Black waitresses also may have lost food service jobs as black migration into the northern cities increased after World War I. Although an estimated half-million blacks headed north between 1916 and 1921, few moved into waitressing.30 In the South, black women were more acceptable in visible public service jobs than in the North because southerners were accustomed to intimate social interactions with black servants in both the private and public realms. In the North, blacks found themselves competing with immigrant women who, unlike white southerners, were less inhibited about taking on personal service work—work that in the South was associated firmly with black labor.31