For the firsttime in history, thousands upon thousands of individual
Afro- Americans had made a basic choice concerning their own
existence. They refused to remain victims of an impersonal and
oppresseve system, and, as the result, they deliberately pulled up
their roots, left their friends and neighbors and moved north to
what they hoped would be "the promised land."
From this decision emerged the new Negro. If he was less polite
and more aggressive than before, he was also more self-reliant
and less dependent on pity and charity. This change, however, did
not occur suddenly. The passive, well-behaved Negro, content to
stay in his place, had largely been a myth. In part, he, had been
the product of a guilt-ridden white stereotype which found this
myth comforting. The Negro himself had also contributed to this
fiction by his custom of social mimicry, his habit of appearing
to fill the role which whites expected of him. By the end of
slavery, however, a spirit of individuality had been growing
within the Negro consciousness. The opportunity for industrial
employment in the North which had resulted from war and from
the slowdown in European immigration along with the increase of
racism and segregation in the South combined to open the way for
the development of the growing spirit of determination.
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