Grace Lewis Analysis

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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

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