Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The Impact of Urbanization
Individualism in America
The Impact of Urbanization
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: The Impact of Urbanization
Progress and individualism are very much celebrated in American culture. Many people migrate to urban cities in the search of economic prosperity and to achieve the elusive “American Dream.” City life can often come as a shock to individuals not accustomed to a fast-paced lifestyle; conversely it can change a person. Such change can transform a person to lose the values and beliefs they were raised with which consequently attribute to losing the bonds that they once held with their families. This is not the case with the families portrayed in Carol Stack’s ethnography Call to Home. The book depicts Southern African-American families living in rural, North and South Carolina’s towns – which migrate to northern urban cities for economic opportunities – known as the Great Migration, and ultimately decide to return home. This essay explores the motives that caused Reverse Migration which include kin ties, structural and environmental violence endured, the role of the children, and the novel philosophies the diaspora brings with them upon returning home. The Great Migration to northern states subtly began in the 1920’s, during the Jim Crow era (J. Stevenson, personal communication, November 12, 2013). An economic boom in the 1940’s during World War II generated the second Great Migration as families in the South were facing structural and environmental violence (J. Stevenson, personal communication, November 18, 2013). Poor infrastructure, lack of opportunities and jobs and incessant poverty inspired migration towards the northern and northwestern part of the country (J. Stevenson, personal communication, November 12, 2013), however Stack’s ethnography primarily focuses on families and individuals that have migrated to northern stat... ... middle of paper ... ...ontinued the cycle of structural and environmental violence. Years after slavery ended African American communities continue to be subjugated by White folk into structures that are not allowing them to flourish. African American families should be allowed to call the South home while having access to all the resources they would otherwise have access to in urban communities, as it is their basic civil and human rights to do so. However, with the injustices they face it is wonderful that the familial bonds keeps the communities stabilized and know that they can count on each other whether they are blood or fictive kin. Works Cited Stack, C. (1996). Call to home: African Americans reclaim the rural south. New York, NY: BasicBooks. Toepke, A. & Serrano, A. (Producer/Directors). (1998). The language you cry in [DVD]. Sierra Leone/Spain: California Newsreel.
To wrap it up, African Americans lived an unfair past in the south, such as Alabama, during the 1930s because of discrimination and the misleading thoughts towards them. The Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow Laws and the way they were generally treated in southern states all exemplify this merciless time period of the behavior towards them. They were not given the same respect, impression, and prospect as the rest of the citizens of America, and instead they were tortured. Therefore, one group should never be singled out and should be given the same first intuition as the rest of the people, and should never be judged by color, but instead by character.
Eric Arnesen’s book, Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents, successfully portrays the struggles of early life for African Americans as well as why they migrated to the north in the years of World War I. During the first world war, the lives of as many as 500,000 African Americans changed dramatically as southern blacks migrated to the north. The migration escalated a shift in the population from extremely rural people to urban people in the years following the second world war. Those who lived in the south, particularly black southerners, had many reasons for why they wanted to move to the north. Due to the failure of Reconstruction, which was supposed to re-build the South after the Union victory and grant slaves
The author skirts around the central issue of racism by calling it a “class struggle” within the white population of Boston during the 1960s and 1970s. Formisano discuses the phenomenon known as “white flight”, where great numbers of white families left the cities for the suburbs. This was not only for a better lifestyle, but a way to distance themselves from the African Americans, who settled in northern urban areas following the second Great Migration.
What has been described here has kept African Americans proud of where they came from and how they can overcome any problem that they are faced with. The phrase “Strength in numbers” comes to mind when reading what they had to endure especially the families of the four little girls that died in the devastating bombing of the 16th street church. They will always be remembered and missed dearly.
...n the trying time of the Great Migration. Students in particular can study this story and employ its principles to their other courses. Traditional character analysis would prove ineffective with this non-fiction because the people in this book are real; they are our ancestors. Isabel Wilkerson utilized varied scopes and extensive amounts of research to communicate a sense of reality that lifted the characters off the page. While she concentrated on three specifically, each of them served as an example of someone who left the south during different decades and with different inspirations. This unintentional mass migration has drastically changed and significantly improved society, our mindset, and our economics. This profound and influential book reveals history in addition to propelling the reader into a world that was once very different than the one we know today.
Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet explores the difficulties faced by blacks in America before, during, and after the civil war. He begins in the early eighteen-sixties with slaves on the cusp of freedom, and concludes in the early nineteen-hundreds with the occurrence of the Great Migration. Hahn, in focusing in on the rural south, strives to share the thought that African Americans revealed the complexity in the relationship between labor and politics in America. He believes that in their struggles to define and understand themselves, they also influenced greatly the development of a new nation.
The Great Migration was the movement of two million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Midwest, Northeast and West between 1910 and 1940. In 1900, about ninety percent of African Americans resided in formed slave holding states in the South. Beginning in 1910, the African American population increased by nearly twenty percent in Northern states, mostly in the biggest cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Cleveland. African Americans left the rural south because they believed they could escape the discrimination and racial segregation of Jim Crow laws by seeking refuge in the North. Some examples of Jim Crow laws include the segregation of public schools, public places and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants and drinking fountains for whites and blacks (“The History of Jim Crow). In addition, economic depression due to the boll weevil infestation of Southern cotton fields in the late 1910s and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 forced many sharecroppers to look for other emplo...
Starting in 1914, an estimate 500,000 black southerners packed their bags and migrated to the North which became known as the Great ...
The author, Isabel Wilkerson, recounts attending the Club of Los Angeles as Doctor Foster’s guest in 1996. Attending the meeting were other people from Monroe Louisiana who came to California around the same time Doctor Foster had. Mrs. Wilkerson explains to the group her work on the Great Migration. “They listen[ed] without emotion or much in the way of comment, not seeing exactly what the Migration has to do them, even though they had all been right in the middle of it” (Wilkerson, 2010, p. 478).
The culture was highly influenced but it also influenced the american culture as a whole. The United states and the African American community has had a plentiful of conflicts in the past as well as the present. Historical accounts of slavery and segregation have caused a riff between a race and a country. From the justice system to the education system, african americans have always been given the short end of the stick. In terms of justice, the united states is seen as a prison country. According to naacp.org “Today, the US is 5% of the World population and has 25% of world prisoners.” the united states is no stranger to prisons. Yet, the overwhelming amount of african american youths and people in general is eye opening. “African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population”(naacp) and “Nationwide, African-Americans represent 26% of juvenile arrests, 44% of youth who are detained, 46% of the youth who are judicially waived to criminal court, and 58% of the youth admitted to state prisons (Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice). Socially, times have improved for the african american community. Yet, statistics draw attention to a bigger picture. The black power movement and the symbol of the black fist serve a purpose. The purpose is to never forget where a people has come from and how far is left to go. The first is an engine that never stops, it fuels the fire of many americans who have felt the weight of oppression and who still feel it in the 21st
As the world lays Nelson “Madiba” Mandela to rest, one cannot help thinking about the oppressive system of Apartheid in South Africa and its American counterpart of segregation in the South. Segregation was America’s Apartheid. Nowhere was it practiced with such harshness as in Mississippi. After the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction, Mississippi and the other Southern states were allowed to establish Black Codes which restricted the freedoms and liberties of African-Americans in the South. This group of laws included restrictions on things like “curfews, vagrancy, labor contracts, women’s rights, and land restrictions” (NLR -United States Part A , 7). Jim Crow Laws followed where the Black Codes left off. Poll taxes and literacy tests kept African-Americans from voting. Often violence was used to enforce segregation and White rule in Mississippi with hundreds of African-Americans dying do to lynching and other aggression. African-Americans fought for many decades in Mississippi to end segregation and attain equal rights in the South with martyrs like Medgar Evers lea...
The Great Migration was a time where more then 6 million African Americans migrated North of the United States during 1910-1920. The Northern Parts of the United States, where African Americans mainly moved to was Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia and Cleveland. They migrated because of the work on railroads and the labor movement in factories. They wanted a better life style and felt that by moving across the United States, they would live in better living conditions and have more job opportunities. Not only did they chose to migrate for a better lifestyle but they were also forced out of their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregation laws. They were forced to work in poor working conditions and compete for
During this time, the South was a hostile place to live for the ninety-percent of the United States’ African-American population that lived there. As a result of racism and added allure of factory jobs in the North, millions of blacks began to migrate to the North in what would be later known as “The Great Migration”. The finality of the war brought the return of the veterans to find their jobs taken by women, African-Americans, and migrants. With their spouse’s home, many women quit their jobs to start families as they resumed their maternal duties, this left only the African-American men, migrants, women remaining in the workforce, and veterans in their place. The result, a diverse workforce where there was once before a nearly uniform white male workforce. Jim-Crow segregation followed the idealistic African-Americans from the South as housing would not be sold or rented to blacks in certain areas of the
Diversity, we define this term today as one of our nation’s most dynamic characteristics in American history. The United States thrives through the means of diversity. However, diversity has not always been a positive component in America; in fact, it took many years for our nation to become accustomed to this broad variety of mixed cultures and social groups. One of the leading groups that were most commonly affected by this, were African American citizens, who were victimized because of their color and race. It wasn’t easy being an African American, back then they had to fight in order to achieve where they are today, from slavery and discrimination, there was a very slim chance of hope for freedom or even citizenship. This longing for hope began to shift around the 1950’s during the Civil Rights Movement, where discrimination still took place yet, it is the time when African Americans started to defend their rights and honor to become freemen like every other citizen of the United States. African Americans were beginning to gain recognition after the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, which declared all people born natural in the United States and included the slaves that were previously declared free. However, this didn’t prevent the people from disputing against the constitutional law, especially the people in the South who continued to retaliate against African Americans and the idea of integration in white schools. Integration in white schools played a major role in the battle for Civil Rights in the South, upon the coming of independence for all African American people in the United States after a series of tribulations and loss of hope.
Slavery and segregation has resulted in disorganized and unstable African American families, but throughout the centuries, these families have evolved by becoming closer and much more tight knit by progressing in socioeconomic status with the help of the civil rights movement.