Great Migration of African Americans

Beginning around 1916, Black Americans left the rural South in great numbers for cities in the North, Midwest and West, a movement called the Great Migration that lasted until about 1970. Roughly six million people moved. Chicago's Black population rose from about 44,000 in 1910 to about 109,000 in 1920, and Detroit, New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Oakland saw similar growth. In 1910 about 90 percent of Black Americans lived in the South, and by 1970 only about half did.¹

Southern Black people faced the system of Jim Crow segregation that followed the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and was confirmed by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), together with disfranchisement, lynching and poor schooling. Sharecropping kept many in poverty, and the boll weevil, which spread through the cotton fields from 1892, destroyed crops and the work that went with them. The pull came with World War I, when war production created factory jobs just as European immigration from the war's start stopped. The Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper edited by Robert Abbott, urged people to come, and letters from early migrants brought relatives after them along the railways.¹²

Migrants found better wages and the right to vote, but also crowded housing, restrictive covenants, discrimination by employers and unions, and violence such as the 1919 Red Summer riots and the 1917 East St. Louis riot. Black communities in northern cities produced the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and new music from jazz to rhythm and blues, and Black voters in the North gained influence that helped the civil rights movement. A Second Great Migration, from 1940 to 1970, carried millions more, many to the West Coast.¹