Shishir K. David

ID# 0192380

College of Architecture - Architecture (Major)

The Great Migration (African American)

January 25, 2012

The Aggregate Significance of the Great Migration of African Americans in the 20th Century

Introduction

During the time period, lasting from, 1915 to 1970 there was a mass exodus of African Americans that left the south and migrated to the north in hopes of greater opportunity. Often garnered as the Second Great Migration of the United States (the first being the Puritan migration of 1620-1640, when the Puritans fled England to New England in quest for religious freedom and tolerance), it led to a cultural shift and a varying degree of dynamics on the inner workings of both northern, southern, and western cities. Many African Americans fled the shackling, degrading system of the South, and made the pilgrimage to northern or western parts, in the hope of escaping racism and gaining more access to jobs, housing and other opportunities. In the following paper one will expound on the adverse affects the Great Migration caused in the aspects of the shift in demographics on American cities, northern resistance, law and politics, and one ethnic group's ongoing quest to shake despair and strive for hope through an era of racial scrutiny and perilous resistance. The Great Migration of African-Americans ultimately transformed the American Society, especially for those of the African American diaspora, and had a grave influence demographically, politically, socially and culturally on the building of this country.

Discussion

From 1915 to 1940, thousands of African Americans journeyed from the rural South to the urban North in search of better lives. This movement, known as the Great Migration, changed the face of America, creating the black neighborhoods that became today's urban inner cities. African American migration turned from trickle to flood during the twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1940, the United States witnessed the largest and most dramatic mass movement of African descended people, as nearly two million African Americans abandoned hope for a better life in the south and headed for points north, west, and overseas. In what historians increasingly understand as a three-pronged Great Migration that spanned nearly a century - 1865-1896; 1910-1940; and 1940-1970 - more than six million blacks shifted the weight of their numbers, culture, and politics from the ostensibly rural south to various urban northern and western regions. The full social, cultural, political, and economic impact of this domestic racialized demographic reallocation cannot be overstated. During the 1920s, outward migration from Alabama alone topped 81,000. Whereas Cleveland's black population hovered around 1.5 percent of the city's total in 1910, a decade later it increased more than 300 percent - from 8.448 to 34,451 - presenting a new set of difficulties for municipal managers.

Black migrants overwhelmingly headed to cities where an insatiable demand for labor in sectors like coal, steel, meatpacking, railroading, and war industries paid handsomely compared to sharecropping. These black migrants often sojourned in smaller southern cities before moving onto other ones north and west of the Mason-Dixon Line, a pattern frequently seen with ...