Blacks in the American South after World War II. By the middle of the twentieth century, African Americans had made some significant gains in their ongoing effort to attain social and legal equality but much remained to be achieved. Many of the gains had been spurred by the two world wars that marked the first half of the century. As European immigration slowed during and after World War I (1914-18), blacks continued their mass exodus out of the South to seek jobs in northern industrial cities such as New York and Chicago, drawn in part by a demand for labor that had previously been filled by European immigrants. Called the Great Migration, this movement remains one of the most influential turning points in African American history after the abolition of slavery in 1865. It began in the 1890s and continued to about 1950, much of the migration occurring between the two world wars. Black soldiers played important roles in the defense of democracy in these wars, which lent new urgency to their hopes that the nation might now live up to its ideals of equality.
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