Abstract

This article investigates economic and living conditions of African-American workers in Chicago during the 1920's. This was a time previous histories have characterized as being economically prosperous for Black Chicagoans. The documentary evidence from contemporary sources, such as newspaper articles, reports of social agencies such as the Chicago Urban League, government reports, and individual accounts, indicates that African-American workers during this decade experienced chronic unemployment and were consistently underpaid. This, in turn, resulted in many families living below the poverty line in those years. These conditions were caused primarily by employers' discriminatory hiring and promotion policies, by a surplus of labor at a time of continued black migration from the South, and also by residential segregation in the African-American neighborhoods of Chicago.

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