Johnson. Negro Housing: Physical Aspects, Social and Economic Factors Home Ownership and Financing
This report, located in UA’s Hoole Special Collections library, addresses the physical, social, economic, and financial factors of home ownership within the Negro communities—more specifically “from the farm of the South to the
great industrial city of the North,”—in 1932 (Johnson vii). Johnson’s informative report focuses on the factual conditions of these communities rather than stating opinions on whether it was right or wrong. Johnson takes the many different aspects of Negro housing and breaks them down chapter by chapter. For example, chapter one talks about physical aspects of housing such as the general characteristics of areas inhabited, chapter two reports on the community as a whole including the violent patterns, chapter five writes on financial issues of home buying for Negroes, and so forth. Considering that this work is relatively formal with mature and somewhat complex diction, the audience of this work may be college-aged students or adults; in search of insight on credible facts of the different aspects of Negro housing from the Northern to Southern parts of America during the start of the Great Depression.
This report is relevant to my research for my ancestors during the 1930s because it applies directly to my grandmother who lived in Montgomery, Alabama, and traveled north to Detroit, Michigan, during The Great Migration in search of work. This report will give me an insight on what communities were like where my grandmother lived.