What changes in lifestyle were seen when blacks moved from the rural south to the urban north in the 1900s?

Answer 1

At the turn of the twentieth century, depressed conditions in the South and industrial job opportunities in the northern states prompted more than 750,000 African Americans to settle in the Northeast and Midwest. Most were young men, and the majority moved to large metropolitan areas, such as New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The influx of southern blacks was resented by both whites and the small numbers of middle-class blacks who had been well accepted in the northern cities. Laws that established racial segregation were enacted for the first time in the early 1900s, resulting in inner-city African American ghettos.

Because of poor economic conditions throughout the country, there was a pause in African American migration north during the Great Depression. The flow increased in the 1940s, and in the following thirty years more than 4 million African Americans left the South to settle in other regions of the country. This migration resulted in more than a change in regional demographics. It meant a change from a slow-paced rural lifestyle to a fast-paced, high-pressured, urban industrial existence.