Real World History Analysis and Reflection Grace J Lewis, like many other migrants of the south, came to the north looking for a job, equal opportunity and stability. Mrs. Lewis did not come to DC believing that she was a part of the Great Migration, which started over 40 years before she moved in the 1960s. She simply was just looking for a job. Mrs. Lewis describes her upbringing in Upright, Virginia: “everybody knew everybody it was neighborly”. For a woman who lived in the south, she never truly faced discrimination until she moved to Washington DC. One of the expectation, I had coming to this interview with Mrs. Lewis was that she bore an unpleasant story of the south. I believed Mrs. Lewis south would be gruesome and have a lot of ugliness to it. However, from interviewing Mrs. Lewis I learned that the south was pleasantly kind to her. The cruelty took place in the North. One of the main arguments in Isabel Wilkerson’s book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration is that “the participants bore the marks of immigrant behavior” (Wilkerson 536). Wilkerson argues that the migrants demonstrated …show more content…
Many migrants would not be able to find a good home to live in. For instance, in Chicago, “Most of these new arrivals to Chicago found themselves living in a narrow strip of blocks on the South Side, stretching from Twenty-Second Street down to Fifty-First Street. The neighborhood was initially labeled the “Black Belt” or the “Black Ghetto,”” (dcc.newberry.org). Migrants would live in unsanitary and crowded places. Even if the migrants found a nice neighborhood with a white majority population soon the whites leave creating “white flight”. Ida Mae Gladney, the main female character in Wilkerson’s book, experienced this concept firsthand as she moved to a good neighborhood [where], and within a month all the whites had left. Mrs. Lewis stated she was lucky to find a house in
America is a nation consisting of many immigrants: it has its gates opened to the world. These immigrants transition smoothly and slowly from settlement, to assimilation then citizenship. These immigrants are first admitted lawfully as permanent residents before they naturalize to become full citizens. In her book “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America”, the historian Mae Ngai draws our attention to the history of immigration and citizenship in America. Her book examines an understudied period of immigration regulation between 1924 and 1965.
YES/NO SUMMARY: In the yes summary “Oscar Handlin asserts that immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth century were alienated from the cultural traditions of the homeland they had left as well as from those of their adopted country.” On the other hand Professor Wyman “argues that as many as four million immigrants to the United States between 1880 and 1930 viewed their trip as temporary and remained tied psychologically to their homeland to which they returned once they had accumulated enough wealth to enable them to improve their status back home.”
Mark Wyman, the author of the brief essay known as Coming and Going: Round-Trip to America, had a different perspective about immigration to America from the various counties during the 1880’s through the 1930’s. A common belief, regarding the immigration to America, held that immigrates stayed in America during the massive shift of population, due to the enormous creation of factories and cities that erupted in America. The past day literature entices readers to believe that all immigrates came to America to work and eventually settled down to create their own families. It’s taught that all of these families stayed in America for their entire life span. Although despite the common belief, Wyman held to his own thoughts on the controversial debate and pioneered a new way of thinking. He believed that countless immigrates, which came from all over the world, actually only
...n the trying time of the Great Migration. Students in particular can study this story and employ its principles to their other courses. Traditional character analysis would prove ineffective with this non-fiction because the people in this book are real; they are our ancestors. Isabel Wilkerson utilized varied scopes and extensive amounts of research to communicate a sense of reality that lifted the characters off the page. While she concentrated on three specifically, each of them served as an example of someone who left the south during different decades and with different inspirations. This unintentional mass migration has drastically changed and significantly improved society, our mindset, and our economics. This profound and influential book reveals history in addition to propelling the reader into a world that was once very different than the one we know today.
In the early 1830's, Mexican-Indians, seeking a better life in the "land of opportunity," crossed the border into America only to find themselves and all who followed forced to assimilate to a new culture. The white Americans pushed their food, their beliefs, their clothing style, and the English language upon these immigrants. Some of the seemingly brainwashed Mexican-Indians saw the American actions as signs of kindness and acceptance. Yet, fearful others considered being caught by the strict American border patrol a "fate worse than death" (490). Immigration officers warned "foreign-looking" people to carry citizenship identification at all times, and they "sneaked up on innocent dark-skinned people, and deported them," possibly also "mak[ing them] suffer unspeakable mortifications" (484, 486). Those legally able to reach America became subjected to American ideals and customs. The whites relocated those unwilling to live the "accepted American lifestyle" to specified areas. Aware of this law, Sancho cynically w...
According to Hunter, the period between 1877 and 1915 is critical to understanding the social transformations in most southern cities and complicating this transformation are the issues of race, class, and gender. The examination of the lives of black domestic workers reveals the complexity of their struggles to keep their autonomy with white employers and city officials. For example, African-American women built institutions and frequently quit their jobs in response to the attempts by southern whites to control their labor and mobility. Hunter carefully situates these individual tactics of resistance in the New South capitalist development and attempts by whites to curtail the political and social freedoms of emancipated slaves. African-American women migrating to Atlanta after the Emancipation found themselve... ...
The award-winning book of poems, Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson, is an eye-opening story. Told in first person with memories from the author’s own life, it depicts the differences between South Carolina and New York City in the 1960s as understood by a child. The book begins in Ohio, but soon progresses to South Carolina where the author spends a considerable amount of her childhood. She and her older siblings, Hope and Odella (Dell), spend much of their pupilage with their grandparents and absorb the southern way of life before their mother (and new baby brother) whisk them away to New York, where there were more opportunities for people of color in the ‘60s. The conflict here is really more of an internal one, where Jacqueline struggles with the fact that it’s dangerous to be a part of the change, but she can’t subdue the fact that she wants to. She also wrestles with the issue of where she belongs, “The city is settling around me….(but) my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I’ve ever known” (Woodson 184). The conflict is never explicitly resolved, but the author makes it clear towards the end
“Columbia’s Unwelcome Guests”, by Frank Beard (February 7, 1885), displays how the unrestricted US policies that were implemented were causing more immigrants to emigrate from Europe. The new aliens are depicted as anarchist, socialist, and the Mafia arriving from the sewers of Italy, Russia, and Germany. In the late nineteenth century, the U.S. government was not only concerned with the racialization of the immigrants entering the country, but also
The cultural transition from youth to adulthood in the U.S. is often a period of chiefly physical maturation, accompanied by progressive changes in perceptions of the world that surrounds oneself. The years in which Anne Moody grew up in Mississippi were marked by often vicious racism, regardless of the emancipation of African-American slaves some 80 years earlier. The laws of many of the former Confederate states, such as the Mississippi Black Codes, often included in them provisions to severely limit the rights of African-Americans. Such passages as the Mississippi vagrant law, fining ‘idle’ blacks, illustrate this through the underhanded encouragement to keep blacks in their former place of servitude. Anne Moody’s coming of age in the era of the oppressive Black Codes was not only that of physical change, but chiefly one of mental growth from that of a victim of the injustices of the Southern U.S. to an active agent of change for her fellow African-Americans.
Although there were numerous efforts to attain full equality between blacks and whites during the Civil Rights Movement, many of them were in vain because of racial distinctions, white oppression, and prejudice. Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi recounts her experiences as a child growing up in Centreville, Mississippi. She describes how growing up in Mississippi in a poor black family changed her views of race and equality, and the events that took place that changed her life forever. She begins her story at the tender age of 4, and describes how her home life changed drastically with the divorce of her parents, the loss of her home, and the constant shuffle from shack to shack as her mother tried to keep food on the table with the meager pay she earned from the numerous, mostly domestic, jobs she took. On most days, life was hard for Anne, and as she got older she struggled to understand why they were living in such poverty when the white people her mother worked for had so many nice things, and could eat more than bread and beans for dinner. It was because of this excessive poverty that Anne had to go into the workforce at such an early age, and learn what it meant to have and hold a job in order to provide her family. Anne learned very young that survival was all about working hard, though she didn’t understand the imbalance between the work she was doing and the compensation she received in return.
“I do not believe that many American citizens . . . really wanted to create such immense human suffering . . . in the name of battling illegal immigration” (Carr 70). For hundreds of years, there has been illegal immigration starting from slavery, voluntary taking others from different countries to work in different parts of the world, to one of the most popular- Mexican immigration to the United States. Mexican immigration has been said to be one of the most common immigration acts in the world. Although the high demand to keep immigrants away from crossing the border, Mexicans that have immigrated to the U.S have made an impact on the American culture because of their self sacrifices on the aspiration to cross over. Then conditions
It has been observed that, from history American has served as a destination for most immigrants in the world the world (Williams 16).
South Korean diplomat and former Secretary General of the United Nations Ban-Ki Moon said: “Migration is an expression of the human aspiration for dignity, safety, and a better future”. There are many reasons for immigration, from escaping countries in peril to looking for better jobs. People may leave behind family, communities, memories, places they’ve lived their entire lives. However, this is all necessary to achieve a common goal: a better future. Cristina Henrquez demonstrates this in her novel, The Book of Unknown Americans.
Portes, Alejandro and Ruben G. Rumbaut, “Immigrant America: A Portrait.” Kiniry and Rose 336-337. Print.
This essay does a great job of showing how her choice for moving out of Mississippi was based on her place in the society at the time of being a black woman. She demonstrates that her place in Mississippi shaped her decisions as a person, by eventually leaving Mississippi and changing her life. “I fantasize about living in that fabled America. Moving across a few state lines is not going to help me escape this place that tells me I am less” (Ward) Jesmyn Ward’s thought process was altered by growing up in Mississippi.