Great Migration (African American)

Based on Wikipedia: Great Migration (African American)

Between 1910 and 1970, five million Black Americans voted with their feet. They packed what they could carry, boarded trains heading north and west, and never looked back. It was one of the largest mass movements in American history—bigger than the waves of Italian, Irish, Jewish, or Polish immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island. And unlike most great migrations throughout human history, this one wasn't driven by invading armies or spreading famine. It was driven by something perhaps even more powerful: the simple, burning desire to be treated as human beings.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson called it "a declaration of independence written by their actions."

The World They Left Behind

To understand why millions of people abandoned everything familiar—their homes, their churches, their extended families, the graves of their ancestors—you have to understand what life was like in the Jim Crow South.

Jim Crow wasn't just a set of laws. It was an entire system designed to maintain white supremacy after the abolition of slavery. The name came from a racist caricature in minstrel shows, and the laws it described touched every aspect of daily life. Separate schools. Separate water fountains. Separate entrances to buildings. Separate seating on buses and trains. And always, always, the Black facilities were inferior—when they existed at all.

But the indignities of segregation were only part of the picture.

Between 1882 and 1968, nearly 3,500 African Americans were lynched—murdered by mobs, often in public spectacles that drew crowds like county fairs. Postcards of the bodies were sold as souvenirs. Local law enforcement typically looked the other way, when they weren't actively participating. For a Black man in the rural South, an accusation—any accusation—could mean death. Looking at a white woman the wrong way. Failing to step off the sidewalk quickly enough. Succeeding too visibly in business.

Economic opportunities were strangled by the sharecropping system, which had replaced slavery with something that often looked remarkably similar. Black farmers would work land owned by whites, giving up a share of their crop as rent. But the arithmetic was rigged. The landowners controlled the books, ran the stores where sharecroppers had to buy supplies on credit, and somehow the debts never seemed to get paid off. Generations of families found themselves trapped in cycles of poverty with no legal way out.

Then came the boll weevil.

This small beetle, about a quarter-inch long, arrived from Mexico around 1892 and proceeded to devastate the cotton crop that the entire Southern economy depended on. By the 1920s, the boll weevil had destroyed millions of acres of cotton. The agricultural economy that had trapped Black Southerners in poverty was now pushing them out entirely.

The Pull of the North

While the South was pushing people out, the North was pulling them in.

World War One changed everything. Before the war, about 1.2 million European immigrants arrived in the United States each year, providing cheap labor for the factories of the industrial North. In 1915, that number dropped to 300,000. Meanwhile, American men were enlisting to fight in Europe, leaving factory floors empty.

Northern industrialists faced a problem. Their steel mills, meatpacking plants, automobile factories, and railroads needed workers. So they sent labor agents south, like talent scouts recruiting for a different kind of team. These agents fanned out through Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana, offering free train tickets and promises of good wages.

The wages weren't just good—they were transformative. A Black worker could earn twice as much or more in a Chicago factory as they could laboring in Southern fields. And beyond the money, there was something even more valuable: the chance to vote, to walk into a store through the front door, to sit where you pleased on a streetcar.

The Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper with national circulation, became an unlikely engine of migration. Its pages were filled with job listings, success stories of those who had already moved, and sharp-tongued editorials encouraging readers to escape what it called "the land of lynching." The paper was so influential in promoting migration that some Southern towns banned its distribution.

The Journey

Migration followed geography. People from Mississippi, most often, ended up in Chicago—straight up the Illinois Central Railroad line that connected the Delta to the city by the lake. Virginians headed to Philadelphia. Texans and Louisianans, when they went west, gravitated toward Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

But geography wasn't everything. Chain migration—following the path of friends, relatives, and former neighbors—shaped the patterns just as powerfully. If your cousin had made it to Detroit and wrote back about the job he'd found at Ford, Detroit is where you went. Studies have shown that when one person moved from a Southern town to a Northern city, on average nearly two additional people would eventually make the same journey.

The migrants carried their culture with them. The blues, born in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta, traveled to Chicago and plugged in, becoming the electrified Chicago blues that would later give birth to rock and roll. The foods of the South—collard greens, cornbread, fried chicken, black-eyed peas—became soul food in Northern cities. Black churches established in the South sent pastors and congregations north, where they became centers of community life and, eventually, of political organizing.

What They Found

The North was not the promised land.

It was better in many ways. Black men could vote. The terrorism of lynch mobs was largely absent. Wages were higher. But racism didn't stop at the Mason-Dixon line. It just wore different clothes.

Housing discrimination was brutal and systematic. Black families who tried to move into white neighborhoods faced violence—firebombings, brick-throwing mobs, crosses burned on lawns. When violence wasn't enough, there were restrictive covenants: clauses written into property deeds that prohibited selling to Black buyers. Banks refused mortgages to Black families, a practice called redlining because of the red lines drawn on maps around Black neighborhoods to mark them as too risky for investment.

The result was overcrowding. Migrants poured into neighborhoods that couldn't expand, packed into apartments subdivided and subdivided again. Landlords knew they could charge premium rents for substandard housing because their tenants had nowhere else to go.

After World War Two, the federal government made things worse. The G.I. Bill promised returning veterans low-cost mortgages to buy homes in the new suburbs. In theory, this applied to everyone. In practice, it was a whites-only program. In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs, 67,000 mortgages were insured under the G.I. Bill. Fewer than 100 went to non-white families.

The workplace brought its own conflicts. White workers, particularly recent European immigrants who had only recently secured their own economic footholds, saw Black migrants as competition—and as a threat. The American Federation of Labor, the dominant union organization of the era, actively advocated for segregating Black and white workers.

The Red Summer

Tensions exploded into violence.

In 1917, the city of East St. Louis, Illinois witnessed one of the bloodiest episodes of racial violence in American history. White mobs, enraged by competition for jobs in the meatpacking and aluminum industries, attacked Black residents for days. Estimates of the death toll range from 40 to 200. More than 6,000 Black residents were driven from their homes.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—the NAACP—responded with something new: the Silent March. On July 28, 1917, more than 10,000 Black men and women walked down Fifth Avenue in New York City, saying nothing, carrying signs that read "Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?" The march was silent because words had failed. The message had to be written in the simple fact of their presence, their numbers, their dignity.

Two years later came what the writer and activist James Weldon Johnson called the Red Summer of 1919.

The war was over. White soldiers were coming home to find that Black workers had taken their jobs—and weren't giving them back. In city after city, violence erupted. Washington, D.C. Chicago. Omaha. Knoxville. Even in Elaine, Arkansas, a small town in the Delta, where Black sharecroppers who had tried to organize a union were massacred by white mobs.

Chicago was the worst. The riot began on July 27 when a Black teenager named Eugene Williams, swimming in Lake Michigan, drifted across an invisible line into waters that white bathers considered theirs. He was struck by rocks thrown by white youths and drowned. When a white police officer refused to arrest any of the attackers, the city exploded.

For a week, white and Black Chicagoans fought in the streets. When the violence finally subsided, 38 people were dead, 500 injured, and over a thousand left homeless. Property damage exceeded $250,000—millions in today's dollars.

The Numbers

The Great Migration is often divided into two phases, though the movement was continuous.

The first phase, from 1910 to 1940, saw about 1.6 million people leave the South. They came primarily from rural areas, often with little formal education, seeking factory jobs in the industrial North. By 1930, the Black population in Northern states had increased by 40 percent.

The Great Depression slowed everything. With factories closing across the industrial belt, there were no jobs to migrate to. The 1930s also saw the final collapse of the sharecropping system, as mechanization made human labor less necessary for cotton farming. This pushed people off the land but gave them nowhere to go.

The second phase began with World War Two. The defense industries needed workers again, and this time the migration was even larger. About 1.4 million Black Southerners moved north or west in the 1940s. Another 1.1 million followed in the 1950s. And 2.4 million more in the 1960s and early 1970s.

This second wave was different. The migrants were more likely to come from cities, not farms. They were often better educated. And increasingly, they headed west—to Los Angeles, to San Francisco and Oakland, to Seattle and Portland, to Denver and Phoenix.

By the late 1970s, the Great Migration was over. The industrial cities of the North were in crisis, factories closing, neighborhoods crumbling. The phenomenon that would come to be called deindustrialization was hollowing out the very places that had drawn migrants for decades.

The Transformation

Consider the numbers: In 1900, more than 90 percent of Black Americans lived in the South. By 1970, that figure was just over half.

Or consider urbanization: In 1900, only one in five Black Southerners lived in a city. By 1970, more than 80 percent of Black Americans nationwide lived in urban areas.

This was a total transformation of how and where Black Americans lived—and consequently, of American culture itself.

The Harlem Renaissance, that explosion of Black art, literature, and music in the 1920s, was a direct result of the Great Migration. Writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, musicians like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, found in New York a critical mass of Black creativity and a stage from which to reach the world. Similar cultural flowering occurred in Chicago, in what became known as the Chicago Black Renaissance.

The political consequences were equally profound. In the South, Black Americans had been effectively disenfranchised since the end of Reconstruction. In the North, they could vote—and their votes mattered. The concentration of Black voters in major cities gave them political power they had never before possessed. This power would eventually help pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Return

History has a way of reversing itself.

Since the 1990s, more Black Americans have been moving to the South than leaving it. This "New Great Migration" reflects changed circumstances on both ends of the journey. The Jim Crow system is gone—not racism, certainly, but the legal apparatus of segregation. The Southern economy has grown, offering jobs that the declining cities of the Rust Belt cannot match. The cost of living is lower. And for many, there are family ties that reach back generations, connections to a homeland their grandparents or great-grandparents left behind.

Atlanta has become a particular magnet, a Black mecca where African Americans have built substantial economic and political power. Charlotte, Houston, Dallas—cities across the South are seeing the children and grandchildren of the Great Migration return.

The writer Nicholas Lemann captured the magnitude of what happened: "The Great Migration was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements in history—perhaps the greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation."

Five million people made a choice. They chose freedom over familiarity, uncertainty over oppression, the unknown over the unbearable. They transformed American cities, American politics, American culture. They proved that when laws failed to protect them, when their own country treated them as less than citizens, they could still act—could still vote, even if only with their feet.

That declaration of independence, written in train tickets and packed suitcases and letters home, changed everything.