US.17 Analyze the goals and achievements of the Progressive movement, including the following: (C, E, H, P) Adoption of the initiative, referendum, and recall, Adoption of the primary system, 16th Amendment, 17th Amendment, impact on the relationship between the citizen and the government.
US.21 Analyze the impact of the Great Migration of African Americans that began in the early 1900s from the rural South to the industrial regions of the Northeast and Midwest. (C, E, G, H)
Lesson 12. (US.17) The Progressive Movement
a. Goals and Achievements of the Progressive Movement
b. Initiative, Referendum, & Recall
c. The Primary System
d. New Amendments
e. The Great Migration
Between 1914 and 1918, more than 500,000 African Americans left the farms of the South for jobs in Northern cities. The movement was part of the “Great Migration," which stretched from the 1890s to the 1960s, and eventually resulted in more than six million black people leaving the South.
This migration was spurred first by the Jim Crow laws, the lynchings, and the poverty of the post-Civil War South. Then, as World War One in Europe simultaneously sparked U.S. industrial expansion and cut off the flow of immigrant workers, jobs opened up by the thousands in northern cities. Henry Ford, for example, offered to pay the astronomical sum of $5 a day in his plants, and he hired blacks. The black populations of Northern cities swelled. In Chicago, for example, the African-American community grew from 44,000 in 1910 to 110,000 by 1920.
But moving North didn't mean leaving racism behind. Many Northern whites resented their new neighbors. The resentment was fueled in 1915 when the wildly popular new movie, “The Birth of a Nation,” which portrayed blacks as deranged and dangerous people who hated white Southerners. There was not much interest in black issues among the Progressive leaders of the early 20th century. When a delegation of black leaders met with President Woodrow Wilson in 1914 to protest segregation in federal offices, he angrily forced them out the door of the White House.
The racial unrest that occurred when black moved to northern cities led to race riots. In 1917 in East St. Louis, Illinois, white rioters went on a rampage in the black community. When it was over, 39 blacks and nine whites were dead. In the summer of 1919, more than 25 race riots broke out in cities across the country. The worst was in Chicago, where an incident at a segregated swimming beach sparked a six-day riot that resulted in 38 people dead and more than a thousand left homeless by riot-sparked fires, and didn't stop until federal troops were called in.