Migration of Southern Blacks to Chicago

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 b

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tegration, but merely equal opportunity and access. The author suggests that some workplace access was designed by industrialists to keep workers in conflict---in this case through race. Unions remained in the hands of whites and operated for whites' benefit. For that reason, unions were distrusted by the migrants. Blacks also advanced in education, employment and politics, but these early advances were not "translated into an ongoing process leading to full participation in the city's economic or political life" (265). The author concludes that the dreams embodied in the Great Migration eventually collapsed under the weight of continued racial oppression and the failure of industrial capitalism to distribute its prosperity as broadly as the migrants had expected. The promise of the movement had required a freedom that could not be attained by crossing the Mason-Dixon line, finding a job in a factory, entering a voting booth, or going to school (265). Bibliography Grossman, James R. Land of Hope. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Elaine Tyler May, in her work Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, writes that Americans in this era were politically and socially conservative, family- and ho
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