The growth of industry made more people from the United States and Latin America come to Youngstown. By the late 19th century, African Americans were well represented in Youngstown. The first local African Methodist Episcopal Church was started in 1871. In the 1880s, local attorney William R. Stewart was the second African American elected to the Ohio House of Representatives. A large increase of African Americans in the early 20th century was because of changes in the industrial area. During the national Steel Strike of 1919, local industrialists recruited thousands of workers from the South, many of whom were Black. This move upset local Whites, and for decades, African-American steelworkers experienced discrimination in the workplace. Migration from the South rose dramatically in the 1940s, when the mechanization of southern agriculture brought an end to the exploitative sharecropping system, leading onetime farm laborers to seek industrial jobs.