Media Device #9--ENW

In the article “Another Place, Another Promise, Another Paradise? Another Perspective on Black Migration, Promised Lands, and Paradises” by Thomas Davis, talks about the mass migration from the different demographics of the United States. Blacks have been moving about for many years, and most of the time it wasn’t by choice. African Americans did not move in unison to the rest of the population, but also didn’t move in contrast to the rest of the population. “Blacks moved to dodge dangers, and to meet desires.” (Pg 1) The first major movement was from the upper south to the lower south. This movement was more voluntary, to get away from the slavery picture. There was a second major movement at the end of the civil war. A move for many blacks was a way to measure their emancipation. This allowed them to be mobile, and gave them the opportunity to re-structure their lives with a special interest in education, religion, and work. In general emancipation created a move towards the city. They then discovered the urban life. “Blacks were at least as urban as whites during the new nation’s first generations.” (Pg 2) Blacks who were free preferred the urban areas. Because the blacks were moving in all directions, this created problems between the blacks and the whites. The blacks created a threat to the white workers. After the presidential election that voted Rutherford B. Hayes into office blacks were excluded from southern economic fruits, were not allowed to buy or lease land, and also were banned from public education. After this blacks decided to prove to the whites that they understood the concept of moving, and relocated themselves in other cities. After World War I, the movement of blacks from the south accelerated, peaked in 1930, and then accelerated again at the end of World War II. There was an estimated 5 million blacks that moved from the south to the north, this created anger, and ultimately riots.
The basic concept of this article could be strongly related to the article by Zinn, chapter 9 titled “Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom”. It relates to the concept of having freedom, only with limitations. The blacks in the Davis article were free, but limited as to where they could go because whites still had a sense of domination over them. In the article by Zinn, blacks were free, but they were forced to join the military and also had privileges taken away from him. Zinn states, “Black man began to vote and to hold office. But so long as the Negro remained dependent on privileged whites for work, for the necessities of life, his vote could be bought or taken away by threat of force. Thus, laws calling for equal treatment because meaningless.” (149) That occurred in both articles.
I believe that nothing that happened to the blacks during this time period was fair. It’s hard to say that this country is free when only a selected group of people actually has that total “freedom”. It’s wrong to pick and chose who can and cannot be free, and this is what the United States was doing at this time. I think that now urban towns can have a bad rep, and could also get tagged as “ghettos” or unsafe, or poor black communities, and this just isn’t always the case. I think that the white community is still afraid of something they are not used to, and that is why whites are hostile against the blacks, and continue to segregate themselves from the urban areas.