  In settling in the new locales, the migrants and their subsequent generations began to undergo what, with hindsight, became a historic and wrenching transformation of what had been, for the most part, a brutally oppressed, illiterate, yet resolute agrarian peasantry into an ethno-racial urban working class, and the transformation of a significant few of them into a modern middle class. With the transformations came vexing challenges and opportunities. Among the most compelling needs were for forms of life appropriate to the new urban circumstances—as well as for those who remained in the rebuilding South—that would sustain the person and a people and promote flourishing life in conditions of intense competition with other ethno-racial class groups, and high risks of social disintegration and failure as invidious racism, unchecked by federal restraints, became ever more intense and widespread. There were, then, compelling needs for social and cultural as well as economic support as nuclear and extended family units were disrupted in being stretched across long miles of migration and crucial forms of communal and organizational support that helped to sustain life in the South were in very short supply in the new urban centers. Once again, in the context of demanding needs to be met in the struggle to survive and endure, particularly thoughtful and articulate Black persons took up the challenges of conceiving what was best to be done for the well-being of the race, and how best to achieve well-being.