What were the most significant factors that negatively impacted the lives of African Americans in the South between 1915 and 197
5? Which of these weighed most heavily on your migrant’s decision to leave the South? In your response, provide specific details from The Warmth of Other Suns and at least one other text you read in this section. Use your answers/summaries from the lessons in this section to help you. Be sure to state your claim clearly and provide supporting evidence/commentary as you develop your response.
As Wilkerson notes, America’s greatest domestic movement began around 1917 and ended in 1975, an epoch during which millions of black American citizens fled Southern towns and cities, with their elaborate and complicated tapestries of Jim Crow laws, for the relative freedoms of the north. Ironically, the early black migrants were converging on the interior Ellis Islands of the North and Midwest (New York, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, etc.), just as oppressed Europeans were converging on the same cities. Both were huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, with one critical difference: black migrants were already citizens. Theoretically, they possessed the freedoms their European brethren were seeking. Despite that, they were routinely pushed to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder where ABC -- Anybody But Colored -- was too often the rule.
