If I were an African-American migrant
Hi Everyone,
If I were an African-American migrant from the south and a former sharecropper, several things could have surprised me if on arrival in Chicago. However, the major surprise would have been the segregation between whites and blacks. In my mind moving to Chicago meant living a big city life where I would get a job with a good wage, a home with running water, and basic freedoms denied to blacks in the South (Kelly & Lewis, 2005). Therefore, I would have been surprised to find crowded tenement housing, limited educational opportunities, violence, discrimination, indifference from city government, and segregation. Segregation meant the enforcement of ethnicity and cultural differences whereby some of the people were seen as inferior to others. The legalization meant that African American migrants would continue finding it hard to get ahead in life. In Chicago, African Americans were segregated into ghettos, and those who chose urban life faced new obstacles (Grossman, 2005). It is even more surprising that as a new migrant, I would encounter new social challenges from the black establishments who would look down on my “country” manners. This would be surprising because, based on advertisements and stories, Chicago was one of the cities where African Americans hoped for a better life in terms of civil and economic opportunities. It was supposed to be the “promised land.”
References
Grossman, J. (2005). Great Migration. Encyclopedia of Chicago, 20.
Kelley, R. D. G., & Lewis, E. (Eds.). (2005). To make our world anew: Volume I: a history of African Americans to 1880. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com