History 2-3 page paper - "To what extent did WWI alter the status of Americans between 1914-1920"?

F

However, racial prejudice against African Americans also existed in the North. The press of new migrants to Northern cities caused overcrowding and intensified racial tensions.

Nevertheless, between 1910 and 1930, hundreds of thousands of African Americans migrated to such cities as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Author Richard Wright described the great exodus.

A PERSONAL VOICE RICHARD WRIGHT “ We are bitter no more; we are leaving! We are leaving our homes, pulling up stakes to move on. We look up at the high southern sky and remember all the sunshine and all the rain and we feel a sense of loss, but we are leaving. We look out at the wide green fields which our eyes saw when we first came into the world and we feel full of regret, but we are leaving. We scan the kind black faces we have looked upon since we first saw the light of day, and, though pain is in our hearts, we are leaving. We take one last furtive look over our shoulders to the Big House— high upon a hill beyond the railroad tracks—where the Lord of the Land lives, and we feel glad, for we are leaving.”

—quoted in 12 Million Black Voices

WOMEN IN THE WAR While African Americans began new lives, women moved into jobs that had been held exclusively by men. They became railroad workers, cooks, dockworkers, and bricklayers. They mined coal and took

part in shipbuilding. At the same time, women continued to fill more traditional jobs as nurses, clerks, and teachers. Many women worked as volunteers, serving at Red Cross facilities and encouraging the sale of bonds and the planting of victory gardens. Other women, such as Jane Addams, were active in the peace movement. Addams helped found the Women’s Peace Party in 1915 and remained a pacifist even after the United States entered the war.

President Wilson acknowledged, “The services of women during the supreme crisis have been of the most signal usefulness and distinction; it is high time that part of our debt should be acknowledged.” While acknowledgment of that debt did not include equal pay for equal work, it did help bolster public support for woman suffrage. In 1919, Congress finally passed the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote. In 1920 the amendment was ratified by the states.

600

Women worked in a variety of jobs during the war. Here, women assemble an aircraft wing.

SPOTLIGHTSPOTLIGHT HISTORICALHISTORICAL

RACE RIOTS Racial prejudice against African Americans in the North some- times took violent forms. In July 1917, a race riot exploded in East St. Louis, Illinois. White workers, furious over the hiring of African Americans as strikebreakers at a munitions plant, rampaged through the streets. Forty blacks and nine whites died.

Another riot erupted in July 1919 in Chicago when a 17-year- old African American swam from the water off a “black beach” to the water off a “white beach.” There, white bathers threw rocks at him until he drowned.

African Americans retaliated, and several riots broke out in the city. Order was restored after sev- eral days of violence that involved about 10,000 people.

▼

MAIN IDEAMAIN IDEA

F

Analyzing Effects

What effect did the war have on women’s lives?