African-American Working Conditions

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The beginning of the Sixteenth Century marked the arrival of the first Africans setting foot in Jamestown, Virginia. A century later, the European Slave Trade would force Africans to arrive in America via merchant – slave ship. And as time went on, Africans would be used on American soil as slaves on southern plantations. They didn’t catch a glimpse of freedom until 1864, when the 13th Amendment passed, making slavery illegal in the United States. But a year later, Black Codes were passed in the southern states that restricted African Americans’ freedom and forced them to work in a low – wage economy where they could barely survive. When the codes were no longer intact, whites did everything in their power to belittle African Americans and make them inferior; they made sure blacks didn’t exercise their political and civil rights by terrorizing them. The working conditions for blacks were horrible, causing death rates to be high in the south. As life in the south became hard to endure, many African Americans began to migrate north. The north offered a place where they could freely …show more content…
New York being largely populated of blacks but there were many other destinations as well; Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, Cleveland, Buffalo, and other urban centers received an enormous amount of black migrants. Over 100,000 blacks migrated to Harlem, transforming Manhattan neighborhood into a creative and independent center of art and performance activities that drew the attention of the rest of New York. Many white Americans, particularly white readers and artists, showed enormous interest of the black life in America. Before the Harlem Renaissance had ended, a large number of Broadway productions and many novels tried to represent black experience for white audiences. Black artists and writers were not always joyous with the way white writers tried to portray black experiences and

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