One might believe that we live in a capitalist society in which competitors in a particular business don’t ever collude with one another, but when it comes to the necessity of turning a profit, businesses and entrepreneurs are going to tend to do what they believe that they need to do to give their business enterprise the best chance of success. Back in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the vast majority of blacks lived in the Southern States, which should not come as any real surprise to anyone, since slavery was pretty much part and parcel of how the Southern economy functioned back then, and thereby those that despite being freed, were typically stuck in a construct in which they didn’t have a lot of good options to vacate their locale, of which, the general belief of blacks being employed as farm labor and similar, was that since they had a need of employment and of income, to strike the best deal that they could make, and if something better came their way to migrate to that.
Not too surprisingly, when it comes to white people who controlled the means of production, a lot of them didn’t want to get into a bidding war with one another when it came to black labor, so that, a law was duly passed, known as the Enticement and Contract-Enforcement Law which stipulated that to lure a worker away from one job to obtain better working conditions and more pay at another job, would not be permitted. In other words, whatever employment that a black laborer obtained under this contract law meant that they could not leave that employment to take on employment with someone else for better pay. To say that this was a real raw deal for the black laborer would be an understatement, because in a true capitalistic system, workers are entitled to find employment at their discretion and will, and to be not only precluded from doing so, but to work within a domain, in which wages are essentially frozen, and of a contract which is unfair to them, is morally corrupt -- yet, this was the law as exercised back then.
Quite frankly, there is then not only no room for advancement when a contract stipulates that the laborer has no right to take on a better deal, but it also removes any incentive from a laborer to do more than necessary, since there isn’t anything for them to aim for, in the achieving of such, which is why, the force of the law, welded by the white man, make a mockery of what supposedly freed people could or could not do, because when employment opportunities are restricted and thereby do not conform to an open market, it is the black laborer that suffers, and thereby is exploited.
So then, whenever people wonder why there are so many black people nowadays living up in the North, or the Midwest, it really comes down to perceived opportunity that leaving the Southern states represented back in the early 20th century, because those that see no future in one locale, are going to take on the risk of another locale, because this thus represents their only fair hope for success, in this the supposed leader of the free world.