Between 1900 and 1930 blacks in North America were venturing into new territories in terms of migration, education, employment, and the arts. The United States witnessed a massive internal migration of African Americans out of the South and into northern cities; in particular, New York and Chicago grew exponentially.
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Ernest Withers’s photograph of the sanitation strike in Memphis in 1968 is similarly well known today. It is often interpreted as an imagined future. It records Black workers’ mass walkout in February 1968 and their infamous placards that read “I AM A MAN” in protest against discriminatory treatment and life-threatening working conditions. With their disparate clothing and physiques, the men were united by their race and their declaration of shared identity – as men.
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