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The Great Migration

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The Great Migration

What is the significance of the great migration and the rise and fall of the black bottom on

the residents of Detroit today? How might this affect working with certain populations?

The Great Migration refers to a massive movement of more than six million blacks in the

United States from the South to the city in the North until 1970. Harsh segregationist laws and

unsatisfactory economic conditions drove most African Americans from their homes (Gardner,

2020). They utilized the chance that came with the demand for industrial workers that emanated

from the World War I. In the Great Migration, the blacks started building a new place for their

wellbeing, and the actively tackled racial discrimination and social, political, and economic

issues to establish a black urban civilization that would exert a significant influence on the future

decades (Tabellini, 2020).

There are various causes of the Great Migration, but the two underlying ones are terrible

economic conditions, and violence and realism. The poor economic conditions in the South led

to the relocation of most African American families to the North. The industrial production

expansion and the additional mechanization of the agricultural sector, partly, triggered the

Second Migration after the end of the World War II. The attempts of the New Deal to rescue the

Southern agricultural sector in the 1930s typically flopped and forever changed the economic

conditions of the region. Furthermore, violence and realism in addition to the dire economic

situation, Southern African Americans decided to move North due to the constant racial violence

and the Jim Crow laws in the South. Whereas the South experienced some level of racism, the

South was unequivocally ruthless to the African Americans by contrast. The friends and families

that had previously migrated wrote to them in the South, detailing their remarkable new lives in
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the North and other opportunities such employment for African Americans. These factors made

the African Americans to migrate North in large numbers.

The Great Migration had a significant effect on Detroit. For instance, because of the

housing conflicts, most African Americans ended up establishing their cities in already created

cities, prompting the growth of a new urban, blacks’ culture. The most popular illustration was

the creation of Harlem in New York City, which was formerly an all-white region and by the id

1920s, it was already a home to hundreds of thousands of black.

That is why black’s experience in the Great Migration is a crucial theme in the artistic

movement referred to as Harlem Renaissance and later dabbed as the New Negro Movement that

had a remarkable effect in the culture of the area. The Great Migration kicked off a new age of

widespread political activism in the African American community, who following their

disenfranchisement in the South, got a new place for their people in the public life in the West

and Northern cities. The activism directly benefited the civil rights movement. The migration of

the African Americans decreased remarkably during the 1930s, as the nation sank into the Great

Depression, but emerged again during the WWII and the demand for production labor in the

wartime (Baharian, Barakatt, Gignoux, Shringarpure, Errington, Blot, & Gravel, 2016).

However, the African American soldiers, upon their return, noticed that the GI Bill did not

always promise equal benefits for all in the aftermath of the war.

Accordingly, the Great Migration had ended by 1970, but its effect was great. While

ninety percent of blacks lived in the South by 1900, and three out of every four blacks lived in

the farms, the South hosted about fifty percent of the population of African Americans in the US.

However, a mere twenty five percent lived in rural areas of the region.
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References

Baharian, S., Barakatt, M., Gignoux, C. R., Shringarpure, S., Errington, J., Blot, W. J., ... &

Gravel, S. (2016). The great migration and African-American genomic diversity. PLoS

genetics, 12(5), e1006059.

Gardner, J. R. (2020). Roy-model bounds on the wage effects of the Great Migration. The

Econometrics Journal, 23(1), 68-87.

Tabellini, M. (2020). Racial heterogeneity and local government finances: Evidence from the

great migration.