Black Workers and the Great Migration North

Marks, Carole

doi:10.2307/274413

Cited by 10 publications

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“…Though the mass movement of Blacks from the agricultural economy of the South to the industrial North had facilitated considerable employment mobility, it also left many African Americans vulnerable to the harsh realities of urban joblessness as affluent residents and employment opportunity moved into the outer suburbs. In a 1999 study, William Sundstrom found that between 1940 and1960, the period of the most substantial internal migration from South to North, the unemployment rates between Black and white workers widened considerably. They attribute this gap to a pattern of migration in which Blacks were moving into areas in which unemployment was increasing and employment opportunities were changing in ways that disadvantaged poorly educated, less-skilled workers.…”

Section: The Vietnam War At Home and Abroadmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Employment Mobility and the Belated Emergence of the Black Middle Class

Lazonick

Moss

Weitz

2021

INET Working Paper Series

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As the Covid-19 pandemic takes its disproportionate toll on African Americans, the historical perspective in this working paper provides insight into the socioeconomic conditions under which President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign promise to “build back better” might actually begin to deliver the equal employment opportunity that was promised by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Far from becoming the Great Society that President Lyndon Johnson promised, the United States has devolved into a greedy society in which economic inequality has run rampant, leaving most African Americans behind. In this installment of our “Fifty Years After” project, we sketch a long-term historical perspective on the Black employment experience from the last decades of the nineteenth century into the 1970s. We follow the transition from the cotton economy of the post-slavery South to the migration that accelerated during World War I as large numbers of Blacks sought employment in mass-production industries in Northern cities such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. For the interwar decades, we focus in particular on the Black employment experience in the Detroit automobile industry. During World War II, especially under pressure from President Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee, Blacks experienced tangible upward employment mobility, only to see much of it disappear with demobilization. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, however, supported by the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Blacks made significant advances in employment opportunity, especially by moving up the blue-collar occupational hierarchy into semiskilled and skilled unionized jobs. These employment gains for Blacks occurred within a specific historical context that included a) strong demand for blue-collar and clerical labor in the U.S. mass-production industries, which still dominated in global competition; b) the unquestioned employment norm within major U.S. business corporations of a career with one company, supported at the blue-collar level by mass-production unions that had become accepted institutions in the U.S. business system; c) the upward intergenerational mobility of white households from blue-collar employment requiring no more than a high-school education to white-collar employment requiring a higher education, creating space for Blacks to fill the blue-collar void; and d) a relative absence of an influx of immigrants as labor-market competition to Black employment. As we will document in the remaining papers in this series, from the 1980s these conditions changed dramatically, resulting in erosion of the blue-collar gains that Blacks had achieved in the 1960s and 1970s as the Great Society promise of equal employment opportunity for all Americans disappeared.

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Section: The Vietnam War At Home and Abroadmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… Herbert Hill, "Racism Within Organized Labor: A Report of Five Years of theAFL-CIO, 1955-1960," Journal of Negro Education, 30, 2, 1961118. 121 NAACP report on the ALF-CIO quoted in Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, p. 331.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Employment Mobility and the Belated Emergence of the Black Middle Class

Lazonick

Moss

Weitz

2021

INET Working Paper Series

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“…6 For those who moved north during this period, employment was commonly found in the domestic and personal services sectors because work in the manufacturing sector was dominated by the influx of European immigrants. 7 Those immigrants settled in the cities of the North and provided a cheap source of industrial labor. This decreased the need for black workers to perform unskilled or semiskilled work.…”

Section: -1910: Movement Waxes and Wanesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Migration on African American Family Development and Relationships

Stewart

2007

Journal of Family History

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This article examines the short-and long-term influences of African American migration on the development and functioning of African American families and family relationships. Using existing research and the results from an ethnographic study of a large, African American, extended family, this article confirms the findings of previous studies and begins to examine the meaning and definition of contemporary types of migration. The study suggests that family members who have “migrated” with respect to socioeconomic status have many of the same issues as those who have migrated with respect to physical distance.

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“King Kong, the Black Gorilla”

Cárcel¹

2021

Quarterly Review of Film and Video

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Black Workers and the Great Migration North

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Employment Mobility and the Belated Emergence of the Black Middle Class

Employment Mobility and the Belated Emergence of the Black Middle Class

Impact of Migration on African American Family Development and Relationships

“King Kong, the Black Gorilla”

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