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Migration of Southern Blacks to Chicago

James R. Grossman, in Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration, explores and analyzes "The Great Migration" of Southern blacks to Northern cities---specifically Chicago in this case---which took place during and after World War I. Grossman says that Chicago hardly fulfilled the high hopes of blacks, but they remained to live and work there because conditions in the South were even worse.

One of the reasons that this migration took place is that the influx of immigrants from Europe was brought to an end with the start of World War I. These immigrants had served as cheap labor before World War I. With European immigration cut off, businesses in Chicago sought to draw fresh labor from the ranks of Southern blacks: "Catalyzed in early 1916 by recruiters from northern railroads suffering from the wartime labor shortage, the Great Migration soon generated its own momentum" (3). One and a half million Southern blacks migrated to the North in this period. The special lure of Chicago was that city's meatpacking houses.

What makes Grossman's book special is that it relies largely on the accounts of the migrants themselves. The book is important for that reason, and also because it documents the beginning of a "crucial transition in the history of Afro-Americans, American cities, and the American working class" (5). The migration altered the economics and social relations of both North and South.

Grossman explores the central role of the perceptions of blacks in this process. The first part of the book analyzes the lives and thoughts of blacks as they heard about the opportunities in the North, as they chose to migrate North, and as they established new lives in the North. In this section Grossman shows how the perceptions and expectations of blacks shaped their experiences in the North.

The second part of the book focuses specifically on black life in Chicago, and the significance of the blacks' "reint...

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Migration of Southern Blacks to Chicago. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 18:33, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701659.html