Question

What drove African American and Mexican migration north? How did the war facilitate these changes? How was this migration significant?

Answer 1

• During World War I, the nation witnessed important demographic changes because African Americans and Mexicans were fed with how they were being treated. African Americans and Mexicans moved to the north to seek better job opportunities.
• The shortage of labor associated with wartime deployments and industrial demands opened up industrial work in northern cities for southern African Americans. Despite challenges in the North, mostmigrants remained in the North and encouraged others to follow them to escape the profound poverty and unrelenting racism of the Jim Crow South.
• Also they moved to leave all the racism happening. With the area they were living there was not a lot of jobs available, so if you were a majority it made it that much harder. It was easier to find jobs in the north because the industrial work that was happening in the north.
• After people left the south and moved north, the African Americans and Mexicans would tell people back home how the north was. It was not perfect, but it was better than the circumstances they were living in. Job opportunities and less racism.
• Most of the available work in the cities was industrial, and many migrating African Americans faced the prospect of learning new trades, generally at lower rates of pay than European Americans received.
• The coming of the First World War drew still more African Americans to the nation's cities, both in the North and the South, as workers were attracted by new factory jobs. A university education came within reach for more and more African Americans, and considerable debate emerged about the role of the growing African American professional class.
• The most profound result of the move to the Northeast and West, however, was the shift in electoral power that it brought with it. For the first time since Reconstruction, a substantial number of African Americans were able to freely exercise their right to vote. This access to the tools of democracy soon resulted in the election of African American political leaders.