Richard Wright, born in 1908 near Natchez, Mississippi, moved to Chicago with his family in 1927. In doing so the Wrights joined a steady stream of black families who left behind Southern poverty and racism to search for a better life in the North, in what came to be known as the "Great Migration." Often, however, they merely ended up trading rural poverty for urban squalor, with only superficial changes in the racism of the surrounding white society. This oppressive urban environment forms the backdrop to Native Son, Wright's first full-length novel.
The Great Migration. Blacks had begun leaving the South in significant numbers near the end of the nineteenth century, but in the period during and after World War I these numbers jumped dramatically. Between 1915 and 1930, over one million black Americans made the journey north, in what was at that time the largest migratory movement in American history. It would be surpassed only by a second wave of black migration northward, beginning in 1940 and lasting until the 1970s.
Both social and economic factors spurred the Great Migration (this term, originally applied to the first wave, is now often used to include both).
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