ABSTRACT
The rapid transition from South to North, rural to urban, and plantation to factory, produced the first large-scale social stratification in the black community. There had been little economic diversity among blacks in the South. Even before the Great Migration began, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois observed that middle-class blacks in Philadelphia sought to insulate themselves as much as possible from the lower class that compromised their lives in crowded, segregated neighborhoods. The social isolation and problems of black lower-class life continued to worsen and became more concentrated during the Great Depression. Even as joblessness slowed temporarily the flow of black migration north, other forces were at work that would cause it to resume and widen to flood proportions. Furthermore, between 1940 and 1960, rising birth-and fertility rates compounded the problem of overcrowding and stress in black districts brought on by record migration and housing shortages.
