Unit 3: Movement and Mindset — Migration, Culture, and Leadership

Great Migration

The massive demographic shift of approximately six million African Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West (c. 1910–1940).

Push Factors

Reasons that compel individuals to leave their current location, such as Jim Crow violence and economic oppression.

Pull Factors

Reasons that attract individuals to a new location, such as job opportunities and the promise of freedom.

Jim Crow Violence

Racial terror in the South, including lynching and mob violence, making it unsafe for African Americans.

Sharecropping

An economic system trapping Black families in cycles of debt due to exploitative agricultural practices.

Disenfranchisement

The stripping away of the right to vote from Black men through literacy tests and poll taxes.

Boll Weevil

A pest that devastated cotton crops in the Southern United States, impacting the agricultural economy.

World War I Labor Shortages

The economic demand for workers in Northern factories due to white men going to war and a halt in European immigration.

Economic Opportunity

The availability of higher wages in Northern industrial centers compared to Southern agriculture.

Black Belts/Ghettoization

Overcrowded neighborhoods where Black migrants were forced to live due to housing discrimination and redlining.

The Red Summer of 1919

A period of racial violence in the U.S. where tensions exploded into mob attacks against Black communities.

Harlem Renaissance

A cultural movement in the 1920s-1930s celebrating Black intellectual, artistic, and literary achievements.

The 'New Negro' Movement

A term defined by Alain Locke representing a generation rejecting racial stereotypes and seeking self-definition.

Self-Definition

The act of artists and intellectuals defining Black identity on their own terms, contrary to white notions.

Political Agency

The understanding of art as a tool for social uplift and as a means to assert the humanity of Black individuals.

Langston Hughes

A poet known for using jazz rhythms to depict the lives of working-class Black people.

Zora Neale Hurston

An author celebrated for her works that reflect Black Southern rural culture and dialect.

Claude McKay

A Jamaican-born writer whose poem 'If We Must Die' became an anthem for resistance.

Aaron Douglas

An artist known as the 'Father of Black American Art' for his geometric styles and cultural motifs.

Jazz and Blues

Music genres that flourished during the Great Migration, contributing to cultural identity and breaking racial barriers.

Booker T. Washington

An African American leader advocating for vocational training and economic self-reliance as means to achieve equality.

The Atlanta Compromise

A strategy suggested by Washington where Black people accepted segregation temporarily for economic opportunities.

W.E.B. Du Bois

The first African American Ph.D. from Harvard, advocating for immediate civil rights and political action.

The Talented Tenth

Du Bois's concept that the top 10% of the Black community should seek higher education to lead the fight for civil rights.

Double Consciousness

Du Bois's term describing the internal conflict of being both Black and American in a racist society.

Marcus Garvey

A leader founding the UNIA, promoting Black pride and economic independence through Pan-Africanism.

Pan-Africanism

A movement advocating for the solidarity and unity of African people globally.