" There is a sense right from the very beginning of this novel that Robert Jones wants too much from the society into which he was born. As the nation changes however, his dreams do not seem as farfetched as they previously had.
It was not until World War Two that the racial problems between white and black Americans, which had always been thought of as uniquely southern, began to gain national attention. This resulted, in part, because of the continuing migration of African-Americans from the South to the increasingly urbanized North and West. This migration was steady through the 1920s and even during the Great Depression did not slow dramatically. But the decade of the 1940"tms saw the largest black migration from the South, as wartime production in industrial areas demanded labor. This would be the first time white and black workers would be working side by side. During this decade, nearly 1 million black Americans made the move from South to North. By 1950, for the first time, a third of all black Americans lived outside the South.
The rise of black ghettos in northern and western cities may have complicated th
This is the struggle that internally, Bob"tms girlfriend Alice battles with every day.
In lieu of the saying: "The more things change, the more they stay the same," the years of and proceeding World War Two can be examined and exemplified. It was a time of extreme change for the African-American race, for the White-American race, and for the Japanese-American race. Where some advances in the system were made, other flaws continued to exist. Racism, and issues of superiority in race, weren"tmt and may never be resolved completely. But the story of Robert Jones illustrates the world at this time clearly, and allows one who may not have ever imagined such a world to exist, to step into his shoes and experience it.
It was not until World War Two that the racial problems between white and black Americans, which had always been thought of as uniquely southern, began to gain national attention. This resulted, in part, because of the continuing migration of African-Americans from the South to the increasingly urbanized North and West. This migration was steady through the 1920s and even during the Great Depression did not slow dramatically. But the decade of the 1940"tms saw the largest black migration from the South, as wartime production in industrial areas demanded labor. This would be the first time white and black workers would be working side by side. During this decade, nearly 1 million black Americans made the move from South to North. By 1950, for the first time, a third of all black Americans lived outside the South.
Ironically African-Americans and other minorities were continually prejudiced against even though the work force would not survive without them during the war. This segment is just an example of the prejudice that blacks and minorities continued to experience even when they were supposedly "included" in the work force. It was a struggle just living daily life as a minority, but it was a struggle to the point where people felt being white was the only way to be happy or successful. This is evident when the work force is examined more closely between white and black and male and female. It seems between all, there is a competition to prove something to one another:
In March of 1941, a black leader named Philip Randolph proposed a new civil rights strategy: a massive march on Washington D.C., in which blacks and sympathetic whites would demand an end to discrimination against blacks in the employment and the armed forces. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was disturbed by Randolph's proposal. The President had been trying to rise up American support for a war against Hitler and his treatment of religious and ethnic minorities. A march of this scale that would bring attention to discrimination against African-Americans could only serve to embarrass the ad
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