This grim picture tends to focus only on discrimination and therefore to underplay the sense of possibility that many blacks nonetheless cherished at the time. More black people than ever before, after all, were escaping the specially vicious world of Jim Crow in the South. The North was different! Millions of blacks, at last, had jobs in the industrial sector, which seemed prosperous in the late 1940s. For such people a stable family life, with a future for the children, seemed within reach: most Negro families at that time were headed by two parents. Blacks who wanted no part of
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