The movement of roughly six million Black Southerners to cities of the North, Midwest, and West between about 1910 and 1970.
The Great Migration was the relocation of approximately six million Black Americans out of the rural South between roughly 1910 and 1970. Migrants left to escape racial violence and the daily oppression of Jim Crow, and to pursue work, schooling, and a measure of freedom that sharecropping and disfranchisement denied them. The two world wars opened the door: as men went overseas and European immigration fell, Northern industry needed labor it had previously refused to hire from the Black South.
Historians describe two phases. In the first, from about 1910 to 1940, some two million people moved to Northern and Midwestern cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. Organizations rose to meet them; the National Urban League, established in 1910, was among those formed in response to the influx. In the second phase, from the Second World War into the 1970s, roughly three million more departed, and the stream widened westward to Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. Among the earlier migrants was the family of Jesse Owens, who moved from Alabama to Cleveland in 1922.
The North was not the promised land. Migrants met the violence of the Red Summer of 1919, restrictive covenants, and the lending practices later called redlining, which confined Black families to segregated neighborhoods and limited their ability to build wealth. Yet the migration reshaped the nation. It concentrated Black voters in Northern cities where registration barriers were lower, turning them into a political force; it fed the growth of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association; and it built the audiences, institutions, and neighborhoods from which the Harlem Renaissance emerged.
See also: Jim Crow, Sharecropping, Lynching, Redlining, Harlem Renaissance, New Negro Movement
Sources
- National Archives and Records Administration, “The Great Migration (1910–1970).” Link
- Library of Congress, “The Booker T. Washington Era,” The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship. Link
- Library of Congress, “The Segregation Era (1900–1939),” The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom. Link
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