What was the great migration and why did it occur? How did it affect the migrants? How did Northerners react? How did it affect race relations in the north?
THE GREAT MIGRATION (1916–1970)
FIGURE 5.2 Percentage of African Americans Living in Urban Areas, 1890–2010
Although African Americans lacked the power and resources to withstand the resurrection of southern racism and oppression, they did have one option that had not been available under slavery: freedom of movement. African Americans were no longer legally tied to a specific master or to a certain plot of land. In the early 20th century, a massive population movement, often called the Great Migration, began out of the South. Slowly at first, African Americans began to move to other regions of the nation and from the countryside to the city. The Great Migration—like the European immigration discussed in Chapter 2—happened in waves. By the end of 1919, approximately one million blacks had moved away from the South and by 1978, almost 6,000,000 had left. The movement increased when hard times hit southern agriculture and slowed down during better times. In discussing the Great Migration, it has been said that African Americans voted against southern segregation with their feet. As Figure 5.1 shows, the black population was highly
concentrated in the South as recently as 1910, a little more than a century ago. By 1990, African Americans had become much more evenly distributed across the nation, spreading to the Northeast and the upper Midwest. Since 1990, the distribution of the black population has remained roughly the same, although there has been some movement back to the South. Figure 5.2 shows that, in addition to moving away
from the South, the Great Migration was also a movement from the countryside to the city. A century ago, blacks were overwhelmingly rural, but today more than 90% are urban. Thus, an urban black population living outside of the
South is a 20th-century phenomenon. The significance of this population redistribution is manifold. Most important, perhaps, was the fact that by moving out of the South and into urban areas, African Americans moved from areas of great resistance to racial change to areas of lower resistance. In the northern cities, for example, it was far easier to register and vote. Black political power began to grow and eventually provided many of the crucial resources that fueled the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
LIFE IN THE NORTH
What did African American migrants find when they got to the industrializing cities of the North? There is no doubt that life in the North was better for the vast majority of them. The growing northern African American communities relished the absence of Jim Crow laws and oppressive racial etiquette, the relative freedom to pursue jobs, and the greater opportunities to educate their children. Inevitably, however, life in the North fell far short of utopia.
Many aspects of African American culture—literature, poetry, music—flourished in the heady new atmosphere of freedom, but on other fronts, northern African American communities faced massive discrimination in housing, schools, and the job market. Along with freedom and such cultural flowerings as the Harlem Renaissance came black ghettos and new forms of oppression and exploitation. In Chapter 6, we will explore these events and the workings of what has been called de facto segregation.
COMPETITION WITH WHITE ETHNIC GROUPS
It is useful to see the movement of African Americans out of the South in terms of their resultant relationships with other groups. Southern blacks began to move to the North at about the same time as the New Immigration from Europe (see Chapter 2) began to end. By the time substantial numbers of black Southerners began arriving in the North, European immigrants and their descendants had had years, decades, and even generations to establish themselves in the job markets, political systems, labor unions, and neighborhoods of the North. Many of the European ethnic groups had also been the victims of discrimination and rejection. And, as we discussed in Chapter 2, their hold on economic security and status was tenuous for much of the 20th century. Frequently, they saw the newly arriving black migrants as a threat to their status, a perception that was reinforced by the fact that industrialists and factory owners often used African Americans as strikebreakers and scabs during strikes. The white ethnic groups responded by developing defensive strategies to limit the dangers presented by these migrants from the South. They tried to exclude African Americans from their labor unions and other associations and limit their impact on the political system. Often they successfully attempted to maintain segregated eighborhoods and schools (although the legal system out-side the South did not sanction overt de jure segregation). This competition led to hostile relations between black southern migrants and white ethnic groups, especially
158
the lower-and working-class segments of those groups. Ironically, however, in another chapter of the ethnic suc-cession discussed in Chapter 2, the newly arriving African Americans actually helped white ethnic groups become upwardly mobile. Dominant-group whites became less contemptuous of white ethnic groups as
their alarm
over the presence of African Americans increased. The greater antipathy of the white community toward African Americans made the immigrants more desirable and, thus, hastened their admission into the institutions of the larger society. For many white ethnic groups, the increased toler-ance of the larger society coincided happily with the com-ing of age of the more educated and skilled descendants of the original immigrants, further abetting the rise of these groups in the U.S. social class structure (Lieberson, 1980). For more than a century, each new European immi-grant group had helped to push previous groups up the ladder of socioeconomic success and out of the old, ghet-toized neighborhoods. Black Southerners got to the cities after immigration from Europe had been curtailed, and no newly arrived immigrants appeared to continue the pat-tern of succession for northern African Americans. Instead, American cities developed concentrations of low-income blacks that were economically vulnerable and politically weak and whose position was further solidified by antiblack prejudice and discrimination (Wilson, 1987, p. 34).
references
Healey, J. F., Stepnick, A., & O’Brien, E. (2018). Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class: The Sociology of Group Conflict and Change (8th Edition). SAGE Publications, Inc. (US). https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9781506399775
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3qA8DNc2Ss (watch and reference this!)
Write a 1-3 (single-spaced) page paper discussing the following questions. Please use and reference information from the text and video.
What was the great migration and why did it occur? How did it affect the migrants? How did Northerners react? How did it affect race relations in the north?
Collepals.com Plagiarism Free Papers
Are you looking for custom essay writing service or even dissertation writing services? Just request for our write my paper service, and we'll match you with the best essay writer in your subject! With an exceptional team of professional academic experts in a wide range of subjects, we can guarantee you an unrivaled quality of custom-written papers.
Get ZERO PLAGIARISM, HUMAN WRITTEN ESSAYS
Why Hire Collepals.com writers to do your paper?
Quality- We are experienced and have access to ample research materials.
We write plagiarism Free Content
Confidential- We never share or sell your personal information to third parties.
Support-Chat with us today! We are always waiting to answer all your questions.
