Agreed about the socioeconomic environment-but the facts of that environment doesn’t justify blacks being singled out for a violent campaign to drive them out of town.

As to other options-you weren’t saying that any groups OTHER than southern blacks should have considered the option of leaving the country during hard times. Phrasing it as you did implies that black people had less legitimate claim to the identity of “American” and less right to stay in the country they’d been born in. Chicago was the place working people of all races chose because it was about the only place, in the 1919 era, where they had a chance to find jobs. You have yet to explain why you think that it was any less legitimate for black people to move their than it was for any other working-class people.

And other groups had it hard, but nobody had it rougher than black and Indigenous peoples in this country. There is nothing in the poor white experience remotely comparable to generations of slavery or having to live in Jim Crow.

Finally, I don’t preach-it’s just that I don’t leave bullshit unchallenged. And your implication that violence committed by black people in Chicago in 1919-essentially all of which was in self-defense, since black people didn’t want any of the fighting and simply wished to be left alone-was somehow morally equivalent to violence by the white racist mobs whose objective was to drive all black people out of Chicago IS bullshit.