Throughout the 1900’s, the nature of the city/urban neighborhood has become dramatically different. As the decades went by, many changes have occurred in the racial and wealth aspects of the communities in these cities. Racial aspects include The Great Migration, which was an extreme relocation of many African-Americans from southern states, such as Alabama, Louisiana, and Misssisssippi, to northern cities, such as Cleveland, Boston, Baltimore, and New York City. Gentrification, which is the upscaling of a neighborhood, is another factor, one of which that is fueled by an inflow of investment in a particular area.
The Great Migration took place in the 1900’s, between 1910 to around 1970. An estimated six million African-Americans moved from southern states into the North and Midwest cities. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration (1910–30), numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration (1940 to 1970), in which 5 million or more people moved and to a wider variety of destinations. This was mostly brought on by the continuous violence against blacks in the south. Even though they were free and segregation laws were passed, they were still denied many opportunities that whites were entitled to. For example, the right to vote and own homes. The number of blacks lynched rose significantly due to the passing of the Jim Crow laws. The south was not a place the blacks wanted to raise a 2 family. The North also offered many opportunities, such as better schools and the right of black men to vote. The Northern industries, such as meat-packing, stockyards, and railroads recruited a high number of blacks, making jobs easier to acquire than in the south.
Urban neighborhoods include ghettos, a term originally used for the description of neighborhoods consisting almost entirely of Jewish people.
