A political cartoon about the Great Migration, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, Episode Four: Making a Way Out of No Way, November 12th, 2013.
Throughout the twentieth century, groups of African Americans migrated North and West from the South in large numbers in what became known as the Great Migration. By 1967, the year of the walkout, there was an influx of African Americans in Philadelphia that changed the social climate forever.
A black man is hung, Lynching, 1925.
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"[African Americans] were fleeing a world where they were restricted to the most menial of jobs, underpaid if paid at all, and frequently barred from voting. Between 1880 and 1950, an African-American was lynched more than once a week for some perceived breach of the racial hierarchy" -Isabel Wilkerson, September 1, 2016, "The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration".
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"Northern industries' decision to open their doors to African-American workers set off a great exodus, as tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands people fled the racial oppression of the American South for the better jobs, higher wages, right to vote, personal safety, and educational opportunities that they could find for themselves and their children in the North"-The Great Migration: A City Transformed.
"The Great Migration 1916-1930", 2005.
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A painting of African Americans leaving the South during the Great Migration, Jacob Lawrence, The Great Migration Series, Panel 40, 1940-1941.
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"When the migration began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the time it was over, in the 1970s, 47 percent of all African-Americans were living in the North and West. A rural people had become urban, and a Southern people had spread themselves all over the nation" -Isabel Wilkerson, September 1, 2016, "The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration".
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"For Philadelphia’s growing black middle-class, white flight to the suburbs gradually opened up middle-class residential neighborhoods in West and Northwest Philadelphia that previously had been closed to them. But for the vast majority of black Philadelphians, the postwar housing boom left them confined to inner-city, high-density neighborhoods with aging and blighted housing stocks" - Civil Rights in a Northern City: Philadelphia, Temple University Libraries.
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Southern African Americans that migrated North brought ideas of black pride with them that helped inspire the students to stand up for their rights.