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Essay on Political Culture "Playing Race": Understanding Chicago through its Music
Part - I
The Black Migration was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in history, perhaps the greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation. In sheer numbers it outranks the migration of any other ethnic group to this country. For blacks, the migration meant leaving what had always been their economic and social base in America and finding a new one (Nicholas, 1992).
From 1910 to 1920, Chicago's black population almost tripled, from 44,000 to 109,000; from 1920 to 1930, it more than doubled, to 234,000. The Great Depression slowed the migration to a crawl, with 278,000 blacks residing here in 1940. But the boom resumed when World War II revived the economy, causing the black population to skyrocket to 492,000 from 1940 to 1950. The postwar expansion and the decline of Southern sharecropping caused the black population to nearly double again, to 813,000, by 1960 (Nicholas, 1992).
The object of the drive was to exhort Southern blacks to come to Chicago, in order to make money and live under the legal benefits of citizenship. The Defender convinced the railroads to offer "club rates" to groups of blacks migrating to Chicago.
The reason why opportunity was greater in Chicago was because most jobs held outside the cotton fields in the south paid only $2.50 a week. Even four dollars a day for picking cotton was nothing, compared to what you could make in Chicago. In Chicago you could make as much as seventy-five cents an hour working in a laundry, or a factory, or a restaurant or a hotel. You could even get overtime (James, 1991). Some of these jobs were supposed to be as hard as picking cotton, but people were making sums unheard of among black unskilled workers in the South................
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