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 b

Related Essays

CHANGING CULTURAL RULE SYSTEMS AND RACE RELATIONS .... responded hostilely to the growing migration of blacks .... In the 1880s, Southern state governments passed Jim .... Separate facilities for blacks were vastly inferior .... (1828 7 )

Nicholas Lemann and Black Migration .... people who took part in the migration and whose .... general history of black migrants, the Southern economy, and .... ignored the racial prejudices that held blacks back .... (2157 9 )

Homelessness in American History .... as in Harlan County, Ky., New York, Portland, Ore., Chicago, Knoxville, Tenn .... a concept borne out during the World War II migration of southern blacks to the .... (3968 16 )

Slaves .... the period of the first great migration (1915-1920 .... Louis in 1917 and Chicago in 1919 ...A new .... have informed their newly freed Southern blacks, "Technical freedom .... (3663 15 )

Racial Oppression .... hand, was part of the vast migration of Southern .... in him by the differences between Southern and Northern .... reflected the anger and impatience of blacks at [the .... (1670 7 )

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

Category: History - M