The concentration of blacks in specific areas of a city also encouraged the growth of social clubs and fraternal orders and benefited black professionals and businessmen who relied on the patronage of the African American masses.Ĭoinciding, with the growth of black ghettos was greater interracial tension and strife in northern cities. Storefront churches, appealing to those African Americans who desired a more intimate and emotional form of religious worship, appeared for the first time and proliferated. Black churches, the community’s traditional social centers, multiplied in number and enlarged their congregations some even held double services in order to accommodate the spiritual and social needs of ghetto dwellers. The growing ghetto population also facilitated the expansion of the black community’s institutional structure, as blacks sought refuge among themselves. Alexander, a Republican from Orange, who entered the state assembly in 1921. It was also during this decade that the first black New Jerseyan was elected to the state legislature. For example, Oscar DePriest, a Chicago Republican, was elected in 1928 to the House of Representatives, becoming the first black congressman since Reconstruction and the first of his race from the North. On the political front the expansion of a black electorate enabled African Americans to gain public office in the North for the first time. Life in the “promised land” witnessed other developments as well. These features of ghetto life soon led to an equation of ghettos with slums. With the rise of the ghettos came a host of major social ills, such as overcrowded and deteriorated housing, inadequate sanitation, a high incidence of communicable diseases, and crime.
Heightened demand for black housing and various discriminatory housing practices, notably restrictive covenants, and block-busting, were the principal features of the ghetto-formation process, itself essentially a function of the exclusion of blacks from white residential areas. The first and largest of these, which also resulted from a large influx of black Caribbean immigrants, was New York’s Harlem. The arrival of black southerners to northern urban centers in the twenties facilitated the continued development of black ghettos. Of the state’s major cities, Newark again registered the highest percentage increase in black population its 38,880 blacks in 1930 were more than double its 16,977 blacks in 1920. With the Great Depression, which was rooted in the stock market crash in October of 1929, the northern movement of African Americans declined considerably.Īs part of the Great Migration, a steady stream of southern blacks continued to pour into New Jersey in the 1920s the state’s African American population increased by roughly 78 percent (from 117,132 to 208,828). This movement, peaking between 19, was also prompted by the serious decline in cotton production that began around 1923 with the advent of synthetic fabrics. The demand for African American labor in the North thus persisted during the 1920s and the large-scale movement of southern blacks to northern industrial centers continued. The passage of the immigration laws of 19 restricted the volume of southern and eastern European immigrants entering the United States.
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