The Great Migration and The Harlem Renaissance - Research Paper Example

The Southern agricultural economy meant that African American farmers had to borrow from wealthy white men in order to sow and harvest. The accruing interest made it impossible for the black man to fully enjoy the toils of his hard work. Other African Americans who worked as farmhands were paid just enough to afford them through every day without a sustainable future. The rural South offered little other choices for the African Americans who were poorly educated, socially ostracized and stuck in a vicious cycle of poverty.

Education remained a distant dream for the African Americans in the South given the cost of education. The only real choice left for millions of African Americans in the South was to emigrate to the North. The North offered better employment opportunities in factories and services based businesses. In addition, the African Americans in the North were offered better opportunities for education and, hence, a means of social mobility. Greater social respect also played its part in convincing millions of African Americans to emigrate to the North.

The First World War also played an important role in forcing millions of African Americans to the doors of factories. The onset of the war had meant that labor was in short supply in the Northern urban centers. In order to replenish labor supplies, African Americans from the South moved to industrial centers such as Detroit where they were in large demand. The oppressive Jim Crow regime in the South along with the Ku Klax Klan’s exploits also forced a large number of African Americans to find better social living conditions.

The wave of emigration from the rural South to the urban North began in the early twentieth century and persisted well into the third quarter of the twentieth century. The migration of African Americans by the millions into the cities is better known as the Great Migration. The first wave of the Great Migration forced some 1.6 million African Americans to move from the rural South to the more urbanized areas. This wave can be traced from the 1910s to the 1930s where the African Americans moved to the urban centers in the North and the mid-West (Arnesen 15).

As a consequence of the Great Migration, the outlook of major urban centers in the United States began to change. The influx of new industrial workers in industrial urban centers meant that the composition of industrial workers began to change. Housing became a large problem since the new workers did not have a purpose to built housing facilities. The new emigrants were confined to their own territories such as the Bronx in New York. The social exclusivity of the neighborhoods in these urban centers provided rich grounds for a new cultural transformation.

This move was catalyzed by the onset of education in these new neighborhoods. The new wave of immigrants provided the human resources as well as the audience required for a new cultural infusion (Andrews, Foster and Harris 103).