South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration

African Americans left behind a South in which they were mired in poverty amid deteriorating economic conditions, where they experienced physical and sexual exploitation, where racism and Jim Crow segregation limited their accomplishments, and where constricted opportunities for formal education consigned them to second-class citizenship. Institutions such as the Amanda Smith Industrial School for Abandoned Colored Girls in Harvey; various churches, including old ones like the Baptists and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and new ones like the Nation of Islam; the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); and others defined girlhood differently than had those in the South. Most Africa Americans, consigned as most were to Jim Crow schools, were unable to secure an education above the lower levels of grade school, but a few went on to high school, and some went to colleges, including the very prestigious private University of Chicago and the public University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.