Slavery

The South was full of hate prejudice, ignorance and disrespect towards African Americans. Jim Crow laws, prevented African Americans from becoming successful and moving past slavery. Starting in 1900 Africans Americans began leaving the south and traveling by train to Northern cities. As immigrants came to America they faced strong prejudice from white American citizens. At this same time large amounts of immigrant; coming from Europe, Asia and Mexico began coming to the US. Both the immigrants and African Americans were trying to move away from the struggles they faced in the past. Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York began to become more diverse due to the incoming of African Americans or the immigrants into there cities.

Los Angeles became home to African Americans, Japanesese, and Mexicans by 1920. “Los Angeles had a reputation as "a good town for Negroes" during the so-called "Golden Era" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when jobs were available, homeownership was achievable, the city was largely free of violent racism, and the future seemed open. Conditions began to change in the 1910s and particularly in the 1920s. As early as 1913, after visiting the city, W. E. B. DuBois wrote enthusiastically of what its Negroes had achieved. But then he added: "Los Angeles is not Paradise. The color line is there and sharply drawn.” (AIE). The Japanese experience was similar to the experience of African Americans. “Like African Americans and Mexicans, Japanese immigrants were affected by restrictive covenants intended to prevent owners from selling to them. Even in areas where these covenants did not exist, native white residents often objected to the movement of Japanese into a neighborhood. In the early 1920s Japanese gardeners and shopkeepers began settling in Hollywood. In 1923 when a Japanese Presbyterian congregation purchased land for a church, objections to an increased Japanese presence in Hollywood erupted in a noisy campaign characterized by signs like this one on the porch instructing "Japs [to] Keep Moving. This is a White Man's Neighborhood." SWAT the JAP, a crudely racist newsheet, carried messages like the following:”( ).

“Black-white relations in growing Chicago were not completely dominated by conflict or shaped by segregation. The Black Belt neighborhoods often overlapped early in this era with nearby neighborhoods of other working class, immigrant groups. Immigrants and blacks worked together in the packing plants and the steel mills. They shopped on Maxwell Street for bargains. Immigrant and migrant children interacted on city streets and in some playgrounds. Although there was friction and tension between groups, children were often able to interact beyond such tensions and enjoy each other's