Because the previous educator did such an outstanding job in outlining the first part of your question, I'll focus on the second part and more specifically address how the North both met the expectations of black migrants and how migrants were disappointed.
I strongly recommend Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, not only for general historical facts about the Great Migration—both waves, which include that which occurred at the beginning of the twentieth-century and the other after the First World War—but also for personal stories about how people's lives changed and remained the same in Northern cities. I'll be drawing from that book with the examples provided here.
As the previous educator mentioned, men and some women found the factory jobs they sought in northern cities, but were unprepared for the hostility they experienced from white workers. Some companies did not...
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hire black workers at all—not always because they did not want to, but sometimes because white workers would not tolerate it. White workers would either make conditions for black workers so intolerable that black people were forced to quit, or they would threaten to walk out. At a steel mill in Pittsburgh, white workers remained only on the condition that black workers would have separate quarters.
Many black workers arrived in the North and found that, in addition to the white hostility they had known in the South, the nature of the work had not changed much from the mind-numbing agricultural labor to which they were limited in the South. Now, instead of picking cotton, they were "turning a lever or twisting a widget or stoking a flame" over and over again. Most black migrants were hired for menial jobs, working as janitors, for instance, or in hard-labor jobs that many whites would not take, such as coal mining or ditch digging.
Black women often could only find work as domestic laborers. Jobs on assembly lines or working as elevator operators or office clerks were frequently closed to them, well into the 1930s. As domestics, they faced similar forms of exploitation that they had experienced in the South. Some white housewives turned back the hands of clocks to avoid paying domestics for the hours they had actually worked. According to Wilkerson, "[o]ne housewife ordered a domestic to eat her lunch out of the pet's bowl, not wanting the help to eat from the same dishes as the family."
Other domestics faced sexual misconduct from white men, just as they had in the South. Only now, some domestics might have felt that they could refuse demands for sex without facing violence or an absence of legal recourse.
More than 6 million African Americans left the South during the Great Migration of the early twentieth century. Although some of those men and women went to the Midwest and West, most went north to find work in the burgeoning factory and railroad industries. Some pros of migration included:
- Higher wages. At the beginning of the Great Migration, African Americans could make as much as 300% more in the North than in the South.
- Freedom from oppression. The Jim Crow laws institutionalized racism in the post-Civil War South and prevented African Americans from achieving equality under the law.
- Safety. White supremacists such as the Ku Klux Klan caused Southern African Americans to live in fear of violent actions such as lynchings.
However, migrating to the North was now wholly beneficial. Some cons included:
- Poor working conditions.
- Rising rents as increasing numbers of African Americans migrated to northern cities.
- Racial tensions. Though not as violent as their southern counterparts, many northerns harbored racist tendencies and were disturbed by the huge influx of African American immigrants.
As you can see, the African Americans who moved north found higher-paying jobs and some increased freedom, but they were also disappointed to continue to experience racism as they had in the South.
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