In general, blacks were harder hit than whites, for as their pool of jobs shrank, whites began displacing black workers who had held menial jobs that whites once considered beneath them. Nearly all Americans suffered during this period of economic upheaval as banks collapsed, savings evaporated, and wages fell while unemployment soared. The Great Migration was slowed-but not stopped-by another massive event of the early twentieth century, the Great Depression of the 1930s. Added to this social incentive was the attraction of industrial jobs in Northern cities, metropolises in which large black populations now appeared for the first time. Even blacks who discounted such rumors made the move, expecting to find less discrimination than in the South. In Southern states like Mississippi (where, like Wright himself, Bigger Thomas in Native Son was born), rumors spread that whites in the North would welcome black migrants. During the first wave-that is, from 1915 to 1930-many Southern blacks believed that the racial prejudice to which they were subjected would lessen as they moved north. It would be surpassed only by a second wave of black migration northward, beginning in 1940 and lasting until the 1970s.īoth social and economic factors spurred the Great Migration (this term, originally applied to the first wave, is now often used to include both). Between 19, over one million black Americans made the journey north, in what was at that time the largest migratory movement in American history. Events in History at the Time of the Novel The Great Migrationīlacks had begun leaving the South in significant numbers near the end of the nineteenth century, but in the period during and after World War I these numbers jumped dramatically. This oppressive urban environment forms the back-drop to Native Son, Wright’s first full-length novel.

In doing so the Wrights joined a steady stream of black families who left behind Southern poverty and racism to search for a better life in the North, in what came to be known as the “ Great Migration.” Often, however, they merely ended up trading rural poverty for urban squalor, with only superficial changes in the racism of the surrounding white society. Richard Wright, born in 1908 near Natchez, Mississippi, moved to Chicago with his family in 1927. A novel set in Chicago in the 1930s published in 1940.Ī young black man accidentally kills a rich white girl, an act that turns out to free him psychologically from the oppressive racism that has shaped his life, even as he is hunted down and imprisoned by white society.Įvents in History at the Time of the Novel

Native Son by Richard Wright