The term “The Great Migration” describes the movement of approximately 6 million Black Americans from the US South to North, Midwest, and West, particularly northern cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. This movement, largely happening between 1910 and 1970, was motivated by the push of increased anti-Black violence in the South, motivated by white Southerners’ fear of the increased power and representation of Black people in society and government, spurred by the passing of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. Black people were also drawn out of the South by the pull of job opportunities, especially as the demand for industrial workers increased during World War I.

Jim Crow legislation, or “Jim Crow laws,” refers to laws in the South that reinforced racial segregation. Instituted after the Reconstruction period (1877) and continuing until the 1950s, this collection of laws is named after a blackface character in a minstrel show, after which the term “Jim Crow” became a racial slur referring to Black people. The laws, legislated on the local and state levels, mainly involved the segregation of public spaces like schools, parks, and restaurants, but they were reinforced by the 1896 U. S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which codified the idea of “separate but equal.” This legitimizing of segregation was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. The Board of Education, which ruled that the separate educational facilities weren’t, in fact equal, and established a legal foundation for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Tenement houses were constructed to address the increased demand for housing as urban populations swelled in the 19th century. In New York in particular, warehouses and former single-family homes based in the city’s poorest neighborhoods were divided into apartments. These tenements often failed to meet minimal living standards, lacking adequate plumbing, ventilation, lighting, and even windows. In 1867, New York passed its first Tenement House Act to regulate tenement housing, but as Hartman demonstrates, this law and its successors did little to alleviate the dire conditions and often had detrimental consequences. (“Tenements.” History. 16 Nov. 2021.)