"Black Protest: A Rejection of the American Dream" and The New Negro

The focus of my paper is the first Great Migration from 1900-1930 and focuses not on the migration itself but on the regions in the North that became home for the migrants. This essay that I choose looks at the idea of the American Dream and what that meant for the people planning a move to the North. There was a promise of attaining happiness once in the North because of how it was promised to be different. But once in the North, the migrants had to deal with elements that were not always a factor in the South. Becoming part of the community and being expected to be a person of production and activism often followed new migrants in the North. There had never been opportunity for these black migrants to take the chances to get involved and now that they were afforded these chances, some had no idea how to take advantage of that situation. The New Negro was not always an easy identity to fall into and many times there were struggles to find a place that fit in their life and was comfortable. This struggle was visible in the  North and so the American Dream is not always realized so quickly but in fact takes time and patience.