For America, the 1920s marked the point in time when the country began developing into a modern society. Attitudes, opportunities, and activities changed. The automobile replaced the horse and buggy. Women got the vote. Small towns grew into cities, and big cities expanded as people moved in from the country in hopes of finding better jobs and getting ahead in life.

Thousands of the urban newcomers were blacks who left the South to escape social and economic oppression. They settled in northern cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York. One man remembered, "Everybody came to Chicago. There was a tremendous need for unskilled labor at the stockyards, for porters in the hotels and for redcaps [porters] at the railroad stations. And these were good jobs, better than what black folks had in the South. So they migrated by the thousands, like my family...