Departing for Chicago Part 1
family just arrived in Chicago from the rural South, 1922, Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Dr. Alvenia Fulton (1893-1999) was born in Tennessee. Why did she migrated to Chicago where she would go on to practice Naturopathy? Fulton followed the path of many other black southerners who started departing the south in the early twentieth century. When World War I started in Europe in 1914 the price of food in the southern United States increased and a business depression occurred that lasted until the summer of 1915. In addition, the boll weevil’s destruction of black belt cotton crops and the flooding of some sections of the South and beyond led to a shortage of crops in 1916 and low demand for agricultural workers. There was also a “demand for labor in the North and higher wages offered there,” according to a 1919 black migration study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor.
