Immigrant Identities

African Americans moved out to escape the miserable conditions in the South that included low wages, racism and lynching. By contrast, in the backdrop of the growth of industries there was an acute shortage of the labor in the North. So the movement was spurred to seek better education for their children and more lucrative employment for themselves. Before the Civil War, blacks were owned as slaves and worked the cotton fields of the southern plantations. Blacks also left the South because of racism and a general lack of rights. The passing of Jim Crow Laws, which segregated blacks and whites, terrorized the blacks. Despite the fact that black migrants enjoyed significantly greater freedom in the North, life for the area’s new residents was far from easy.

In many instances, blacks were hired as scab labor. They didn’t have the opportunity to work in the factories while the European immigrants had established themselves well of. Low wages and welfare forced many black immigrants to have fewer children than the eastern Europeans because they couldn’t afford to take care of another human being. “Ida Mae, for example, bore no more children after the one she carried in her belly from Mississippi at the age of twenty-five, despite the many fertile years she spent in the North. She and her husband could not afford another mouth to feed” (418). The number of fertility dropped in black women due to this reason. The numbers compared to the Europeans for fertility were much lower in black women.

Due to the large growth of the black population in the Northern cities, there was an increasing competition amongst the migrants for employment