Factors Affecting The United States - 4403 Words

FINAL PAPER #1 1. What factors combined to attract great numbers of people to American cities? What were the characteristics of these migrants? How did these migrants change once they were in the United States? How did they change America, cities or otherwise? To put this in perspective, an observant and inquisitive fifth grade once asked her mother: Why does it seem as though Blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, and Europeans from Italy and Poland like living in cities? The racial composition cities in the United States underwent a major changes that might be considered as decisive shortly after World War I. Ayer has indicated that demographers typically distinguish two modes of living: urban and rural. In plainer language, people live in the city†¦show more content†¦For example, in the 1920s, Chicago s urban black population grew by 148 percent; Cleveland s by 307 percent; Detroit s by 611 percent. (Cengage MindTap, n.p.). A number of reasons brought about the movement of African Americans to northern cities from the south. First and perhaps a clear reason is the African American annoyance of Jim Crow disfranchising system in the South. Secondly, a large numbers of African Americans were forced to leave their homes and families in the south in their search for a better life following the depressed cotton market as well as the natural disasters that reduced many black land-owner to sharecropping or tenant farmers trapped in vicious cycle of indebtedness. From a positive perspective, the massive military conscription that occurred during WWI caused labor shortages, particularly in the northern region of the United States. These labor shortages appeared to be an opportunity that offered African American for employment in steel, shipbuilding, and automotive industries, meat packing factories, and also in plants that specialized in ammunition production (Cengage MindTap, n.p.). Many cities adopted residential segregation ordinances such that disallowed blacks to establish residence in predominantly white neighborhoods. To that end, housing issues became a contentious matter between blacks and whites throughout and beyond the Great Immigration era. Although the U.S. Supreme Court made a