Explain how the Harlem Renaissance, African-American migration, women's suffrage and Prohibition contributed to social change

Learning goal: Explain how four movements, the Harlem Renaissance, African-American migration, women's suffrage and Prohibition, each contributed to social change in the United States in the early twentieth century, and compare the kinds of change they produced.

Social change means a lasting shift in how groups in a society live, relate to one another and understand their place: where people live, who votes, what is legal, whose voices are heard. A movement is a sustained, organized effort by many people toward a shared goal. The four movements in this standard differ. Migration was millions of individual decisions that added up to a demographic transformation. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and artistic flowering. Suffrage and Prohibition were organized political campaigns that changed the Constitution. Asking what kind of change each produced is the key to comparing them.

African-American migration (the Great Migration). Beginning around 1915, Black Southerners moved north in large numbers to cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Historians describe push factors: segregation under Jim Crow laws, disfranchisement, lynching, and poor returns from sharecropping, made worse when the boll weevil damaged cotton crops. They also describe pull factors: World War I created factory jobs just as European immigration nearly stopped, and Black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender published accounts of Northern opportunity. The migration continued, with pauses, until about 1970 and moved millions of people in total. It changed the North, where Black urban communities grew, built churches, businesses and newspapers, and later gained political influence as voters. It also met resistance: housing discrimination confined many migrants to crowded neighborhoods, and competition for jobs and housing contributed to the violence of 1919.

The Harlem Renaissance. In the 1920s Harlem, in New York City, became the center of a burst of Black literature, music, art and thought, made possible in part by migration that concentrated talent in one neighborhood. Writers included Langston Hughes, who had gone to high school in Cleveland, Ohio; Zora Neale Hurston; Claude McKay; and Countee Cullen. In 1925 Alain Locke edited The New Negro, an anthology that named the movement's spirit: a confident claim to dignity and cultural equality. Jazz and blues, carried north by migrants, reached national audiences through records and radio, with musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association promoted Black pride and economic independence and drew very large followings before Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and deported in 1927. W. E. B. Du Bois, through the NAACP magazine The Crisis, promoted Black writers. The Renaissance changed how Black Americans represented themselves and how many white Americans encountered Black culture, though it did not end segregation, and some critics then and now argue that white patronage shaped what artists could publish.

Women's suffrage. Suffrage is the right to vote. After decades of organizing, the Nineteenth Amendment, which forbids denying the vote on account of sex, was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified in August 1920 when Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to approve it. Two strategies worked side by side: the National American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Carrie Chapman Catt, lobbied state by state, and the National Woman's Party of Alice Paul picketed the White House in 1917 and endured arrests. Women's wartime work strengthened their argument. The change was real and large, but it had limits: many Black women in the South remained barred by poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation, and immigrants from Asia were barred from citizenship. Women's roles also changed outside politics: more women worked for wages, attended college and entered public life, and in 1923 Alice Paul's party first proposed an Equal Rights Amendment.

Prohibition. The temperance movement had deep Ohio roots: the Woman's Christian Temperance Union was founded in Cleveland in 1874, and the Anti-Saloon League began in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1893. Their campaigns produced the Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in January 1919, which banned the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes (it did not itself outlaw drinking or possessing alcohol, and the enforcing law allowed alcohol for medical, religious and industrial uses), and the Volstead Act of 1919 enforced it; Prohibition took effect in January 1920. The social change was large but not what reformers intended. Illegal saloons called speakeasies, bootlegging and organized crime, including Al Capone's Chicago operation, grew; enforcement was uneven; and disrespect for the law spread. The Twenty-first Amendment repealed Prohibition in December 1933, the only time an amendment has been repealed.

A fully worked model. Compare suffrage and Prohibition. Both were organized reform movements, both used the amendment process, both were ratified about a year and a half apart (January 1919 and August 1920), and women were leaders in both. The outcomes differ: suffrage lasted and expanded democracy, while Prohibition was repealed after almost fourteen years in effect because it proved unenforceable and unpopular. Conclusion: changing the Constitution does not guarantee lasting social change; public support and the ability to enforce a change help decide whether it lasts. Two cases suggest this; they cannot prove it as a rule.

The misconception. "The Nineteenth Amendment gave all women the vote in 1920." It removed sex as a legal ground for denial, but other barriers kept many women of color from voting until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Worked example 1 — classifying change: Great Migration: demographic change (where people lived) leading to cultural and political change. Harlem Renaissance: cultural change (how Black Americans were represented). Suffrage: political change (who votes). Prohibition: legal change that produced unintended social effects (speakeasies, organized crime). Classifying the kind of change is the first step in any comparison.

Worked example 2 — push and pull: A hypothetical sharecropper in Mississippi in 1917 reads in a Black newspaper that a Chicago meatpacking plant is hiring. Push factors in his decision: low cotton returns after boll-weevil damage, segregation, no vote, fear of violence. Pull factors: wages, schools, the chance to vote. His choice, multiplied by hundreds of thousands, changes Chicago. The example is hypothetical; the factors are documented.

Worked example 3 — Ohio and Prohibition: Evidence: the WCTU was founded in Cleveland (1874) and the Anti-Saloon League in Oberlin (1893). Interpretation: Ohio was a center of organized temperance reform. Result: the Eighteenth Amendment (ratified 1919, effective 1920) and its repeal by the Twenty-first (1933). The Ohio evidence explains origins, not outcomes; the outcome was national.

Four-movement comparison chart: For each movement record: its goal, its key people and organizations, its main dates, the kind of change it produced, and one limit or unintended result. Use only facts you can support from the lesson or a source you read.

Independent performance: Write an essay answering: "Which of the four movements produced the most lasting social change?" Success criteria: a thesis; evidence from at least three of the four movements with correct dates; a definition of "lasting" you apply consistently; one limit acknowledged for the movement you choose; and a clear separation of what happened from your judgment about it.