Black Migration from the South to the North
James Baldwin stated in Fifth Avenue Uptown, “I once tried to describe to a very well known American intellectual the conditions among Negroes in the South. My recital disturbed him and made him indignant; and he asked me in perfect innocence, “Why don’t all the Negroes in the South move North?” I tried to explain what has happened, unfailingly, whenever a significant body of Negroes move North. They do not escape Jim Crow [legal segregation]; they merely encounter another, not-less-deadly variety. They do not move to Chicago, they move to the South Side: they do not move to New York, they move to Harlem. The pressure within the ghetto causes the ghetto walls to expand, and this expansion is always violent….. One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.” Throughout the 20th century, African-Americans migrated from the plantations of the South, to the industrialized cities of the North. The reasons for the migration are plenty, and the consequences of th
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Approximate Word count = 2643
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)
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