The Great Migration Case Study

St. Louis, Missouri is one of the up and coming cities in the United States at the beginning of the 1900s. The city has experienced incredible growth following the end of the Civil War, people from all over the United States, and the world in general, have flocked to this new industrial superpower. St. Louis donned the honor of being the fourth largest city in the United States in 1900 with a population of 575,238. Having a population of that size brought a large amount of diversity into the city, at times racial tensions rose, but for the most part the city and its residence collaborated in incredible ways that carried St. Louis into the 20th century. Racial and social segregation was a major concern for St. Louis city planners early in the 1900s. There was an influx of immigrants predominantly from Eastern Europe beginning in the 1870s. These immigrants established numerous neighborhoods on the North and South sides of the city and took many of the industrial jobs of the time. By the time The Great Migration began to take off many of the jobs and tenements were already full to capacity, forcing even more neighborhoods to form and separate the population by racial background. For the most part this did not have extreme ramifications on St. Louis, there were restrictive covenants on many
Louis at the turn of the century. Tenements often housed more than their design allowed for, and the cobble streets became clogged with filth. French priest Charles Croonenberghs stated that “the air is so rich along the Mississippi , the pasty dust from American coal smoke falls so thick in the streets that one is satisfied by an afternoon walk in St. Louis as if one had eaten a heavy dinner.” Just as most other industrial towns of the time, St. Louis had unsatisfactory sanitation practices that endangered the lives of many of its residents particularly the poorer day-laborers who lived in the constant