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germany was responsible for all the damage of WW1

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the peace treaty that ended WW1

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act that expanded the espionage act to cover more offenses

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principles for world peace

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movement of african americans from the southern united states

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In 1910, 89% of African Americans lived in the South. But by 1970, this was true of only 53% of the African American population.

It was during the First World War that a silent pilgrimage tooks its first steps within the border of this country. The fever rose without warning or notice or much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach. It would not end until the 1970s and would set into motion changes in the North and South that no one, not even the people doing the leaving, could have imagined at the start of it or dreamed would take nearly a lifetime to play out...

Historians would come to call it the Great Migration. It would become perhaps the most underreported story of the twentieth century...

In many ways, the Great Migration consisted of many smaller migrations between local communities. The African Americans who left South Carolina were particularly likely to migrate to New York and Philadelphia, while migrants from Louisiana mostly headed to the great cities of the West.

We can track these patterns using data from the decennial census. This data sheds light on a momentous shift in American history.

Beyond discrimination and segregation, there was physical violence. From 1890 to 1910, at the , an average of African Americans were lynched yearly, -- sometimes simply because a white person accused them of acting "insolent". Jamelle Bouie in the Nation about riots against the few prosperous African American communities that developed:

Economic opportunities were sparse. The war had destroyed the South's economy and sources of wealth. There was little initial investment in the region. Not granted the land that many of them , many African Americans ended up working as sharecroppers for white landowners. These landowners often forced these sharecroppers into crippling debt by contracts signed under the the threat of violence.

The First Wave of the Great Migration

Hoping for a better life, many African Americans headed north.

From 1910 to 1940, over 1.6 million African Americans left the South. They primarily headed to the cities of the Northeast, as well as Chicago and Detroit.

The table below displays the cities with the largest African American population in 1940, and how the population changed from 1910 to 1940. This table, and ones that follow, are estimates based on a one percent sample of the population.

The conditions African Americans confronted in the North were improved but still full of hardship. Racism and prejudice abounded. Government policy kept African Americans out of many neighborhoods through ; the restriction of neighborhoods in which people of certain racial and ethnic groups could get approved for a mortgage. (Redlining an issue today.)

These migrants in foundries, in meatpacking companies, as servants of the wealthy and on projects such as the expansion of the Pennsylvania Railroad . Spencer Crew , "[African Americans] typically wound up in dirty, backbreaking, unskilled and low-paying occupations. These were the least desirable jobs in most industries, but the ones employers felt best suited their black workers." Still, these jobs often paid more than double than what the migrants would have received in the South.

Only one quarter of the African Americans living in New York City by 1940 were born in New York State. In comparison, over one third of the African Americans living in New York City were born in South Carolina, Virginia or North Carolina. At almost 13% of the entire African American population in New York City, no migrant group was more common than those from South Carolina (less than 7% of all migrants during this period were from South Carolina).

Many cities and states had unusually strong migratory relationships. Nearly half of the migrants who left Mississippi went to Chicago. African American Virginians migrated to Philadelphia at an uncommon rate.

The table below shows the twenty cities with the largest African American population in 1940, and the most common birthplace of migrants to the state.

Most of the patterns accord with geography.

For cities on the East Coast, most migrants came from states on the East Coast. Midwestern cities like Chicago, St. Louis and Akron received an unusually large number of migrants from Mississippi and Alabama, states in the middle of the South. 22% of Chicago's African American population in 1940 were migrants from Mississippi or Alabama.

Los Angeles and San Francisco received migrants from the states furthest West. Of the more than 70,000 African Americans living in Los Angeles in 1940, 40% were born in either Texas, Louisiana or Oklahoma.

But proximity does not explain all of the patterns. Georgia and South Carolina are similar distances from Cleveland, Ohio, but a migrant from Georgia was three times more likely to go to Cleveland than one from South Carolina.

Apart from the introduction of automobiles, it would be hard to think of anything that more dramatically reshaped America's big cities in the twentieth century than the relocation of the nation's black population. This began with the first era of migration, but the most dramatic changes occurred as a result of the second phase...

...the growing concentration [of African Americans] in major cities had keyed dramatic reorganizations of metropolitan space, accelerating the development of suburbs and shifting tax resources, government functions, private-sector jobs, and a great many white people out of core cities.

This next table shows the change in population for the twenty cities that had the largest African American populations in 1940, and the state from which that city had the most migrants. The African American population grew by about 70% during this period as a whole.

The African American populations of the Northeast and Midwest continued to grow at a rapid pace, but it was the African American migration West that distinguishes the second phase. In just thirty years, the populations of Los Angeles (76,200 to 765,800) and San Francisco/Oakland (21,600 to 331,700) grew ten times larger. The Los Angeles area needed labour to fill over $11 billion dollars in war contracts to produce automobiles and steel. The African American population in San Francisco grew six times larger just from 1940 to 1945 due, in large part, to men coming to work on the naval shipyards .

The Reverse Migration
African Americans moving to the South during this period have been particularly to large metropolitan areas, with Atlanta and Houston seeing particularly large gains. College educated African Americans are among the most likely to head South from the Northeast and Midwest. Frey that the reverse migration, "reflects the South's economic growth and modernization, its improved race relations, and the longstanding cultural and kinship ties it holds for black families."

The impact of the Great Migration on American life is difficult to overstate. The economies, politics, and culture of America's great cities were forever changed. Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns:

If millions of African Americans had not migrated from the South to northern cities, the modern United States would look completely different. Contemporary American life is, in many ways, a ramification of this far-reaching, but underreported, historical event.

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The Great Migration: The African American Exodus from The South

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In 1910, 89% of African Americans lived in the South. But by 1970, this was true of only 53% of the African American population. It was during the First World War that a silent pilgrimage tooks its first steps within the border of this country.

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an agency that coordinated the purchases or war supplies

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information used to promote or publicize something

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agreement made to stop fighting for a certain time

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a military force that is sent out to foreign places

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group of merchants that sail together

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authorized government to enlist people to the military

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a military alliance between Germany and Mexico

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unoccupied land that is under despute between two parties

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a method of fighting that they used; fought in bring trenches facing each other

- this shows a map of the trenches

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people or anything that have and agreed peace with eachother

- this is an example of allies

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belief of people that a country should have a strong military capability.

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patriotic feelings or principles

- the picture shows how a person with such nationalism will do anything for their country or state