Historic migration and present day entrapment

In his continuing assault on the peasants, Paul Ryan (R-WI unfortunately) declared that lazy inner city men are the core of the poverty problem in America. I am not going to dignify his contempt for so many fellow Americans by quoting him. Thankfully ThinkProgress has done the dirty work by recording Ryan's venomous remarks and the context. Instead, it might be fun to speculate how many moderate suburbanites in his district might decide that having an openly racist Scrooge representing them is not in keeping with their feeble attempts to remain "mainstream." No, that's untestable and certainly won't lead to this phony losing his seat. How about whether Republicans will ever accept anything as a "social" problem? Or what talking points they will come up with to explain away all the able-bodied, educated people out there who made every right decision and still cannot get a job, much less get ahead no matter how many applications they fill out or job fairs they attend? Well, let's actually back up for a minute and examine a bit of history. Namely, why there are so many "lazy" men in big cities of a certain skin tone to begin with.

It was called The Great Migration, a stream of people moving from the South to the North for almost fifty years. Sometimes a flood, sometimes a trickle, African-Americans walked, hitched, or rode the rails in a million or more personal journeys to greater opportunity and a better life in northern industrial cities. I started becoming aware of the larger world around the time that gangster rap was replacing heavy metal as the chief corrupting influence on young people. Along with rap and hip hop came a score of movies warning us suburban white kids (and our parents) of how evil the city was. I found "A" that African-Americans lived in the South and worked on farms in the past, not to gel with "C" that African-Americans lived in Northern cities and did all sorts of bad things. "B" was missing, namely how did this change occur?

"B" for "Blues" a major component of the Great Migration

During World War I the cheap, exploitable labor of new immigrants was cut off by the need in their home countries for cannon fodder. Therefore European immigration statistically ended by 1915 or so. Immigration was something of a conveyor belt in the early Twentieth Century; people landed on the East Coast, worked for a while at sweatshops and other poor jobs until they saved up enough or just got fed up with their treatment, then set out west for land and opportunity. Certainly not all immigrants left New York or other cities but it was enough to create continuous demand for cheap labor in factories. This movement coincidently was a major reason why it took so long for economic reform, and labor protections to get a critical mass of support in the US.



Migration is always a combination of push/pull factors, reasons to leave where you are and reasons drawing you to a destination. After the Civil War, freedmen certainly did not like the repeated efforts of white landowners to reinstate slavery in one form or another but they were both attached to the land of their birth and had little knowledge of other places to go. By WWI these factors had mitigated somewhat but whites still made life difficult for African-Americans in every way they could. Some ambitious labor recruiters from Northern companies visited the South to attract workers with promises of better pay and better treatment.



After the war, anti-foreigner sentiment had reached a crescendo and restrictive legislation essentially ended immigration during the 1920s. The Great Depression dried up opportunity here as well. But The Great Migration continued because the first wave of African-Americans had found life better in the North and sent letters home to tell friends and family to come join them. After Pearl Harbor, the need for labor spiked again and many more southern blacks came north to work. Work, get it? Even with prejudice from whites and unequal pay from factory owners, life was better for African-Americans and there was even the possibility of advancement. So ethnic enclaves grew up in cities, served by black businesses. Things were going pretty well, at least comparatively, for most of the newcomers.

Then the bottom fell out. WWII ended and instead of depression returning the US boomed. Working-class whites streamed to the suburbs and became the so-called middle class. Jobs and capital followed but because of redlining, exclusion from government programs, and other discrimination, African-Americans largely could not. As the inner city became denuded of money, the black enclaves turned into impoverished slums. Then enters "the drug problem."

What would you do? Go back down South? Leave the country? Paul Ryan would certainly like that. But how do we solve social problems in the real world?