Great Migration

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Great Migration

Mass movement by black Americans in the early twentieth century from the predominantly rural, segregated South to the urban North and West, where they sought economic, social, and political freedom.

At the end of the American Civil War (1861–1865) and the abolition of slavery, 91 percent of America's five million African Americans lived in the Southern states, roughly the same percentage as in 1790. Blacks made up 36 percent of the total Southern population (as compared with 3 percent of the total Northern population), and worked mostly as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic servants. Very few owned property. Most black farmers were heavily in debt and struggled to pay rents. Other forms of labor open to blacks were similarly low-paying and exploitative.

Reconstruction

The Reconstruction era (1865–1877), which kept protective Union troops in the South and brought blacks the constitutional guarantee of full citizenship, raised hopes for better jobs and civil rights. A small but important minority of blacks found work in industries such as coal mining, timber, and railroads, and others received a limited education. As Reconstruction drew to a close, however, and with it the emergence of Northern dominance over Southern life, white legislatures in the South began to pass Jim Crow laws, which legalized and systematized state and local segregation and discrimination. Blacks, especially those attempting to exercise their rights, were the victims of Lynchings and other terrorism. Opportunities in school, work, and politics dwindled. Some blacks responded by migrating to Northern border states, especially Kansas. Their numbers, however, were limited to a few tens of thousands, and the migration was mostly to rural areas. In 1910, nearly fifty years after the war had ended slavery, 89 percent of all blacks remained in the South, and nearly 80 percent of those lived in rural areas.

Causes of the Migration

Several events in the early 1910s coalesced to change black patterns of settlement. From 1913 to 1915, falling cotton prices brought on an economic depression that seriously hurt Southern farmers, both black and white. Just as farmers began to recover, they were struck by an overwhelming infestation of Boll Weevils, insects that destroyed much of the cotton crop between 1914 and 1917. In the Mississippi Valley, farmers suffered an additional plague: severe floods in 1915 ruined crops and homes, especially those of blacks, who lived in disproportionate numbers in the valley's bottomlands. The few Southern blacks who had owned their own farms before 1910 were now largely reduced to sharecropping and tenant farming; most sharecroppers and tenant farmers, meanwhile, slid deeper into debt.

At the start of the Great Migration, most African Americans lived in the South and did agricultural work. Those who migrated to the North often found themselves working in industrial settings, such as this steel casting plant in Ohio (ca. 1910).

Ohio Historical Society

view larger image

At the same time Northern industries were undergoing an economic boom, fueled in part by the start of World War I in Europe (1914–1918). The North and West were also experiencing a labor shortage: following several years of cheap labor from unlimited foreign immigration, the Congress of the United States had now restricted the number of new immigrants. The labor shortage became even more acute as the United States entered the war in 1917. While wages in the South ranged from 50 cents to $2 a day, wages in the industrial North, expanded because of the war effort, ranged from $2 to $5 a day.

In the North and West

Southern blacks responded to these forces by filling Northern jobs by the hundreds of thousands. Between 1915 and 1920, from 500,000 to 1 million African Americans left the rural South for the urban North; thousands more moved West. Others remained in the South, but moved from the country to the city. On their arrival in the North, migrants found not just better wages but the freedom to vote, less exposure to white violence, and, sometimes, better schools for their children. Racism remained persistent, however. Discriminatory real-estate practices forced blacks into ill-maintained and segregated housing, contributing to the rise of the urban black ghetto. Blacks were routinely excluded from Labor Unions, and many migrants were forced into menial jobs as butlers, waiters and the like, or served as replacement workers (called “scabs”) during strikes by white unions.

The increased competition among blacks and whites for jobs and housing sparked race riots in dozens of Northern cities, including major white-on-black riots in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, and Chicago, Illinois, in 1919. For blacks, the riots were an enduring reminder that white violence was not restricted to the states of Jim Crow. For the nation, the tensions caused by black migration made many people aware of what blacks had known for some time: the problems of race were an American, not merely a Southern, phenomenon.

Despite the problems, migrants in the North wrote to family and friends in the South with stories of better living conditions, better jobs, and more freedom. Often they sent money and offered other help for the move. Prominent black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender and leading black aid societies such as the National Association of Colored Women proclaimed (often overzealously) the virtues of the “Promised Land,” and helped newly arrived blacks find jobs. Northern companies, including meatpacking, automobile, and steel businesses, even sent agents to recruit blacks from the South.

In addition to the tide of unskilled laborers flowing out of the South, many of the few black mechanics, apprenticed workers, musicians, and professionals also left. Together with Northern skilled laborers, they made up a small new Northern black middle class, establishing their own unions, social and fraternal orders, churches, and welfare services. The growth of this middle class during the 1920s was not, however, without conflict. As wealthier blacks moved into better housing left by whites, poor blacks were left concentrated in overcrowded ghetto neighborhoods.

Southern states, which relied heavily on black agricultural, domestic, and sometimes industrial labor, tried to stop the population flow. Several state legislatures and city councils passed laws fining and jailing “vagrant” or “landless” blacks—that is, blacks who were traveling. They also fined and jailed Northern labor recruiters and Southern blacks who encouraged other blacks to move. In several states, the Chicago Defender was banned. Black people left in large numbers nonetheless. In addition to the hundreds of thousands who left in the 1910s, another 700,000 to 1 million African Americans moved to the North and West in the 1920s.

The effect on Northern and Western cities was dramatic. In Detroit, Michigan, the black population, which was estimated at fewer than 6,000 before World War I, grew to more than 120,000 at the end of the 1920s. Chicago's black population grew from about 40,000 in 1910 to about 240,000 in 1930. New York's grew from 100,000 to 330,000. Western states, previously home to few blacks, received a smaller but still significant influx. In Los Angeles, California, the population of 8,000 blacks in 1910 increased to almost 40,000 in 1930. By 1940, 23 percent of blacks in the United States were living in the North and West; black majorities in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi had come to an end. In the areas they left behind, thousands of farm acres were reported idle, and many businesses in these areas were forced to close or slow down.

Widespread as the black exodus from the South was, black movement within the South was greater. The same forces of farm depression, industrialization, and wartime labor shortage that prompted many blacks to leave the South altogether prompted more blacks (as well as whites) to move from the Southern farm to the Southern city. Whereas blacks comprised at most 10 percent of some Northern cities in the 1920s, in the South they were routinely 25 to 50 percent of a city's population.

World War II Migration

The Great Depression of the 1930s slowed the Great Migration, but the start of World War II (1939–1945) had effects on migration similar to the start of World War I. This time a sagging farm economy, rapid economic growth, persistent Southern racism, and a national labor shortage were accompanied by mechanization of Southern farms and increasing gains in the Civil Rights Movement. As blacks again left in large numbers, however, they moved not just to the cities of the northern Rust Belt, but increasingly to the cities of the West, especially to the California cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. By 1960, at the end of the second wave of migration, 40 percent of the nation's blacks lived in the North and West, and nearly three-quarters of all American blacks lived in cities—the same percentage that had lived in rural areas at the start of the century.

Migration of African Americans to Cities 1910–1920

view larger image

For those who participated in it, and even for their children and grandchildren, the Great Migration continues to resonate as one of the most powerful stories of African American struggle and opportunity. Its impact can be seen in African American literature, music—particularly in the urban Blues pioneered by such southern transplants as John Lee Hooker—and visual arts, perhaps most notably in the paintings of Jacob Lawrence, whose Migration series explores the images and themes inspired by his parents' migration north.

See also Chicago Riot of 1919; Exodusters; Fraternities and Sororities, Black, in the United States; Sharecropping.

processed xml | source xml