Great numbers of Black Southerners emigrated to the cities of the North during the Twenties and the Thirties. The new lives of these urban African-Americans in the industrial North were radically different from those they had led in the Agrarian South. On the surface, they confronted much less prejudice. What were the differences in racial attitudes between the two cultures? Was the prejudice of the North less real because it was better hidden?


Black Americans moved from South to North during World War I and the decade that followed changed forever black America's economic, political, social, and cultural lives. The Great Migration was, up to that point, the largest voluntary internal movement of black people ever seen.The migration continued roughly the for the next twenty years. By 1970, about five million African Americans had made the journey, and the geographic map of black America had fundamentally changed. Black Southerners pulled up stakes and headed north. Both their places of origin and destination shifted from earlier patterns.I believe that
they also moved in order to maintain safe haven from anti-abolitionists.

 While the Great Migration helped educated African Americans obtain jobs, eventually enabling a measure of class mobility, the migrants encountered significant forms of discrimination. It wasn't like the worse of the South but it was surely hard for them to get jobs and even a fair education.

In many ways the North was less prejudice. Slavery had just been nullified from the South. So in many ways whites may have thought they still had control over the blacks no matter what the constitution might have said.

Was the prejudice the North less real because it was better hidden? In many ways I thought that the North would be a new beginning for the African Americans who emigrated.Not necessarily because the prejudice was hidden but maybe because the different opportunities they had. For instance, better jobs, education, land.

African- Americans wanted nothing more than the so called AMERICAN DREAM. I assume that moving to the North would better everything.