The classical liberal fought for human rights and fought against the tyrannical power of government.
During the early 1800s, the "democratic spirit " caught hold of the American people and becoming more "democratic" became an American obsession.
After the Civil War and the Reconstruction era , racial inequality persisted across the South during the 1870s, and the segregationist policies known as “Jim Crow” soon became the law of the land.
The Great Migration Begins. When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914 , industrialized urban areas in the North, Midwest and West faced a shortage of industrial laborers, as the war put an end to the steady tide of European immigration to the United States.
During the Great Migration, African Americans began to build a new place for themselves in public life, actively confronting racial prejudice as well as economic, political and social challenges to create a Black urban culture that would exert enormous influence in the decades to come.
With war production kicking into high gear, recruiters enticed African Americans to come north, to the dismay of white Southerners. Black newspapers—particularly the widely read Chicago Defender —published advertisements touting the opportunities available in the cities of the North and West, along with first-person accounts of success.
Impact of the Great Migration. The Great Migration was the relocation of more than 6 million African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West from about 1916 to 1970.
The most prominent example was Harlem in New York City, a formerly all-white neighborhood that by the 1920s housed some 200,000 African Americans.
The summer of 1919 began the greatest period of interracial strife in U.S. history at that time, including a disturbing wave of race riots.
The Great Migration (1910-1970) The Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United States history. Approximately six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states roughly from the 1910s until the 1970s. The driving force behind the mass movement was to escape racial violence, ...
Although the migrants found better jobs and fled the South entrenched in Jim Crow, many African Americans faced injustices and difficulties after migrating. The Red Summer of 1919 was rooted in tensions and prejudice that arose from white people having to adjust to the demographic changes in their local communities. From World War I until World War II, it is estimated that about 2 million Black people left the South for other parts of the country.
The driving force behind the mass movement was to escape racial violence, pursue economic and educational opportunities, and obtain freedom from the oppression of Jim Crow. The Great Migration is often broken into two phases, coinciding with the participation and effects of the United States in both World Wars.
World War II brought an expansion to the nation’s defense industry and many more jobs for African Americans in other locales, again encouraging a massive migration that was active until the 1970s.
history, the widespread migration of African Americans in the 20th century from rural communities in the South to large cities in the North and West. At the turn of the 20th century, the vast majority of black Americans lived in the Southern states. From 1916 to 1970, during this Great Migration, ...
It occurred in two waves, basically before and after the Great Depression. At the beginning of the 20th century, 90 percent of black Americans lived in ...
The Great Migration was the movement of some six million African Americansfrom rural areas of the Southern statesof the United Statesto urban areas in the Northern statesbetween 1916 and 1970. It occurred in two waves, basically before and after the Great Depression. At the beginning of the 20th century, 90 percent of black Americans lived in the South. By 1970 nearly half of all African Americans lived in Northern cities.
The Great Migration arguably was a factor leading to the American civil rights movement.
Many African Americans in the South found themselves trapped in sharecropping jobs and other forms of debt peonage with no hope of improvement in their circumstances. Jim Crow laws kept them in an inferior position relative to white people, and they were denied political rights.
A huge internal population shift among African Americans addressed these shortfalls, particularly during the World Wars, when defense industries required more unskilled labour. Although the Great Migration slowed during the Great Depression, it surged again after World War II, when rates of migration were high for several decades.
From 1916 to 1970, during this Great Migration, it is estimated that some six million black Southerners relocated to urban areas in the North and West. African American family from the rural South arriving in Chicago, 1920.
Historians have long described this exodus as the Great Migration, great not just because of the numbers of people who moved but also because of the social and political consequences.
The Great Migration out of the South lasted three-quarters of a century , slowing in the 1970s. Since then, Black Americans have been moving to the South in large numbers, in some sense reversing the Great Migration. But the story is more complicated than the slogan. The Great Migration was largely from the rural South while the new migration has little to do with rural areas, or with states like Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana which saw so many leave during the exodus. The big cities of Georgia, Florida, Virginia, Texas, and North Carolina have attracted most of those participating in the Move South and typically this has not been a return migration. Some elders have returned home, but a strong majority are newcomers to the South, including many children or grandchildren of the exodus generation. Others are immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. And the migration is transforming the South. Many of the migrants have come with advanced skills and education: some with resources to start new enterprises, others with the capacity to affect the culture and politics of southern places. Here are interactive graphics and maps that allow us to track the migration south.
Migration slowed dramatically in the 1930s, then soared during World War II and the two decades following, a period sometimes called the Second Great Migration. After the 1960s, rates of migration began to decline noticeably and by the 1980s former southerners were among those looking for opportunities in the new economy of the South, now renamed the Sunbelt.
Migration out of the South was not new to the 20th Century, but volumes escalated through the first three decades of the new century, reaching a peak during World War I and the 1920s.