Great Migration

The Great Migration or Great Northward Migration was a period in the history of the United States, running roughly from 1910 to 1970, during which a mass movement of a very large number of African Americans from the rural southern states to the more industrialized cities in the North, Midwest, and West occurred. There were multiple reasons for this movement; firstly, the advent of mechanization in the shape of tractors, large ploughs, and other farm machinery reduced the need for agricultural workers in states where African Americans had typically provided extensive farm labor. By way of contrast, there were growing opportunities in northern cities as new industries emerged in factories in cities like Detroit, New York, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. Finally, the ongoing racial discrimination and violence pervasive throughout the southern states in the form of Segregation and the Jim Crow Laws made moving to the more racially liberal northern states attractive to many African Americans. In total, during a period of just over half a century, six million African Americans migrated internally within the United States.

Chronology of events

Poster for The Birth of a Nation (1915).

At the start of the twentieth century, approximately 90% of all African Americans still lived in the southern states, which had formed the core of the Confederacy and had fought the Union in the American Civil War between 1861 and 1865 to try to retain slavery in their states. These African Americans were centered in Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, and some Midwestern states such as Missouri and Indiana. Though legally outlawed by the Constitution, a form of slavery in America continued through informal laws, local statutes, rules, and guidelines designed to hinder African Americans; the African Americans in these states were liberated owing to the Union victory in the war, but when Reconstruction failed as a policy in the 1870s, Segregation and the Jim Crow Laws were introduced, effectively turning African Americans in the southern states into second-class citizens who had to use segregated restrooms, attend segregated schools and use black stores and churches. This was, in many ways, simply slavery by a different name; in place from the late 19th century until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, these laws created a "separate but equal" status for African Americans, which in reality led to conditions inferior to those provided for white Americans.

Beyond formal laws, there were also unwritten rules and social norms that perpetuated discrimination and inequality. For example, African Americans were often denied the right to vote through literacy tests, poll taxes, and other discriminatory practices. They faced segregation in schools, public transportation, and even in the military. Matters became even worse for the African American communities of the South in the early twentieth century, when mechanization in the form of tractors, machine-driven ploughs, and other labor-saving farm equipment made jobs for agricultural workers scarcer. Then to compound matters, the period between the mid-1910s and the mid-1920s saw the Ku Klux Klan experience a dramatic revival across the United States, fueled by the popularity of the 1915 silent film, The Birth of a Nation, which celebrated the Confederate cause during the Civil War. Estimates suggest there may have been three million or more Klan members across the United States in the early 1920s, with over 25% of white, adult males being Klansmen in many southern states. Lynchings and attacks on African Americans increased proportionately and all of this further fueled the attraction of migrating north to more tolerant cities like New York, Chicago, and Detroit where jobs were available, Segregation didn’t exist and there was less racial violence and discrimination.

Extent of migration

The industrialization of America created a shift in how the nation saw itself and the type of work available to the working class. The automobile and Henry Ford’s $5.00 a day workweek brought many to the urban areas for work. Coinciding with World War I and the subsequent demand for industrial labor in Northern cities, it proved to be a real opportunity for improvement. Between 1910 and 1970, it is estimated that approximately six million African Americans migrated north from largely rural communities in states like Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Alabama to urban settings in northern states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan, Philadelphia, Delaware, Ohio, and Maryland. Typically, this is divided into two periods: the First Great Migration, which occurred between the early 1910s and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, with the peak occurring in the 1920s and declining considerably in the 1930s as the Great Depression wiped out the kind of job opportunities in the northern states which were drawing many people to northern cities in the 1910s and 1920s. This first wave accounted for approximately a quarter of the migration, with at least 1.3 million southern-born African Americans living in northern cities by the 1930s. The Second Great Migration, occurred primarily between the end of World War II in 1945 and the mid-1960s, and accounted for a far larger number of migrants. For instance, 1.4 million African Americans migrated northwards in the 1940s, followed by over a million in the 1950s and as much as two million in the course of the 1960s and early 1970s. This part of the Great Migration was driven by the post-war economic boom which the United States enjoyed as it became the world’s foremost economic and political power, while better levels of educational attainment for African Americans also allowed black Americans to acquire better-paying jobs in the north. It only gradually came to an end from the mid-1960s onwards as the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 brought Segregation to an end, and race relations in some southern states gradually improved over time.

Demographic impact

Langston Hughes, who migrated to Harlem from Missouri.

The Great Migration transformed the demographic landscape of the United States, as prior to it, the bulk of African Americans lived in southern states and only had a limited presence in northern cities. For example, Harlem in New York City was a largely white neighborhood in the nineteenth century, one with a considerable Dutch American presence still, a legacy of the seventeenth century when New York had been the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Two New York mayors of the 1830s and 1850s, Cornelius Van Wyck Lawrence and Daniel Tiemann, hailed from Harlem. It was only with the influx of African Americans into New York in the early twentieth century that Harlem became a hub of African American settlement, so much so that the Harlem Renaissance of African American poets, writers, and artists such as Langston Hughes occurred here in the 1920s.

Aretha Franklin.

Similar patterns of urban change were witnessed in cities all across the northern states as a result of the Great Migration. There were many major cities involved, including New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Baltimore, St Louis, and Cleveland, as well as smaller cities and towns such as Buffalo, Newark, Columbus, and Rochester. Detroit provides one of the most striking examples: in 1910 just about 6,000 African Americans resided in the city; by the time of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, there were 120,000 African Americans living in the city. By 1960, there were nearly half a million African Americans in Detroit, as the rise of the city as the automobile-production capital of the world created endless jobs in factories and service industries.

One of those who arrived was Coleman Young, an Alabama-born politician who would eventually become the first African American mayor of Detroit and who held that position for twenty years. Other notable people who ended up in Detroit as a result of the Great Migration included the singer Aretha Franklin, who was born in Tennessee in 1942, but whose father relocated the family to Detroit after the war, and Diana Ross, who was born in Detroit, but whose parents hailed from West Virginia and Missouri. Similar patterns of demographic change occurred in cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and St Louis.

See also

• Second Great Migration

Explore more about migration and African American heritage

• Immigration & travel records on MyHeritage
• A Checklist of African American Resources, webinar by Angela Walton-Raji on Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• African American Genealogy Research: Four Important Elements from the MyHeritage Blog
• Reasonably Exhaustive Research of Africa American Families that Came Out of Slavery, webinar by LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson, JD, LLM, CG, CGL, FASG on Legacy Family Tree Webinars

References

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