Social History for Every Classroom

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Social History for Every Classroom

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This worksheet is designed to help students organize information from the documentary Up South: African-American Migration in the Era of the Great War.

In this memoir first published in 1952, Charles Denby, an African-American migrant from Alabama, recalls his train ride North and first night in Detroit, Michigan. In 1930, out of work because of the Great Depression, Denby moved back to the South.…

In the summer of 1919, violence broke out between whites and African Americans in Chicago. The five-day riot left thirty-eight people dead and more than five hundred people injured. The city formed a Commission on Race Relations to study what…

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Between 1910 and 1920, as the Great Migration swept north, the African-American population in Chicago and other northern cities more than doubled. Members of established African-American communities tried to help new arrivals adjust to city life.…

This article explores the return migration of African Americans from New York City to the South, reversing the Great Migration that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (1911-1972), the grandaughter of former slaves, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she learned to sing in her family's baptist church. In 1927, at the age of sixteen, Jackson migrated to Chicago where she found a…

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Between 1910 and 1930, more than one million African Americans moved out of the South to cities in the North, Midwest, and West. They sought economic opportunity, freedom from racial segregation, and safety from lynching and other kinds of racist…

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One of the first challenges for southern migrants who arrived in Northern cities like Chicago was finding a place to live. One report tells of a single day when 600 families applied to live in 53 housing units. Given the demand, unscrupulous…

In the United States, the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) increased the demand for industrial production while decreasing the flow of European immigration. Labor shortages in both factories, mines, fields, and service industries meant greater…

In 1917, ten-year-old Rubie Bond left Mississippi with her parents and migrated to Beloit, Wisconsin. Her father, who worked as a tenant farmer in the South, had been recruited to work at a factory in Beloit. In 1976, she was interviewed as part of…
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