Civil Rights

14 Pages 3511 Words

use the situation in the South remained even worse (Levy, 5). The only significant racial reform enacted by the federal government in the decade after the end of WWII was the desegregation of the armed forces, ordered by President Truman in 1948 (Levy, 7).
African Americans abandoned the cotton fields and small town of the South for the industrial cities of the North. In the last decade of the 19th century and in the first of the 20th, 200,000 African Americans came North. They came for a number of reasons: some came to sightsee and never returned South; some came to escape the violently racist attitudes of the South; some came to enjoy the economic opportunities the North afforded. Millions of jobs for men and women were made available by the expanding industrial economy. For many, a job even at the lowest of ranks in the factory provided an income higher than they could earn as sharecroppers or tenants farmers. No white ethnic group had to overcome the barriers of color that confronted the African American (Hartshorne, 119).
Most blacks left the South simple to be able to feed themselves and their families. Poor pay was the leading reason for migration, but there were some migrants who moved about simply for adventure or to see new places (Hartshorne, 121). The industrial cities were magnets. To farm workers in the South, the pay increase they would receive by working in a factory was twice sometimes as much as four times the pay they were receiving in the South. Also, the fear of mob violence and lynching were frequently alleged reasons for migrating, and Booker T. Washington had has that ‘”for every lynching that takes place…a score of colored people leave…for the city”’ (Hartshorne, 123).
The great migration coincided with the emergence of the US as a world power, which was symbolized by its major role in WWII. This second great war affected American life, epically those who were African American. It ...