Migration and Disappointment.

Anti-segregation race riots in Chicago, Knoxville, Omaha, and Washington, D.C., in 1919 indicated the emergence of a more militant "New Negro" who would dare to pursue economic opportunities and a better life. During the 1920s one million African Americans left the South for northern cities to follow the promise of better jobs. They continued to be disappointed: only the most precarious, dirtiest industrial jobs were opened to black men, and black women were excluded entirely from industrial work and left with only traditional domestic labor.

New Black Communities.

Migration north was traumatic, but black families developed ways to cope with their difficulties. Blacks, like immigrant groups, used chain migration: one member of a family moving alone to a new location, getting a job, and then helping others of his family to join him. In northern cities blacks quickly re-created...