Answer to Question 1
Ideal Answer: The ideal answer should:
1. Explain that the anger of working-class whites at losing their jobs after World War I in northern cities led to a racist focus on black people as the cause of economic suffering by the white working class.
2. Note that several race riots, including the Chicago race riot in 1919, were essentially riots against a new population of black workers in areas that were previously dominated by whites.
3. Conclude that the labor movement was unable to halt these riots in part because unions did not embrace black workers during this time. Blacks also served as strikebreakers by corporations trying to lock out white workers during a strike or labor protest. During the 1930s when unions expanded under government authority, black and white workers would join together to improve race relations within the ranks of labor.
Answer to Question 2
Ideal Answer: The ideal answer should:
1. Define the Great Migration as the migration of two million blacks from the southern to the northern states in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
2. Explain why southern blacks left the South: segregation, lynching, natural disasters, relatives living in the northern cities, expansion of jobs in heavy industry because of World War I.
3. Note that most blacks stayed in the South. Issues of poverty, debt peonage, violence from southern whites, and family discouragement kept many blacks in the South.
4. Note that the Great Depression and World War II helped to increase black migration out of the South, this time also to western states.