The Great Migration

The Great Migration is the relocation of six million of African American from the rural South to the cities of the North from 1916 to 1970.

In 1919, 1 million of African American had left the South. As we saw previously, 6 million of African Americans left the South to go to North to have better conditions of life. There are multiple reasons why they migrated to the North.

• One of the reasons is to escape the discrimination and the harsh segregation which occurred because of the Jim Crow’s law “equal but separated”. Those laws represent the separation of black people and white people in public spaces, for example in restaurants, in the bus.

• Another reason why African American left the South is also to find a better job, indeed, black people in the South didn’t had much opportunity for their jobs, they were sharecroppers or domestic servants and the wages were very low, by going to the North, they hoped to find a better job with a better wage. Furthermore, after World War One, there was a shortage of industrial labourers and black people saw it as a chance to be recruited in the North. In the South, black people were working in horrible conditions, the North appeared like a solution to their problems and a way to have a better life with better conditions for their families.

For some people, migration to the North worked but for some other it didn’t. The life after the migration was not the one they expected. Some black people were integrated and some others not. This period was a huge change of culture, they lived in the rural part of the country and going to the North made them live in the urban part of the United States. They left behind them the sharecropping system and their cultural roots such as the sense of the community which doesn’t exist in big cities in the North.

Because they were a million who went to the North, the conditions of life were not what they imagined, they had poor working condition and they had to be in competition to find a living space. They also thought that racism and discrimination would have been less present but it wasn’t. Indeed, white owners of houses didn’t want to sell them to black people. Even if racism was not legalized in the North, it was still present.

For some other black people, the migration was a success. They succeeded in life like C.J. Walker, a black woman born in 1867, she went to the North and she managed to make herself rich. Indeed, she built a cosmetic empire and she became millionaire. In fact, she is the first female who won money by her own.

So we can say that the migration of African American in the North was a complicated challenge and the truth of the life in the cities was different in the way of living but quite similar in terms of discrimination.

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