Jim Crow Segregation Essay

During great migration, black americans such as Ida Mae Turner, George Starling and Richard Sterling Foster from “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson fled the segregation and persecution of the Jim Crow south. These immigrants headed north and west in search of a life not as a second class citizen but as a full american citizen with equal rights, and while what they found on the other side of Jim Crow was certainly substantially better, there was also a large amount of more discrete versions of Jim Crow there as well. The first and possibly most possibly most major inequality that blacks faced in the south was violence. Any white citizen had however much authority over blacks as could be imagined. At a whim, they could burn down …show more content…
A lot of times, they would at best be making a couple cents a day for the hard labor that they did in the field, or they would make only a small percentage of what their white counterparts doing the same job made. In the north, the jobs that these oftentimes unskilled laborers worked could have similar or even worse conditions, such as Ida’s husband George’s time working at the Campbell 's Soup factory. Despite these poor conditions, the wages that black immigrants could make were substantially better, often being paid dollars per day where they previously only made a few dollars a week. Yet while the wages were better, blacks working the same jobs as white still rarely made equal pay. Another problem the blacks faced in both the north and the south was actually finding a job to work. In the south, this exclusion happened blatantly through Jim Crow, but in the north, where Jim crow had no hold, blacks were still kept out of jobs through more discrete means. For example, bosses would claim that no matter how much they wanted to hire blacks, the white labor unions would go on strike if they they did, and that wasn’t a risk they were willing to …show more content…
Besides making a living wage for the first time in many immigrants lives, they were also afforded many other benefits. To start off, they were allowed, and even encouraged in Ida’s case, to vote in local, state, and national elections. A second positive benefit that they found in the north was that they were encouraged to send their children to get a good education, which was vastly different from the southern black mindset, which was that the earlier one gets to work the better. And lastly, while it was still extremely difficult for blacks to move upwards on the economic ladder, they had the ability to do so, as is shown by Richards gradual rise into a position that mirrored his education