What two factors led to the Great Migration?

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The Great Migration which began in 1916 involved the mass exodus of African-Americans from the farms of the South to the industrial cities of the North. From 1916 to 1918, over 400,000 African-Americans migrated from the south, or on average sixteen thousand per month and five hundred per day.

Typical of any migration movement, there were push and pull factors triggering the Great Migration. The economic push and pull factors involved the devastation of crops in the South and the growing demand for labor in the North.

There were many push factors involved. A tiny insect called the boll weevil swept across the South, destroying their main crop, cotton, while displacing thousands of farm laborers. Between 1890 and 1910, the political push factor involved the institution of Jim Crow laws which, among other things, disenfranchised the African-American community with laws that prevented them from voting through the installation of property requirements, literacy tests, poll taxes, and the “grandfather clause.” In addition, they had to live with the daily fear of being lynched in the South; at least two people were lynched every week.

There were also many pull factors involved. The shortage of labor in the North was caused by the First World War which generated a greater demand for labor and also diminished the supply of laborers in the North. Industries in the North needed workers to produce materials for war. The influx of European immigrants was halted by the war; by 1918, there were almost as many Europeans leaving the United States as entering.

Between 1910 and 1970, an estimated 6 million African Americans migrated from southern states to northern and Midwestern cities.

Attempting to escape racism and Jim Crow laws of the South as well as poor economic conditions, African Americans found work in northern and western steel mills, tanneries, and railroad companies. 

During the first wave of the Great Migration between the two World Wars, 1 million African Americans settled in urban areas such as New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Detroit, drastically increasing the Black populations in those cities. Segregation was illegal in those areas, but racism was still to be found there.

By the onset of World War II, African Americans were also migrating to cities in California such as Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco as well as Washington's Portland and Seattle.

Harlem Renaissance leader Alain Leroy Locke argued in his essay, “The New Negro,” that

“the wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the Northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance — in the Negro's case a deliberate flight not only form countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern."

African American men were granted the right to vote through the 15th Amendment. However, white Southerners passed legislation that prevented them from exercising this right.

By 1908, 10 Southern states had rewritten their constitutions to restrict voting rights through literacy tests, poll taxes and grandfather clauses. These state laws would not be overturned until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was established, granting all Americans the right to vote.

African Americans faced segregation as well. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case made it legal to enforce "separate but equal" public facilities, including public transportation, public schools, restroom facilities, and water fountains.

African Americans were subjected to various acts of terror by white Southerners. In particular, the Ku Klux Klan emerged, arguing that only white Christians were entitled to civil rights in the United States.

As a result, this group, along with other white supremacist groups murdered African Americans by lynching, bombing churches, and also setting fire to homes and property.

Following the end of enslavement in 1865, African Americans in the South faced an uncertain future. Although the Freedmen's Bureau helped to rebuild the South during the Reconstruction period, they soon found themselves reliant on the same people who were once their owners. African Americans became sharecroppers, a system in which small farmers rented farm space, supplies and tools to harvest a crop.

However, an insect known as the boll weevil damaged crops throughout the South between 1910 and 1920. As a result of the boll weevil’s work, there was less of a demand for agricultural workers, leaving many African Americans unemployed.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, factories in northern and Midwestern cities faced extreme labor shortages for several reasons. First, more than 5 million men enlisted in the Army. Second, the U.S. government halted immigration from European countries.

Since many African Americans in the South had been severely affected by the shortage of agricultural work, they responded to the call of employment agents from cities in the North and Midwest. Agents from various industrial sectors arrived in the South, enticing African American men and women to migrate north by paying their travel expenses.

The demand for workers, incentives from industry agents, better educational and housing options, as well as higher pay, brought many African Americans from the South. Much of this higher pay, however, was offset by a higher cost of living.

Northern African American newspapers played an important role in the Great Migration. Publications such as the Chicago Defender published train schedules and employment listings to persuade Southern African Americans to migrate north.

News publications such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Amsterdam News published editorials and cartoons showing the promise of moving from the South to the North. These promises included better education for children, the right to vote, access to various types of employment and improved housing conditions.

From about 1916 to 1970, nearly 6 million African Americans moved from the rural South to cities in the North, Midwest and West as part of the Great Migration.

African Americans were pushed from their communities by a lack of economic opportunities and harsh segregationist legislation, and they migrated north to take advantage of the need for factory workers during World War I.

During the Great Migration, African Americans began to carve out a new position for themselves in public life, actively facing racial discrimination as well as economic, political and social barriers in order to construct a Black urban culture that would hold great power in the decades ahead.

Why Did Many African Americans Participate In The Great Migration?

Many African Americans in the South were imprisoned in sharecropping jobs and other forms of debt peonage, with no possibility of improving their situation. Jim Crow laws put Blacks in a lower class than white people, and they were denied political rights.

There were more opportunities available in the North and despite widespread racism, racial segregation was not enforced. They set out on the Great Migration in search of economic and social opportunities.

Causes of the Great Migration

African American workers happily abandoned low-wage employment as agricultural workers and domestic workers in the rural South and migrated north in large numbers. They found comparatively high-paying positions in meatpacking plants, shipyards and steel mills in the major cities of the Midwest and Northeast.

The desire of Black Southerners to escape Jim Crow segregation was the second significant cause of the Great Migration. Rural African American Southerners believed that segregation, as well as racism and prejudice towards Blacks, were far less severe in the North.

Between 1914 and 1920, nearly half a million African American Southerners abandoned plantations and farms for higher-paying positions in the war industries, in an attempt to escape violent racism. From 1910 to 1920, for example, the Black population of New York expanded by more than 66 percent to more than 150,000, while the number of African American residents in Cleveland increased by 307 percent to roughly 35,000.

During the same time span, Detroit’s Black population increased by 611 percent, to over 40,000 people. Community and kinship networks within Black communities in the North and South supported and enabled the Great Migration. Such networks conveyed information about job openings, suitable housing and other connections in Northern cities.

Many groups and families raised funds for their vacations through Black churches and a variety of volunteer organizations.

Did you know? When the Great Migration began in 1916, a factory salary in the urban North was often three times what Black people could expect to make laboring on the field in the rural South.

The Great Migration Began

When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, manufacturing cities in the North, Midwest and West faced a labor crisis as the war halted the continuous flow of European immigrants to the United States.

With war production ramping up, recruiters urged African Americans to travel north, much to the dismay of white Southerners. Advertisements in Black newspapers, particularly the widely read Chicago Defender, touted the opportunities available in the cities of the North and West, along with first-person testimonials of achievement.

The First Great Migration (1910–1940)

The Northeastern and Midwestern United States accounted for fewer than 8% of the African-American population when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863. This began to alter over the next decade, and by 1880, migration to Kansas was well underway. The United States Senate launched an investigation into it. In 1900, over 90% of Black Americans still lived in Southern states.

Between 1910 and 1930, the African-American population in the Northern states increased by nearly 40% as a result of migration, particularly to large cities. Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, and New York City had some of the greatest increases in the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of Black people were recruited for industrial tasks, such as those related with the Pennsylvania Railroad’s growth.

Because the changes were concentrated in cities, which had attracted millions of new or current European immigrants, tensions rose as people battled for limited jobs and housing. Tensions were often fiercest between Black people and ethnic Irish who were defending newly obtained roles and areas.

Tensions, mostly fueled by white workers, were developing as a result of the movement of African Americans northward and the mingling of white and Black workers in factories. The American Federation of Labor, or AFL, fought for the separation of white and African American workers in the workplace. There were nonviolent protests, such as walkouts, in opposition to African Americans and white people working together.

As tensions rose as a result of pushing for employment segregation, violence ensued. In 1917, the East St. Louis Illinois Riot, remembered as one of the worst workplace riots, killed between 40 and 200 people and displaced approximately 6000 African Americans.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, reacted to the brutality with the Silent March. In Harlem, New York, almost 10,000 African American men and women protested. Conflicts persisted after World War I, as African Americans faced new conflicts and tensions, while African American labor activity flourished.

The late summer and autumn of 1919 saw the rise of racial hostilities, which became known as the Red Summer. Violence and lengthy rebellion between Black Americans and whites in key US cities characterized this period. The causes of this violence differ. Washington, D.C., Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, Tennessee and Elaine, Arkansas, a small rural community 70 miles (110 km) southwest of Memphis, were all touched by the violence.

Chicago was the hub of the race riots, with the most violence and deaths occurring there during the riots. The writers of The Negro in Chicago, in an official report from 1922 on race relations in Chicago, concluded that there were numerous reasons that contributed to Chicago’s violent outbursts. Many Black workers had primarily taken over the jobs of white males who had left to fight in World War I.

When the war ended in 1918, many men returned home to find that their employment had been taken over by Black men ready to work for far less. By the time the riots and bloodshed in Chicago had faded, 38 people had been killed and 500 more had been injured. In addition, $250,000 in property was damaged, and over a thousand people were displaced.

Many more people had been killed in various cities across the country as a result of the Red Summer’s violence. Many people became aware of America’s growing racial tensions as a result of the Red Summer. The violence in these major cities foreshadowed the Harlem Renaissance, an African-American cultural movement that occurred in the 1920s.

As racial tensions over housing and employment discrimination rose, racial violence reappeared in Chicago, Detroit and other cities in the Northeast in the 1940s.

The Second Great Migration (1940s–1970s)

Because of fewer opportunities, migration was decreased during the 1930s Great Depression. Migration was resumed with the defense buildup for World War II and the postwar economic success, with higher numbers of Black Americans departing the South in the 1960s.

Because of exclusionary housing regulations designed to keep African American families out of emerging suburbs, this wave of migration frequently resulted in overpopulation in urban regions.

1. Patterns of Migration

Throughout the two waves of the Great Migration, southerners’ primary destinations were large cities. In the first phase, two-thirds of the migrants were drawn to eight large cities: New York and Chicago, followed by Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Kansas City, Denver, Louis and Indianapolis.

The Second Great Black Migration increased the population of these cities while also introducing new locations, such as the Western states. African Americans were drawn in huge numbers to Western cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Phoenix, Seattle and Portland.

There were various migratory patterns that connected specific southern states and cities to comparable regions in the north and west. During the first Great Migration, about half of those who went from Mississippi ended up in Chicago, while those from Virginia tended to settle in Philadelphia. The majority of these patterns were geographical in nature, with the nearest cities drawing the most migrants (such as Los Angeles and San Francisco receiving a disproportionate number of migrants from Texas and Louisiana). 

Migration patterns were influenced by network linkages. Black Americans tended to relocate to northern places where other Black Americans had previously migrated. According to a 2021 study, “when one randomly selected African American migrated from a Southern birth town to a destination county, on average, 1.9 other Black migrants made the same move.”

Migrant Life in the City

Some researchers believe that by the end of 1919, 1 million Black individuals had left the South, generally by train, boat or bus; a smaller number owned automobiles or even horse-drawn carts.

Between 1910 and 1920, the Black population of major Northern cities increased by enormous percentages, including New York (66%), Chicago (148%), Philadelphia (500%) and Detroit (611%).

Many immigrants found work in factories, slaughterhouses and foundries, where working conditions were demanding and occasionally dangerous. Female migrants had a more difficult time finding work, resulting in fierce rivalry for domestic labor roles.

In addition to job competition, there was competition for residential space in increasingly populated areas. Despite the fact that segregation was not legalized in the North (as it was in the South), racism and prejudice were common.

After the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1917 that racial housing regulations were unconstitutional, several residential neighborhoods adopted covenants requiring white property owners to pledge not to sell to Black people; these remained legal until the Court knocked them down in 1948.

Rising segregated-area rents, combined with a return of KKK activities after 1915, worsened Black-white relations across the country. The summer of 1919 marked the beginning of the largest period of interracial strife in United States history, including a worrying wave of race riots.

The most severe was the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, which lasted 13 days and resulted in the deaths of 38 people, injuries to 537 and an eviction of 1,000 Black families.

The Great Migration’s Impact

As a result of housing pressures, many Black inhabitants ended up establishing their own cities within large cities, supporting the development of a new urban, African American culture. The most visible example was Harlem in New York City, a historically all-white neighborhood that contained over 200,000 African Americans by the 1920s.

The Black experience during the Great Migration became a major issue in the artistic movement known initially as the New Negro Movement and subsequently as the Harlem Renaissance, which had a huge impact on the culture of the time.

The Great Migration also marked the beginning of a new age of increased political activism among African Americans, who, after being rejected in the South, found a new position in public life in the cities of the North and West. This activism assisted the civil rights movement directly.

When the country was in the grip of the Great Depression in the 1930s, Black migration slowed significantly, but managed to pick up again with the advent of World War II and the need for wartime manufacturing. However, returning Black soldiers discovered that the GI Bill did not always guarantee the same postwar benefits to all.

When the Great Migration ended in 1970, its demographic impact was undeniable: in 1900, 9 out of every 10 Black Americans lived in the South, and 3 out of every 4 lived on farms. By 1970, the South was home to only half of the country’s African Americans, with only 20% living in the region’s rural areas. The epic tale of America’s Great Migration was famously captured in Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

Citations:

1. https://depts.washington.edu/moving1/map_Black_migration.shtml
2. https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Migration
3. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/long-lasting-legacy-great-migration-180960118/