The Great Depression Of The 1930s

The growth of Chinese jobs in the California labor market did not stop there. Because of the hard times, employers found it especially attractive that the Chinese workers would work for long hours with low pay. Huge losses hit California in 1876 with a drought; this led to unemployment across the coast including for the Chinese. Many white investors, however, used the Chinese as scapegoats for this statewide depression, fueling the anti-Chinese fire and leading to more hostility towards Chinese workers. The firsthand account of Lee Chew, a Chinese immigrant to America in the early 1880s, shows the disparities between the white man’s perception of Chinese laborers and reality as well as the hostility that arose as a result. When Lee first arrived in America, he started working as a housekeeper for a family in California, being paid $3.50 a week and being able to keep 50 cents afterwards. For Lee and other Chinese immigrants, they believed the hostility arose from jealousy in the labor market, “because he [Chinese worker] is a more faithful worker than one of their people, [and they] have raised such a great outcry about Chinese cheap labor that they have shut him [Chinese worker] out of working on farms or in factories or building railroads or making streets or digging sewers.” Lee’s testimony shows the common ripple effects of the working restrictions white men imposed on the Chinese immigrants looking for jobs. This resulted in Chinese

The assigned readings offered an engaging view of the new suburban life emerging in California during the postwar years of the 1940s and 1950s. During this time, California was becoming heavily populated and was experiencing an increased demand for housing. In Holy Land, D.J. Waldie discussed the rise of the suburbs in Southern California, the creation of tract housing and shopping centers, and the 1950s illusion that everyone could be middle class (Waldie, 4-85). As suburban areas were developing and emerging within Southern California, a neighborhood was challenging the conservative norm of the time by allowing racial diversity within the area. In What 's Good for Boyle Heights is Good for the Jews, George J. Sánchez 's tells the forgotten history of Boyle Heights, a suburb of Los Angeles, praised for being one of America 's first communities to embrace racial diversity. During a time of severe bigotry against African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Latino-Americas, Jewish residents of Boyle Heights were able to respect and accept minorities of color living within their community (Sánchez, 633-657). The postwar years in California demonstrated the extraordinary power the state had in developing suburbs and how a small district within the Los Angeles area was able to challenge the status quo on racial diversity.

“The Red Scare of the 1950s, the years of Senator MCcarthy the city began condemning homes” (Normark 17.) When many social and interracial labor movements of the Left were dismantled. This was not an isolated case this was happening all over the country right before our own eyes. A 1950 far-sighted housing development of 3364 housing units proposed on a 278-acre site in the underprivileged downtown Chavez Ravine neighborhood. Elysian Park Heights, the project was intended to be the groundwork for citywide slum revitalization development. Regardless of how self-sufficient the residents of Chavez Ravine one of the more prominent Mexican American thriving communities served as a home to three Mexican Communities La Loma, Palo Verde and Bishop. Job and housing discrimination was one of the reasons the neighborhoods rallied around each other making them a thriving community. Despite of having no help from the city they had a school, church and vegetation. (Evanosky 80) Mexican families being discriminated everywhere else in the city they found refuge and decided to make Chavez Ravine their home. (Dennis Evanosky, Eric J. Kos, 80) Getting no response from the city, in spite of years asking for help to upgrade their community. The government condemn the habitat as a blighted area this changed their lives as they knew it. (80)

Images of Great Depression migrants often depict white families, impoverished farmers whose crops have been destroyed by dust storms, and people who have no choice but to escape to California in search of job opportunities (Shindo, 26). The oral history interview of Vera Jones Bailey about her experiences growing up in Kansas and Missouri and her move to California during the Great Depression both typifies and challenges those assumptions (Dunning, 1, 8). This interview was one of twenty six conducted by Judith K. Dunning, a project director at the Regional Oral History Office at the University of California in Berkeley, in 1986 as a part of the project “On the Waterfront: An Oral History of Richmond, California, 1942.” Dunning’s research

This investigation will analyze to what extent did negative racial encounters in the 1950’s caused the white fight to the suburbs.African Americans began moving into Chicago in great numbers following the Great Depression. Tensions arose as they moved into the city, which sparked many whites to move into neighboring suburbs such as the ones highlighted on the map to your right.(Ebony Magazine 18) Following the great population change were negative racial encounters and segregation.This exhibit will inform others of the point of views of both sides of the White Flight in America beginning in the 1950s.

In Gayle Gullett’s, Women Progressives and the Politics of Americanization in California, colored immigrants were being excluded from the act of Americanization because of their

Many African Americans had moved north during the Great Migration to escape conditions in the south, but found that discrimination was still prevalent in northern cities. African Americans not only had difficulties finding jobs, but still felt the stigma of being black. Living within the time of legal discrimination, many African Americans soon realized that though they may have escaped the violence of the south, they still had to deal with the challenges and setbacks of being black in America. The Great Migration began in the 1910s and 1920s during World War I. The second wave of migration of Blacks to the north and west began in the 1940s during and after World War II (Alexander, 1998, p. 352). With the war going on, many black people found jobs due to the numerous openings of those fighting in the war. But once the war ended, white soldiers came back, finding blacks filling their jobs and wanting them back. Black men had particularly difficult times finding jobs; “they were the last to be hired or accepted in the unions and were the first to be let go during the Depression” (Dyer, 2001). Not only did the new immigrants face tension with whites over jobs, but also with Northern blacks, who believed that the migrants “threatened their social, economic and political security” (Tolnay 1997, p.1216).

Factors like eminent domain, urban renewal, and suburbanization impacted Chicanos because their homes were torn down and they couldn’t do anything about the destruction. Professor Carpio mentioned how the Chavez Ravine study was urban renewal at its finest, where space was taken to create shopping centers, playgrounds, and parking facilities (Carpio, Chicano Studies 10A, 2016). There would be a clear discrepancy of how the Chicano populated town was before the urbanization and how it turned out after, but the memories seared into Chicanos were of their town being torn apart. When Chicanos could do nothing else but accept the modernization of society, they tried to live in the suburban areas that replaced their Latino barrios. Yet again, they faced discrimination by Anglos who did not want them in the suburban space they created to keep them separate from Mexicans and other races. In the case Doss v. Bernal, Chao Romero stated, “the Bernal’s experience of segregation and housing discrimination was unfortunately common throughout California…” which meant at this point in Chicano history they were used to this treatment, but they counteracted it politically, which is why the Bernal’s brought the problem to court (Romero, 1). In this case they experienced a victory where the Anglos living in the suburban could

The 1920’s was a decade of discovery for America. As mentioned in “who was roaring in the twenties? —Origins of the great depression,” by Robert S. McElvaine America suffered with the great depression due to several factors but it managed to stay prosperous at the end. In “America society and culture in the 1920’s,” by David A. Shannon there was much more to the great depression. It was a time of prosperity an economic change. Women and men were discovering who they were and their value to society in “The Revolution in Morals,” by Gilman M. Ostrander. Even if Racism still existed as mentioned in “ The Tribal Twenties,” by John Higham, the 1920’s still was time of change that affects people today.

The political backlash to the widespread economic hardships of the time, which should have been aimed at the capitalist system of exploitation, fell instead on minority workers and their families. Mexican immigrants, welcomed as laborers during the economic boom of the war years, were scapegoated during the depression and subjected to racist attacks and severe immigration restrictions. Over one million immigrants came from Mexico to the United States between 1900 and 1930, filling the demand for low-wage, unskilled workers in the growing U.S. economy. Most Mexican Americans were farmers and they settled in the communities in California and the Southwest. Many Mexicans and their children became U.S. citizens. Mexican Americans faced a great deal of increasing hostility because they were competing with whites for whatever low-paying jobs that were available.

Because of California’s need of agricultural labor, many immigrants found work in the farm field of California. With this need

The Japanese were not the only ones in California during the 1930’s having to perform hard labor, many Mexicans were migrant farm workers in California as well.

The roaring twenties was a time filled with hope and change. President Warren G. Harding promised a “return to normalcy”, which reflected his own conservative values and the voters’ wants for stability and order. Americans felt that they had been through more than enough, and desired prosperity. During the years 1919 and 1920 the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments were passed; the outlaw of alcoholic beverages and the right for women to vote, which ones of the many reasons society was turning their backs on Progressivism. Republicans were beginning to return to their previous dominance. The 1920’s was an economic boom for America, including everything from an increase in jobs, a rise in plentiful goods, new consumer products, and the reduction of taxes. The country was filled with jazz music, dance, and what appeared to be a brighter future. The 1929 crash of stock market was the beginning of a downward spiral leading in to the Great Depression. The stock market crash is often to be confused as the cause of the Great Depression, although that is false. A few of the issues that lead to the Great Depression included; farming (which decreased in demand as farms increased through the states during World War I), banking, and mass unemployment. Capitalism took shape as what was once the individualistic Protestant work ethic was reshaped into industrial work on a grand scale. Each worker contributed to the greater good, and the workers were presided over by a boss

My grandfather was born in Wisconsin during the Great Depression. He moved back and forth between Chicago, Illinois and Beloit, Wisconsin growing up. His household was impoverished. While culturally German, his family lived in the Polish neighborhood of Chicago. At this time, racial tensions between different Europeans in the United States was still high. “During this time we saw, for example, the Irish “become” white and the “heathen” Asians transformed into model minorities.”2 Carl grew up fast,

Thousands of migrants in the 1920’s - 1950’s envisioned Compton, California as the perfect place to settle down and ideal center for industrial workers. That vision did come true for white Americans, although it