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The Great Migration lead to many new opportunities for the African Americans in the North. White people were not very accepting with the new change of African Americans migrating up North. Particularly, the white working class.The white working class felt threatened by African Americans coming into their space and taking their jobs, and land.There was major tension between “whites” and “blacks”. “ On July 27, 1919, a 17-year-old African-American boy named Eugene Williams was swimming with friends in Lake Michigan when he crossed the unofficial barrier (located at 29th Street) between the city’s “white” and “black” beaches. A group of white men threw stones at Williams, hitting him, and he drowned. When police officers arrived on the scene, they refused to arrest the white man whom black eyewitnesses pointed to as the responsible party. Angry crowds began to gather on the beach, and reports of the incident–many distorted or exaggerated–spread quickly.” Many people were injured and homeless after this. These were known as race riots. The Africans still had it better in the North by many means. However, The New York times pointed fingers at the Africans telling them that there is a better life for them if they move to the North and that’s where the Africans decided to listen and migrate.

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On July 27, 1919, an African-American teenager drowned in Lake Michigan after violating the unofficial segregation of Chicago's beaches and being stoned by a group of white youths. His death, and the police's refusal to arrest the white man whom eyewitnesses identified as causing it, sparked a week of rioting between gangs of black and white Chicagoans, concentrated on the South Side neighborhood surrounding the stockyards. When the riots ended on August 3, 15 whites and 23 blacks had been killed and more than 500 people injured; an additional 1,000 black families had lost their homes when they were torched by rioters.

Growing Racial Tensions

The "Red Summer" of 1919 marked the culmination of steadily growing tensions surrounding the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North that took place during World War I. When the war ended in late 1918, thousands of servicemen returned home from fighting in Europe to find that their jobs in factories, warehouses and mills had been filled by newly arrived Southern blacks or immigrants. Amid financial insecurity, racial and ethnic prejudices ran rampant. Meanwhile, African-American veterans who had risked their lives fighting for the causes of freedom and democracy found themselves denied basic rights such as adequate housing and equality under the law, leading them to become increasingly militant.

Did you know? In the summer of 1919, Richard J. Daley, who served as Chicago's powerful mayor from 1955 until his death in 1976, was a 17-year-old member of an Irish-American organization called the Hamburg Athletic Club. Though an investigation later identified the club among the instigators of the rioting, Daley and his supporters never admitted that he participated in the violence.

In this fraught atmosphere, the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan organization revived its violent activities in the South, including 64 lynchings in 1918 and 83 in 1919. In the summer of 1919, race riots would break out in Washington, D.C.; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Phillips County, Arkansas; Omaha, Nebraska and-most dramatically- Chicago. The city's African-American population had increased from 44,000 in 1909 to more than 100,000 as of 1919. Competition for jobs in the city's stockyards was particularly intense, pitting African Americans against whites (both native-born and immigrants). Tensions ran highest on the city's South Side, where the great majority of black residents lived, many of them in old, dilapidated housing and without adequate services.

A Drowning in Lake Michigan

On July 27, 1919, a 17-year-old African-American boy named Eugene Williams was swimming with friends in Lake Michigan when he crossed the unofficial barrier (located at 29th Street) between the city's "white" and "black" beaches. A group of white men threw stones at Williams, hitting him, and he drowned. When police officers arrived on the scene, they refused to arrest the white man whom black eyewitnesses pointed to as the responsible party. Angry crowds began to gather on the beach, and reports of the incident-many distorted or exaggerated-spread quickly.

Violence soon broke out between gangs and mobs of black and white, concentrated in the South Side neighborhood surrounding the stockyards. After police were unable to quell the riots, the state militia was called in on the fourth day, but the fighting continued until August 3. Shootings, beatings and arson attacks eventually left 15 whites and 23 blacks dead, and more than 500 more people (around 60 percent black) injured. An additional 1,000 black families were left homeless after rioters torched their residences.

Lasting Impact

In the aftermath of the rioting, some suggested implementing zoning laws to formally segregate housing in Chicago, or restrictions preventing blacks from working alongside whites in the stockyards and other industries. Such measures were rejected by African-American and liberal white voters, however. City officials instead organized the Chicago Commission on Race Relations to look into the root causes of the riots and find ways to combat them. The commission, which included six white men and six black, suggested several key issues -including competition for jobs, inadequate housing options for blacks, inconsistent law enforcement and pervasive racial discrimination-but improvement in these areas would be slow in the years to come.

President Woodrow Wilson publicly blamed whites for being the instigators of race-related riots in both Chicago and Washington, D.C., and introduced efforts to foster racial harmony, including voluntary organizations and congressional legislation. In addition to drawing attention to the growing tensions in America's urban centers, the riots in Chicago and other cities in the summer of 1919 marked the beginning of a growing willingness among African Americans to fight for their rights in the face of oppression and injustice.

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On July 27, 1919, an African-American teenager drowned in Lake Michigan after violating the unofficial segregation of Chicago's beaches and being stoned by a group of white youths. His death, and the police's refusal to arrest the white man whom eyewitnesses identified as causing it, sparked a week of rioting between gangs of black and white Chicagoans, concentrated on the South Side neighborhood surrounding the stockyards.

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The following graph shows the percentage of people in Georgia that were African American from 1800 to 2010. The statistics were compiled using data from census.gov with regards to Georgia and resident population counts over the years found here: https://www.census.gov/2010census/data/apportionment-pop-text.php
As you can see, in the early 1800s, Georgia had the highest percent population of African Americans (although they were enslaved. After the Civil War, African Americans moved elsewhere gradually to better conditions, away from the land that they and their people were forced to lives of labor, before and after the war. As you can see, the lowest point of black population in Georgia was in 1930, when the makeup of Georgia citizens were only 0.4% African American. The Great Migration would change Georgia's economy and scar it for the duration of the Great Depression.

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Conditions in the South were unfavorable to black people to say the least. Negative attitudes and old prejudice that survived the Civil War continued to plague the South. It is no surprise that African Americans would run to greener pastures as soon as possible. At the turn of the 20th century,  black citizens of the South would do exactly that.
The video below from the American Social History Project (ASHP) is a portion of one of their several documentaries, this one being about the reasons and repercussions of the Great Migration. It includes several reenacted accounts of their journey to the North. From 0:38 to 1:02, a traveler recounts that he faces the same injustices on the journey north as he did at home from segregation. His strong sense of morality and desire to live in a place that he could truly be free was the propelling force for his journey to the North. Racism was so pervasive, that it drove these citizens away from their homes. The sheer amazement of equal treatment illustrates just how horrid conditions were where they came from. For example, at 2:18, a man remarks upon how strange it felt to buy a newspaper without having all white customers be served first regardless of who was next in line. Everyone had the same priority. A great benefit to the next generation of African Americans was the fact that education for blacks was equal to whites. Inferior schooling would no longer hinder the growth of black children. After suffering so long under oppressive practices like segregation and sharecropping, it would be impossible to convince these people to give up the new lives they forged in the North. From Chicago to New York, black citizens traveled from the south in droves.

All of this was to work as hard as they had in their former homes to make a better future for themselves, their families, and America as a whole. The antiquated, cruel ways of the South was finally being punished, and the blame fell squarely upon their own shoulders. The North would not turn away their new populations back to slave away farming in a cycle of debt that none could easily escape. Even the media, such as the New York Times would not have sympathy for a culture that drove away its own people. America would be better off with a population united against oppression in a system where they are all equal Americans.

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Up South: African-American Migration in the Era of the Great War

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African Americans' conditions in the South were poor to say the least. The Civil War marked the end of the shackles of slavery. But oppression insidiously would chain African Americans socially instead of physically. The new freedman was faced with homelessness, jail time, or sharecropping or working in a system designed to be a parasite to their labor in the same way their former masters leeched off them. As time progressed however, African Americans would build a life for themselves, despite mostly living in the South. But the Great Migration would change all of that. In this particular article, the damages that have come to Georgia are a result of their black population moving North to better conditions. Most importantly, the article focuses on James S. Peters' view of the situation, that being nearly apocalyptic. Several times, the financial loss in the agricultural sector is compared to Sherman's March of the Union Army, where fields were burned as they progressed further into the South.
But why would the New York Times bring these tidings of doom to the North, the very haven that African Americans were fleeing to? It is likely a strike out toward the South. For years, Northern periodicals would criticize the backwards ways of the South and the terrible business practices that they held. In the North, however, conditions were only getting better, especially at the turn of the century. European immigrants were still coming to America to achieve the American dream and industry expanded to make way for all the labor. While the work was undoubtedly hard, and conditions may have not been up to the standards that are in use today, the black family coming to the North had infinitely more opportunities than in the South. And this is not including the greater treatment they enjoyed in the North. Gone were waiting in separate lines for goods, suffering worse treatment with transportation, and having to live in the squalor of inferior housing. The North treated them as citizens. They were not handed blessings on a silver platter. But they were people. And with hard work, the African American citizen could finally build any life to their liking.
The South offered no such sanctuary and suffered for their attitudes. The New York Times article speaks of unmanned plows, empty fields, plantations wanting of labor, Southern banks on the brink of collapse, and a land that still wasn't willing to grant equal rights in the face of financial oblivion. So if a black man who has used all his resources on the journey northward read this article, they would be all the more resolute in their decision to make a better life for themselves. Their white counterparts would just have their opinions of the South confirmed. The place was an intolerant swamp of hatred, segregation, and conditions so awful that they drove their African American population north.