Many of the black sharecroppers migrating to the cities were illiterate and had no chance of getting a proper job, they left to find a new promised land, and only to have their dreams dashed away. The writer Richard Write, himself a migrant from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, wrote that ‘never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city.’ Blacks often found it hard living when slumlords gouged them for rent, employers refused to hire them, and some union bosses denied them membership. Soon the delightful dream of the Promised Land had turned into an ugly nightmare, black families were faced with illiteracy, joblessness, and welfare dependency, but by far the hardest pill to swallow was the new threat of racism and street gangs. Angry whites attacked blacks that dared move into their neighbourhoods. For several nights during 1951, a white mob in a Chicago suburb assaulted a building into which a black family had moved. The National Guard had to stop the disturbance and disperse the crowd. Chicago tried to cope with this problem by building Black Public Housing Schemes, which would also increase the building economy of Chicago drastically. These however were essentially overcrowded racial enclaves or segregated prisons.
Black Americans were not the only people to have had a bad time during the American prosperity years; Orientals also had a bad time especially the Japanese were forced to live their lives in fear because of the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Many Americans even some blacks hated the ‘Japs’; some people went out of their way to make sure that they realised it. One Californian barbershop offered ‘free shaves for Japs’ but noted that it was ‘not responsible for accidents.’ Others were even blunter. Idaho’s governor declared: ‘a good solution to the Jap problem would be to send them all back to Japan, then sink the island. They live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats.’ Such attitudes were regrettably widespread and partially due to the growing American ego and the fact that people now felt that they had accomplished so much without the help from other nations. They became targets of the FBI, even FDR ordered 100,000 Japanese Americans to be rounded up on mass and put into internment camps. In contrast the 600,000 German and Italian Americans were individually investigated.
With the US prosperity came new and advanced technology, better wages, more social time and better quality of life. This shortly led to women becoming bored of their idealistic housewife jobs. Betty Friedon expressed all of their frustrations in the book ‘The Feminine Mystique’ which she wrote in 1963. Many regarded her as the founder of the modern Feminist movement. Women argued that ‘women, as well as men can only find their identity in work that uses their full capacities. A woman cannot find her identity in the dull routine of housework.’ This book came as a revelation to many American housewives. In 1963 the campaign of Civil Rights was making real progress, and this began to overlap with the women’s problems. The call came to ban the discrimination on gender and race.
In 1961 President Kennedy appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as chair of the Presidential Commission on the status of women. In 1963 the commission reported and showed the problems that the women were talking about, in 1960 only 5 percent of the nations managers were women, and only 12 percent of professions and technical workers were women. In the 1960s a woman in the same job as a man earned on average 59 percent less than the man.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 guarantied equal rights for all minorities as well as women.
