"I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to the kitchen when company comes...tomorrow I'll be at the table when company comes...They'll see how beautiful I am...I, too, am America." This excerpt is taken from Langston Hughes' poem titled I,Too and he is expressing that this is no kind of way to treat a person. Langston believed that if others would just look, they too would realize that African Americans are also beautiful.”
The move from the south to the north for most African-Americans was a great escape to a much better life. “To plant our feet on higher ground” (words of the old spiritual) summed it up best. The south was a miserable place for African-Americans. They didn't have a variety of things that they could do according to the south's laws and regulations. To put it
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The area was filled with slavery, Jim Crow laws, inequality, brutality, and death. The "great migration" can be best described as the mass movement of more than one million black southerners to cities in the North, West and Midwest. between 1910 and 1930 the total African American population doubled in the North and almost tripled in New york, New Jersey and Pennsylvania combined. Their population quadrupled in Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Harlem's black population grew from 17,995 to 147,141. There was no room for growth or advancement. When they traveled from the south to the north, their minds opened more because of what they could do in the north. Now known as the negro National Anthem lift every Voice and Sing began as a poem written by James Weldon in the 1900's. 5 years later his brother John Weldon Johnson set the words to music. The song was influenced by the sufferings of