The Great Migration

Between 1916 and 1970 around six million Black Americans left the southern states for cities in the North and West. It is one of the largest internal migrations of the twentieth century in any country, and it was long treated as demography rather than as history.

What they left

Since the 1890s the Jim Crow laws had built a system in which Black southerners were excluded from the vote through poll taxes and literacy tests, separated from white people in schools, trains, waiting rooms and cemeteries, and left without real protection in law. Between 1877 and 1950 over four thousand lynchings are documented in the southern states.

The economy was sharecropping: a family rented land for a share of the crop, bought on credit at the owner's store, and rarely got clear of the debt.

Timeline

1916

the First World War halts immigration from Europe; northern factories are short of hands

1917

race riots in East St. Louis; the first of several

1919

the Red Summer: attacks on Black communities in over twenty cities

1920s

Harlem becomes the largest Black urban community in the United States

1930s

the Depression slows the movement temporarily

1940

war industry opens; the second and larger wave begins

1941

Roosevelt bars discrimination in defence industries after a threatened march on Washington

1948

the American armed forces are desegregated

1950s

the mechanical cotton picker makes field labour redundant in the South

1970

the movement ebbs; nearly half of Black Americans now live outside the South

What they came to

Work, higher wages and the vote — but not equality. Northern cities had no Jim Crow laws; they had something else: restrictive covenants barring sale to Black buyers, and redlining, in which federal mortgage maps marked Black neighbourhoods as too risky to lend in. The effect was segregation without a single statute that named race, and it shaped American cities for the rest of the century.

What it changed

Politically it moved the Black electorate to states where votes actually counted, and that is a principal precondition for the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965 being passable at all. Culturally the music travelled with it: blues from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, gospel to Detroit, and later soul, Motown and hip hop.

Why it went unseen

Isabel Wilkerson, who wrote the best-known account, points out that the movement never had a leader, a date or a declaration. It consisted of six million individual decisions taken in kitchens over sixty years, and so it was never told as a single event — not by those who left, and not by the country they moved through.