Great Migration

The Great Migration was the movement of some six million Black Americans from the rural South of the United States to the cities of the Northeast, Midwest and West between about 1910 and 1970. Driven by segregation, violence and poverty under Jim Crow, and drawn by industrial jobs, the migrants transformed the country's largest cities and the cultural and political life of Black America.

Until 1910 more than nine in ten Black Americans lived in the South, most of them in the countryside, many working as sharecroppers. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation and shut Black citizens out of political power, and between 1882 and 1968 lynch mobs killed nearly 3,500 African Americans. Southern agriculture was also battered by floods and by the boll weevil, an insect pest that devastated cotton. An earlier wave of "Exodusters" had left for Kansas in the years after emancipation, but the great movement north began in the 1910s.

The First World War opened the door. European immigration collapsed, from about 1.2 million arrivals in 1914 to some 300,000 the next year, while factories needed workers for steel mills, railways, meatpacking and car plants. Northern firms sent recruiters south, sometimes offering free travel, and wages could be more than double those in the South. Black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender portrayed the North as a promised land and printed job notices and train timetables. Perhaps 400,000 people left the South between 1916 and 1918 alone. Migrants tended to follow rail lines and family networks: many from Mississippi went to Chicago, from Alabama to Detroit and Cleveland, and from Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia to East Coast cities such as Philadelphia, Washington and New York. By 1930 about 1.3 million Black Southerners were living in other regions; Detroit's Black population, only 6,000 in 1910, reached 120,000 by 1929.

The newcomers faced hostility from white workers who feared competition for jobs and housing. In 1917 rioting in East St. Louis left between 40 and 200 African Americans dead, and the NAACP answered with a silent march of more than 10,000 people in Harlem. In the "Red Summer" of 1919 racial violence broke out in many cities, worst of all in Chicago, where 38 people died. Discriminatory lending and housing practices confined migrants to crowded districts such as Chicago's Bronzeville.

The Great Depression slowed migration sharply, but the mechanisation of Southern farming in the 1930s and 1940s pushed many sharecroppers off the land, and the defence industries of the Second World War pulled them north and west. Around 1.4 million Black Southerners left in the 1940s, 1.1 million in the 1950s and 2.4 million in the 1960s and early 1970s. This time Western cities such as Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle and Portland also became major destinations, often for migrants from Texas and Louisiana. In Chicago, the Black population grew from 278,000 to 813,000 between 1940 and 1960.

The migration remade the map of Black America. By 1970 about 47 per cent of Black Americans lived outside the South, compared with 8 per cent in 1900, and more than 80 per cent lived in cities. Northern Black communities built newspapers, churches, businesses and political organisations, and gave rise to the Harlem Renaissance and a flowering of Chicago blues, as musicians such as Muddy Waters moved north from the Mississippi Delta. Industrial jobs and union membership lifted many families: the share of Black families below the poverty line fell from 87 per cent in 1940 to 30 per cent by 1970. Yet migrants still met discrimination and segregated housing. With deindustrialisation in the 1970s the movement ended, and after the gains of the civil rights movement the flow began to reverse as Black Americans moved back to the South.

Our 1914, 1930 and 1960 maps show the United States during the two waves of the Great Migration.