Slavery invited slave resistance. After the Great Migration and its disappointment resistance gave way to frustrated anger. Langston Hughes and Jacob Lawrence and millions of African-Americans saw the Great Migration as an epic struggle of injustice, strife, change, and even beauty. These men and women described their hopes for something better. The African-American community embraced this vision. Believed in this vision. Shared this vision with their children. One can well imagine the degree of disappointment the African-American community experienced when in fact the North–while it offered more legal protection for African-American Americans–did not offer African-Americans a sanctuary from racism. The Great Migration had not brought equality and justice.
After the civil right movement, Martin Luther King’s efforts, the Black Panthers, and thirty years since the 1960 race riots there still was essentially two Americas. The failure of the Great Migration made the African-American agenda more concerned with power issues. After the Great Migration American racial relations became a history of movement–not progress.
The northern city remained the point of destination for most African-Americans. But, as we shall see in the next chapter, the city was not kind to African-Americans. The failure of African-Americans to prosper in the northern city assured the failure of the Great Migration and was more evidence that white domination was still very much alive in America.