Summary: The Cause Of Great Migration

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The cause of the Great Migration for freedom “"We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves were undeniably a element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or "against us". Emancipation, will strike at the heart of the rebellion,”
 this quote derives from a speech President Abraham Lincoln once said to the Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. In 1863, at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves, less than 8 percent of the African American population lived outside the South. This was a problem do to the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation only helped a limited number of Slaves, the rest where still under southern control and law.…show more content…
All of those qualities where found in the north. I’m not saying that the northern states where not racist, I’m saying and stating that they where less cruel and more understanding. The north was a still racist based and segregated. As the 19th century began the migration began with it as well. African Americans where fed up with the mistreatment they received in the south. The insulting wages they worked their whole lives for and the fear of dying or being tortured at any given moment for any given reason was devastating. In the Novel The Warmth of other suns by Isabel Wilkerson ties in with the novel Slavery by another name. The Warmth of other suns is like to continuation to the timeline begun in Slavery by another name. Even though The Warmth of other suns is based on the personal stories and lives of 3 people, it explains how African Americans had to do every thing possible to escape the south in search of newer and better lives. Ida Mae, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster are the three main characters in this novel and there adventure to the north is completely detailed in this story. You can infer how much they detested their lives and their mistreatment from the south; by the way they risked so much and sacrificed a lot as well to get away from their old lives. They were a part of a great movement of…show more content…
This excerpt from warmth of other suns helps show the dilemmas that blacks went through in this time period, “ There were days when whites could go to the amusement park and a day when blacks could go, if they were permitted at all. There were white elevators and colored elevators (meaning the freight elevators in back); white train platforms. There were white ambulances and colored ambulances to ferry the sick, and white hearses and colored hearses for those who didn’t survive whatever was wrong with them… A total of four restrooms had to be constructed and maintained at significant expense in any public establishment that bothered to provide any for colored people: one for white men, one for white women, one for colored men, and one for colored women…” (Wilkerson, p. 44). There is a lot more to this excerpt but I put some of the details, you can see how these man and women had to live in a segregated world from white men. There lives consisted on not doing what a white man could do. In my opinion if things could get any worse I believe that we would have reached a point in which a black man could not breath the same air I n the room a white man was standing in. Also in The warmth of other suns, on page 14 Wilkerson gives us a timeline in which she explains how all through out human history when we as human find our present location difficult to live in or undesirable we do
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