Chapter 3 "Migration" Summary

Sweet arrives in the town of Xenia and attends Wilberforce University. Sweet isn't the only one who was sent away by parents to live in another part of the country. "When the politicians and businessmen extended rail lines into the smallest of southern hamlets in the years after Reconstruction, they had wanted simply to connect the region's fields and forests to the North's great factories. But the process also provided Negroes with a thousand escape routes. It was never easy to leave, to slip free of piles of debts, to shutter homes and abandon lands, to say good-bye to family and friends. But a hundred thousand colored people did just that between 1900 and 1915, many of them, like Sweet, very young and very scared." (pg. 71) The Negroes that migrated to the North hoped for equality in terms of rights and...