small Black professional class — doctors, lawyers, postal clerks, teachers, church ministers — had emerged. Migrants arrived with the educational disadvantages of the Southern Jim Crow school system: short school years (so cotton-picking could resume), under-resourced classrooms, often only a sixth- or eighth-grade ceiling.
Cultural style
Old Settler religious life ran toward the formal — Congregational, Episcopal, AME, the older Baptist congregations. Migrants brought Pentecostal and Holiness worship styles that were louder, more emotional, and (to Old Settler ears) embarrassing in front of white neighbors. Dress, speech, and social manners drew similar contrasts.
Strategic anxiety
Old Settlers had built their position partly by being unobtrusive — by not provoking the white majority. A sudden tenfold increase in Black population in five or ten years threatened that strategy directly. White realtors, employers, and politicians began to treat all Black residents as members of "the colored district," whether they had been there for fifty years or fifty days. The Old Settler felt the cost of the migration on their own front step.
The friction was at its sharpest in 1915–1925. By 1940 the children of migrants had been Northern-schooled themselves and the children of Old Settlers had grown up alongside them. By 1960 the distinction was largely historical — kept alive in family memory and a few civic clubs but no longer a working social category.