The Great Black Migration

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African Americans migrated from the southern states to northern and western states in large numbers between 1910 and 1918. They were escaping social, economic and political systems in the southern states that enforced the enforced the separation of the races. African American hardships did not end with emancipation proclamation. Soon after slavery was abolished, the sharecropping system was established in order to keep African Americans from progressing economically. African Americans grew tired of not making social nor economic strides in the early 19th century which pushed one and half million African Americans to move out of their homes in southern states. A newspaper article from the New York Times tried to make a comparison between the lives of a Southern versus a Northern African Americans. Northern African Americans had to navigate systematic racism through deriving from housing, schools, and the welfare system. The article talks about the overwhelming amount of black people migrating North and these cities did not have the resources to properly accommodate the migrants into their city’s lives. By the 1920s however, New York’s Harlem had become an intimate part of New York City and a hub for black art and black identity (Jeffrey B. Ferguson, 2007, 46-55).