Reasons and Risks Involved on Great Migration

The Great Migration
Name
Institutional Affiliation
The Great Migration
Introduction
About six million African-Americans migrated to the urban Midwestern and northern cities from the rural southern states between 1910 and 1970 (Black, Sanders, E. Taylor, & L. Taylor, 2015). The Great Migration was an attempt to escape Jim Crow laws and racism that was rampant in southern states. Following the migration, several African-Americans secured positions in railroads, tanneries, and steel mills in western and northern states. They settled in urban regions such as Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Pittsburg during the first wave of the migration. At the beginning of the Second World War, African Americans also migrated to cities such as San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles. While the Fifteenth Amendment had given African Americans the right to vote, the white Southerners had legislations that denied African-Americans democratic rights. The constitution in Southern states had been rewritten by 1908 to deny African-Americans their voting rights through Grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and literacy tests (Coleman, 2015). The state laws remained effective until the establishment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which granted all Americans voting rights. Racial violence also led to the Great Migration where African-Americans were murdered by white Southerners, particularly by the Ku Klux Klan. This paper argues that although African Americans who left the Southern states had higher rates of incarceration and mortality, they had more economic opportunities and higher incomes.
Reasons for the Great Migration
The Jim Crow laws and disenfranchisement, racial violence, the Boll Weevil, the First World War and the demand for workers, and the Black Press are some of the reasons for the landmark event of the massive migration of African Americans from the Southern states to urban Northern states (Black et al., 2015). The laws in the Southern states, which denied African Americans the right to vote also enforced segregation. The white Southerners such as the Ku Klux Klan also subjected African Americans to acts of racial violence and murdered African Americans by bombing churches, lynching, and destroying their homes and property. The demand for workers between 1910 and 1920 declined as the boll weevil destroyed sharecroppers’ crops. This left many African Americans jobless and thus a massive migration from the Southern states. The northern and Midwestern factories experienced labor shortages as the United States entered the First World War. Millions of African Americans joined the army as agricultural work declined. This demand for workers and better pay, education, and housing resulted in many African Americans moving from the Southern states. Finally, the Black Press such as the Chicago Defender played an instrumental role in the migration (...