Black Migration from the South to the North

James Baldwin stated in Fifth Avenue Uptown, “I once tried to describe to a very well known American intellectual the conditions among Negroes in the South. My recital disturbed him and made him indignant; and he asked me in perfect innocence, “Why don’t all the Negroes in the South move North?” I tried to explain what has happened, unfailingly, whenever a significant body of Negroes move North. They do not escape Jim Crow [legal …

…whites. The blacks moved North because of the lack of jobs and to escape the racial tensions of the South. Many blacks encountered another similar situation, but of less deadly variety. They are forced into the ghettos of the cities because of the economic and residential mobility, which denied blacks to live elsewhere. This caused the walls of the ghettos to expand and many changes were brought about to the city because of this expansion.