Black America began its move to the city because of a driving and desperate need for change. When rural southern communities, for all their fresh air and land, still remained too much a choking, binding, stagnating experience because of racism, economic, social, and political repressions, some people had to leave. Leaving meant many times leaving an extended family, a community, institutions and friends to go to an unknown area with few contacts and few concrete promises. The promise of the city was that it was there. It had an openness and pace that did not exist in small farm-based communities. The promise was that one could test one's abilities in uncharted and untried territory. There was a pioneering thrust to the expanding Black neighborhoods. Initially there was no space to accommodate the numbers; community boundaries were extended block by block, street by street- many times in conflict with other ethnic groups who had come to the city looking for the same thing.