After the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments outlawed slavery and established the constitutional rights of African Americans. These amendments gave African Americans the freedom to migrate to other parts of the country and to establish their own communities.

In the South, the systematic segregation created by Jim Crow laws defined the social order, with separate communities for whites and blacks. The center of the early-twentieth-century black community was the church, with its strong tradition of storytelling and oral history that dated back to the pre-literacy days of slavery. As one of the few institutions that African Americans controlled, the church provided not only a meeting place, but also spiritual comfort against a backdrop of inequality and oppression. Schools, sports teams, garden clubs, and barbershops also brought African Americans together in community activities.

Simultaneously, segregated conditions in the South triggered the Great Migration, beginning in 1915, when many African Americans moved north in search of better opportunities. By the late 1940s, African Americans were moving in great numbers to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and a dozen other cities, where a growing black community awaited them, where public facilities were often integrated, and where African Americans were allowed to vote.

Throughout the United States, limited access to equal education and employment determined the economic outlook for African Americans. Even in northern cities, de facto segregation relegated African Americans to menial jobs such as cooking, housecleaning, various types of janitorial work, factory jobs, and providing childcare for white families. Being a mail carrier was one of the better jobs available to African Americans.

While many struggled for better opportunities and economic equality, not everyone was poor. In some pockets of the country, African Americans created and sustained professional, craft, and trade jobs. But in the larger community, they were paid less than whites were for doing the same job, they often could not get jobs in stores where they shopped, and African Americans who openly opposed segregation often lost their jobs.

Most schools in the South were segregated, and because African American children were needed to work in the fields, their schools were often open only during the winter months.