African-American Great Migration

Examples of African-American Great Migration in the following topics:

• The Great Migration and the "Promised Land"

  • The Great Migration was the movement of African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West.
  • By the end of the Second Great Migration, usually considered to have occurred between 1940 and 1970, African Americans had become an urbanized population.
  • The African-American Great Migration created the first large, urban black communities in the North.
  • While the Great Migration helped educated African Americans obtain jobs, the migrants encountered significant forms of discrimination.
  • Examine the causes and effects of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the North.

• Changing Demographics

  • In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Mexican population in the U.S. grew and African-Americans migrated to the North.
  • From 1910 to 1970, approximately 6 million African-Americans moved out of the rural Southern U.S. into the Northeast, Midwest, and West in what historians have called the African-American Great Migration.
  • Between 1910 and 1930, the African-American population increased by about 40% in northern states as a result of the migration, mostly in the major cities.
  • This later painting, titled "During World War I there was a great migration north by southern Negroes" by the artist Jacob Lawrence, depicts African-American migration north via abstract images.
  • Analyze the causes and challenges of both the Great Migration of African Americans and the immigration of Mexicans in the United States

• The "Color Line"

  • Du Bois was a prominent African-American intellectual who was active in the early 20th century, promoting full civil equality.
  • Du Bois would go on to be a prominent leader in the pursuit of African-American civil rights.
  • The private sector was not the only source of racism; under President Wilson, the plight of African-Americans in government jobs suffered.
  • Du Bois also wrote an editorial supporting the African-American Great Migration, the movement of blacks from the southern U.S. to the Northeast, Midwest, and West, because he felt it would help blacks escape southern racism, find economic opportunities, and assimilate into American society.
  • Du Bois was a prominent advocate for African-American rights in the twentieth century.

• Racial Friction

  • Numerous examples of postwar racial friction sparked by Nativism and the Great Migration reached a peak in the 1919 Red Summer.
  • Northern manufacturers recruited throughout the South, sparking an exodus of African-American workers that became known as the Great Migration.
  • The Passing of the Great Race achieved wide popularity among Americans and influenced immigration policy.
  • African-Americans had to make great cultural changes, as most went from rural areas to major industrial cities and had to adjust from being rural laborers to urban workers.
  • A white gang looking for African Americans during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919.

• The "New Negro"

  • The term was made popular by Alain LeRoy Locke and has been used in African-American discourses since 1895.
  • In addition to racially motivated violence, African-Americans were flooding into the North in huge numbers, increasing segregation in the North and the regeneration of the Ku Klux Klan.
  • Many disillusioned African-American veterans became more conscious racially, politically, and socially, and this helped to shape a new spirit of militancy that found expression.
  • In several essays included in the anthology The New Negro (1925), which grew out of the 1924 special issue of Survey Graphic on Harlem, editor Alain Locke contrasted the "Old Negro" with the "New Negro" by stressing African-American assertiveness and self-confidence during the years following World War I and the Great Migration.
  • Race pride had already been part of literary and political self-expression among African-Americans in the 19th century.

• The Harlem Renaissance

  • In a 1925 anthology, The New Negro, which grew out of the 1924 special issue of Survey Graphic on Harlem, editor Alain Locke contrasted the "Old Negro" with the "New Negro" by stressing African-American assertiveness and self-confidence during the years following World War I and the Great Migration.
  • Many more African-Americans arrived during World War I.
  • The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African-Americans from the South to cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and New York.
  • Composers used poems written by African-American poets in their songs, while implementing the rhythms, harmonies and melodies of African-American music, such as Blues, Spirituals and Jazz, into their concert pieces.
  • Yet it also received a great deal of patronage from white Americans such as writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten and philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, who provided various forms of assistance, opening doors which otherwise would have remained closed to the publication of work outside the African-American community.

• The "Nadir of Race Relations" and the Great Migration

  • The early 1900s marked the low point in 20th-century race relations between white Americans and African Americans.
  • The nadir of race relations in the United States was an ideological era of nationwide hostility directed from white Americans against African Americans.
  • In what became known as the Great Migration, more than 1.5 million black people left the South, and, while they faced difficulties, their chances overall were better in the North.
  • The years during and after World War I saw profound social tensions in the United States, not only because of the effects of the Great Migration and European immigration but also due to demobilization and the competition for jobs with returning veterans.
  • A white gang looking for African Americans during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919.

• The Changed Role of Women

  • The period directly following the Revolutionary War was one of great hope and indecision for African Americans.
  • A massive migration, not unlike the Great Migration many years later, took place at the close of the war with primarily African American women moving to urban areas in the North.
  • Most free African Americans in northern urban centers were employed in “service trades” such as cooking and catering, cleaning stables, cutting hair, or driving coaches.
  • Additionally, many employers in the North refused to house whole families of free African Americans, preferring only to board domestic laborers, who tended to be women.
  • African American women made efforts to continue to support and maintain ties to their kin in these situations, but obstacles remained ever-present and challenging.

• African American Migration

  • The Exodus of 1879, also known as the Kansas Exodus or the Exoduster Movement, refers to the mass movement of African Americans from states along the Mississippi River to Kansas in the late nineteenth century.
  • It was the first general migration of blacks following the Civil War.
  • This sudden wave of migration came as a great surprise to many white Americans, who did not realize that black southerners were free in name only.
  • The Exodus was not universally praised by African Americans.
  • Summarize the patterns of African American migration in the late nineteenth century

• Minorities and the New Deal

  • No other group in the United States suffered as devastating consequences of the Great Depression as African Americans.
  • The crisis in agriculture that began long before the onset of the Great Depression also greatly affected African Americans, many of whom still lived off the land, more often as sharecroppers and other tenants than landowners.
  • While formally the New Deal was designed to benefit also African Americans, some of its flagship programs, particularly those proposed during the First New Deal, either excluded African Americans or even hurt them.
  • The evicted farmers were often forced to migrate to northern cities as the southern countryside had no alternative to offer.
  • However, other New Deal programs produced much more positive outcomes for African Americans.