The Great Migration

Figure 1. This map shows the migrant streams of southern African Americans during the Great Migration from 1916 to 1930. (credit: “Great Migration” by Bill of Rights Institute/Flickr, CC BY 4.0)

Some historians differentiate between a first Great Migration (1916–40) and a second Great Migration (1940–70). Both waves of relocation featured Black Americans leaving the South for other regions of the country, typically in search of better-paid work and a less hostile environment. The first Great Migration saw about 1.6 million people move from mostly rural areas in the South to northern industrial cities. From 1910 to 1930, approximately 1.3 million Black southerners moved north and west in several different migrant streams that generally depended on the transportation available to them. African Americans from the East Coast typically went to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and New York. New York City’s Black population more than doubled during those decades, from 152,000 to 328,000. From the middle South, Black residents of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky moved to Chicago and midwestern industrial cities, where car manufacturers and related industries began to employ African Americans. Detroit’s population grew from 41,000 in 1910 to 120,066 in 1920. Arkansans, Louisianians, and Texans went to places like Saint Louis and California. The Second Great Migration (1940–70) began in earnest after the Great Depression and brought at least 5 million people—including many townspeople with urban skills—to the North and West.

Push Factors

A combination of both push factors and pull factors played a role in this movement. Despite the end of the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution (ensuring freedom, the right to vote regardless of race, and equal protection under the law, respectively), African Americans were still subjected to intense racial hatred. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War led to increased death threats, violence, and a wave of lynchings. Even after the formal dismantling of the Klan in the late 1870s, racially motivated violence continued. According to researchers at the Tuskegee Institute, there were thirty-five hundred racially motivated lynchings and other murders committed in the South between 1865 and 1900. For African Americans fleeing this culture of violence, northern and midwestern cities offered an opportunity to escape the dangers of the South. Impoverished Black farmers began moving to southern cities in large numbers after 1910, and many continued from there to northern cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, New York, and Chicago. Rural southern African Americans worked chiefly as sharecroppers, planting and harvesting crops on White landowners’ farms for a percentage of the profit (often 50 percent). Many sharecroppers ended the year in debt, especially after the boll weevil began to move across the South in 1892, decimating cotton crops. In 1900, nearly half of southern farmers did not own land, and a majority of them were African Americans. Under the thumb of White landowners and in constant debt, many of these sharecroppers compared their living and working conditions to slavery.

Pull Factors

In addition to this “push” out of the South, African Americans were also “pulled” to the cities by factors that attracted them, including the opportunity to earn a wage rather than be tied to a landlord, and the chance to vote (for men, at least), ideally without the threat of violence. Although many lacked the funds to move north, factory owners and other businesses that sought cheap labor sometimes provided assistance. Often, the men moved first and then sent for their families once they were established in their new city life.

The Black experience during the Great Migration became an important theme in the artistic movement known first as the New Negro Movement and later as the Harlem Renaissance, which would have an enormous impact on the culture of the era. Based in New York City, this cultural movement produced some of the finest and most influential literature, music, and fashion of the twentieth century. The Great Migration also began a new era of increasing political activism among African Americans, who after being disenfranchised in the South found a new place for themselves in public life in the cities of the North and West. The civil rights movement directly benefited from this activism.

Life in the North

Racism and a lack of formal education relegated most African American workers to many of the lower-paying unskilled or semi-skilled occupations. More than 80 percent of African American men worked menial jobs in steel mills, mines, construction, and meatpacking. In the railroad industry, they were often employed as porters or servants. In other businesses, they worked as janitors, waiters, or cooks. African American women, who faced discrimination due to both their race and gender, found a few job opportunities in the garment industry or laundries, but were more often employed as maids and domestic servants. Regardless of the status of their jobs, however, African Americans earned higher wages in the North than they did for the same occupations in the South, and typically found housing to be more available.

However, such economic gains were offset by the higher cost of living in the North, especially in terms of rent, food, and other essentials. As a result, African Americans often found themselves living in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions, much like the tenement slums in which urban European immigrants had lived at the turn of the century. For newly arrived Black people, even those who sought out the cities for the opportunities they provided, life in these cities could be exceedingly difficult. They quickly learned that racial discrimination did not necessarily vanish at the Mason-Dixon Line.

Why Move to the North?

So why move to the North, given that the economic challenges they faced were similar to those that African Americans encountered in the South? The answer lies in noneconomic gains. Greater educational opportunities and more expansive personal freedoms mattered greatly to the African Americans who made the trek northward during the Great Migration. State legislatures and local school districts allocated more funds for the education of both Blacks and Whites in the North, and also enforced compulsory school attendance laws more rigorously. Similarly, unlike the South where a simple gesture (or lack of a deferential one) could result in physical harm, life in larger, crowded northern urban centers permitted a degree of anonymity—and with it, personal freedom—that enabled African Americans to move, work, and speak without deferring to every White person with whom they crossed paths. Psychologically, these gains more than offset the continued economic challenges that Black migrants faced. Despite persistent discrimination, particularly in employment and housing, Black southerners began to build communities in the North, prompting the chain migration of family members and neighbors.

The Tulsa Race Massacre

The iniquities of Jim Crow segregation, the barbarities of America’s lynching epidemic, and the depravities of 1919’s Red Summer weighed heavily upon Black Americans as they entered the 1920s. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black Americans had built up the Greenwood District with commerce and prosperity. Booker T. Washington called it the “Black Wall Street.” On the evening of May 31, 1921, spurred by a false claim of sexual assault levied against a young Black man–nineteen-year-old Dick Rowland had likely either tripped over a young White elevator operator’s foot or tripped and brushed a woman’s shoulder with his hand–a White mob mobilized, armed themselves, and destroyed the prosperous neighborhood in what came to be known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Over thirty square blocks were decimated. Vigilantes burned over 1,000 homes and killed as many as several hundred Black Tulsans. Survivors recalled the mob using heavy machine guns, and others reported planes circling overhead, with pilots firing rifles and dropping firebombs. When order was finally restored the next day, the bodies of the victims were buried in mass graves. Thousands of survivors were left homeless.