African American Women and the Second Great Migration
Uploaded by maikaqt on Jul 18, 2007
African American Women and the Second Great Migration
In 1941, A. Phillip Randolph’s March on Washington movement forced the nation to take notice of African Americans. Following the march, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that mandated the end of racial discrimination in defense industries. The agency in charge of enforcing the executive order, the Fair Employment Practices Committee, was weak. Still, the agency provided a forum for African Americans whose complaints, until then, would have fallen on deaf ears. Although discrimination against African American people was prevalent throughout the United States at this time, nowhere were racial tensions as high as they were in the South. In numbers large enough to be coined the “Second Great Migration” African American people left the south and headed north and west to find employment in defense industries. With the political and social climate slowly beginning to change, the “Second Great Migration” of African Americans from the South to northern and western cities had a unique character.
Unlike the “Great Migration” which took place during World War I, the World War II migration included a vast number of women.# During the first migration African American men outnumbered women three to one. By the second migration this was no longer the case as increasingly men sent for their wives, families traveled together, and women even sometimes traveled alone. Although they are often ignored in accounts of migration out of the South, women had many of the same motivations to leave the South that men had. Just as men longed to escape the agricultural work of the South, women too hoped to escape low-wage domestic labor. Women, like men, wished to flee the harsh realities of racism. The music and other media that enticed men to head west also enticed women. Often the reality was that life for men and women out West was little different from life in the South, but the hopes and dreams that encouraged men to leave their homes in the South also encouraged women. While men hoped to get out of the fields, women hoped to get out of the kitchen.#
World War II had an important impact on gender roles in the United States. Women, both black and white, were asked to challenge feminine roles and do “men’s” work in wartime industries. For African American...