Essay on the great migration

The Great Migration of the Afro-Americans is a mass migration of about 6 million people from agricultural southern states to the industrial cities of the North, North-East and West of the United States, which took place in the period from the 1910s to the 1970s. This event is one of the central issues of the US black population’s history in the XX century.
Some historians distinguish two stages of this migration. During the first, which lasted from about 1910 to the 1930s, about 1. 6 million people moved to the North. The biggest part of the migrated Americans was originally from Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi and they were mostly farmers who searched a happier life and job. So they went to the industrial cities of the North, where the racism was not shown so openly. The second stage took place from the 1940s to the 1970s, during the country’s economic recovery during and after World War II. During this period more than 5 million of the Black people, mainly urban residents with higher education or higher professional qualification, moved to the states of the West, primarily in California.
The main result of this process was the change in the racial composition of the population of the Northern states. Isabel Wilkinson in her book, The Warmth of Other Suns, cites data that before the Great Migration in the northern states lived only 10% of the Black population of the country, after it this number increased to 47%. By 1970, when, according to the census, 80 percent of Afro-Americans lived in metropolitan areas, the Black America has become predominantly urban. The majority of Afro-Americans continues to live in the South, although its racial composition of the population has changed greatly. First of all, historians say about the end of the so-called ” Black belt” – states where Black people were the dominant racial group. By 1970, only one state (Mississippi) conserved the proportion of the Black over 30%.
In the North and West to settlers were opened much wider perspectives than in the South, where continued to act racist Jim Crow laws. At the new place to Afro-Americans was easier to demonstrate their abilities in addition they often lived in their communities. This led to the emergence of new African-American cultural centers and such a phenomenon as the Harlem Renaissance.
Mass migration of Afro-Americans caused conflicts on racial grounds. Initially, the migrants from the South were to fill the shortage of labor in the factories, which arose in connection with the First World War. In turn, the White people did not take them to the unions while the management of factories used them as strikebreakers. Fighting also conducted for housing and other social goods. This caused the first conflicts and racial riots.