Black Migration Research Paper

As blacks began to leave the South for urban cities in the North in hopes of escaping poverty and oppression to finding adequate work and housing, the idea of “white flight” came to fruition. What blacks leaving the south hoped to find was a chance for equal opportunity in the workplace and comfortable housing for their families. Instead, they suffered the same degradation and harassment that they experienced in the South. Job opportunities in the North for the black community were nothing short of menial and finite, as labor unions kept blacks from being hired at certain establishments. White workers who did not wish to work alongside blacks, which caused their employers to allocate blacks to jobs that were unappealing and undesirable.
The lack of equal opportunity in employment resulted in disparities in wages between black and white workers, therefore contributing to the segregation of blacks to low income housing within urban areas, whereas white families could afford to move to the suburbs. Even when black families could afford to move to the suburbs, white families did their best to intimidate and provoke black families into moving out. During the first wave of black migration, cities throughout the
Instead, poverty in black communities increased and became more concentrated in ghettos. As poverty and unemployment increased within inner-cities around the 1970s and 1980s, delinquent behavior such as petty crime and drug use became more prevalent. Behavior such as this left a scar on inner-city life that labeled its occupants as “evil,” while suburbs were sensationalized as “good” (Judd & Swanstrom, 2015). The good versus evil narrative of cities and suburbs further increased segregation between blacks and whites, causing even greater economic depression within