Black Protest
...f opportunity in the form of better education, better wages, and greater political freedom. There were also many factors in The Great Migration. These included oppressive Jim Crow laws and the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the southern states, and the desire to escape the sharecropping method of subsistence agriculture in the south. Sharecropping is often described as a system of agriculture that produced a poverty so debilitating it unmasked all pretensions of freedom. W.E.B. Du Bois, in his article The Migration of Negroes, states three reasons why the Negroes left the South for the North. He states, as to reason of the migration, undoubtedly, the immediate cause was economic, and the movement began because of floods in middle Alabama and Mississippi and because the latest devastation of the boil weevil came in these same districts. A second economic cause was the cutting off of immigration from Europe to the North and the consequently widespread demand for common labor. The third reason has been outbreaks of mob violence in northern and southwestern Georgia and in western South Carolina. Migration was a way out for most African-Americans. They could start over again and make a better life for themselves and their family. But not everyone saw migration as a great opportunity. Percy H. Stone wrote, The Negro Migration, where he states that the race problem, thought for so long to be confined to the South, will be spread; and the responsibility for our care and treatment, ours being a backward race, will have more shoulders on which to rest. He believed that the Black Southerners could stay in the South because that was their home. Stone states, “we leave the soil to which we Eric 3 seem specially adapted and the section that now affords us an opportunity to build up institutions reflecting credit on ourselves; and in our haste to grab the industrial opportunities of other sections we defeat our own purpose, because our economic struggle is not in itself an end, but a means to a more perfect home life and social life.” White Southerners were also displeased with the Negro Migration. In Mary DeBardeleben’s, The Negro Exodus: A southern Woman’s View, she wanted to know why is the Negro dissatisfied? What can we do to keep them in the South? White Southerners could not afford to lose the Negroes to migration. They cannot afford to let them go, because Negroes meant so much financially to the white Southerners. DeBardeleben states, “ He works for little: his upkeep costs us little, for we can house him in any kind of shack, and make him pay us well for that; we do not have to be careful of his living conditions; he is good-natured, long-suffering, and if he should happen to give us trouble we can cope with that and the law will uphold us in anything we do.” The Negroes were viewed as cheap labor and the Whites would not gain from this migration, so, naturally they opposed it. Despite the jobs and housing available in the North, the challenges of living in an urban environment were daunting for many of the new migrants. The great mistake that African-Americans made in their movement to the North was to go without a definite place and no definite employment in sight. Also, African-American who moved to the North expected things to be different from the South. There will be considerable disappointment if they think they will not encounter prejudice in the North. The low-wage jobs that they found in urban areas forced them to live in cramped low-rent Eric 4 districts, which became black ghettos. The Great Migration also sharp...