Second Great Migration Essay

Around War World II, a great population of working males in the north had to leave for war leaving an empty working market. African Americans in the south took this as an opportunity to escape their oppression. As a result, the Second Great Migration occurred, where thousands of black citizens took their families to the north to fill in the gaps where the working white males had left. In their relocation they faced systematic racism that still influences the way the modern-day inner city functions. To elaborate, the main reason for the migration was economic based. In the south many black families suffered with sharecropping, where they never could get out of debt or own land. They were essentially still servants to the white race with

Langston Hughes, from The Chicago Defender, interviews a black man who runs into a cop at night, and the exchange between the two sums up the relationship perfectly. There 's a certain tension between white cops and black citizens that has continued to progress till this day. There are no "friendly word(s)", as the man puts it, between the officials designed to protect, and minorities. Police officers were trained to be discriminatory in areas like Harlem, purposely sent to these highly black , populated areas to create uneasiness or stress. This type of prejudices still exists today and is becoming more pronounced with video recordings of it

With the lack of a white labor market, black males took these working jobs to build or work in factories. Often these jobs were quite dangerous and there were no option of moving up in management. It was a common problem that white higher officials saw black citizens as too dumb to work more complicated jobs. This type of job discrimination still carries on today where it 's extremely difficult to move up to higher job positions. Often, white trainees would get promoted over their black mentors, simply because they were white. Large northern cities hold the economic wealth of America, and it 's disheartening to see that the majority of management positions are held by white males and continue to be. Generally, the Second Great Migration proved to be an impactful event in American history that shifted the balanced of race in northern cities. There are both positive and negative outcomes from this transition that are directly related to the discrimination faced by minorities in American society. As more awareness reaches the public, hopefully these outdated perceptions can be altered to benefit those who have been restricted from obtaining greater