Great Migration
The Great Migration refers to a significant movement of African Americans from the rural South to urban areas in the North, primarily occurring between 1910 and 1930. Driven by dire economic conditions in the South, including exploitative sharecropping practices and oppressive Jim Crow laws, many black southerners sought better opportunities and living conditions in northern cities. World War I further accelerated this migration, as labor shortages in the North opened up job opportunities for African Americans, who had previously faced limited access to such positions.
As a result, the demographic landscape of cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York dramatically shifted, with substantial increases in black populations. This migration not only transformed the economic circumstances of many African Americans but also birthed a vibrant urban culture, exemplified by the Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of jazz music. While migrants faced ongoing discrimination, they also became politically active, leveraging their growing numbers to advocate for civil rights and community improvements. The Great Migration was pivotal in shaping a more racially diverse America and fostering a more politically engaged black populace in the early twentieth century.
Great Migration
The Great Migration brought about a massive redistribution of the African American population throughout the United States. It transformed black ways of life, art, and institutions, as well as the demographics and cultures of many American cities.
In the late nineteenth century, following Reconstruction, thousands of black southerners migrated to other regions of the country, seeking a better life. A majority of these migrants moved to rural areas and continued to work in agriculture. These early population shifts were decidedly different from the Great Migration of the 1920s, which involved much larger numbers of African American migrants to urban areas.
Causes and Demographic Changes
In 1910, about 90 percent of the African American population lived in the South, and 60 percent worked in agriculture. A majority were sharecroppers, tenant farmers who contracted to give a portion of their crops as rent to the landowners whose fields they worked. By 1920, the promise of a decent living through sharecropping had given way to the reality of a corrupt, exploitive system that was little better than slavery. Sharecroppers were forced to purchase supplies they needed on credit from plantation stores at exorbitant prices, creating a cycle of debt that increased with each passing season. In addition, comprehensive and openly discriminatory Jim Crow laws in the South had created a highly segregated social system that was enforced through legal as well as extralegal means, including lynching and other forms of violence.
Grinding poverty and an almost total lack of educational or occupational opportunities motivated black southerners to relocate, and the cities of the industrial North became increasingly attractive destinations. World War I brought about labor shortages in the North as the supply of European immigrant labor decreased along with the native-born white male labor force after the United States entered the war in 1917. Job opportunities previously closed to African Americans thus opened, and many black southerners moved to northern cities for work. The Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 restricted immigration, particularly from southern and eastern Europe, further stimulating the demand for labor and quickening the Great Migration.
By 1920, black southerners were hearing firsthand from earlier migrants and from black newspapers about jobs, salaries, and living conditions in the North that were far superior to those in the South. As a result, around one million African Americans moved north during the 1920s, causing black population explosions in many urban centers. Between 1920 and 1930, the black population in Detroit grew by nearly 300 percent, in New York by 115 percent, and in Chicago by 114 percent. By 1930, more than 20 percent of the country’s black population lived in the North.
Cultural and Political Effects
In cities with large influxes of black migrants in the 1920s, a uniquely African American urban culture developed and thrived. Jazz and modern forms of blues music emerged. The birth of modern jazz is sometimes attributed to trumpeter Louis Armstrong’s migration from Louisiana to Chicago in 1922. “Race records,” black music recordings sold to black consumers, became a booming industry, and jazz music inspired new popular dances and permeated the nation’s culture during the decade that became known as the Jazz Age. New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, the largest African American enclave in 1920s at 200,000 residents, generated breakthroughs in black literature and art in a cultural movement that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance.
These cultural developments led to expanded social and political consciousness among urban African Americans. Black migrants continued to endure hardships and discrimination in the North, but in different ways than in the Jim Crow South. Although discrimination against blacks was not codified in the law, many African Americans living in the North experienced de facto segregation, often only finding employment in the least desirable jobs and housing in the least desirable neighborhoods. However, the black vote, suppressed in the South despite constitutional protections, was taken up enthusiastically by the large and growing urban black populations in the North to try to better their situation. Black churches and advocacy organizations such as the National Urban League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association became centers for political mobilization and social activism.
Impact
The Great Migration was a pivotal event in twentieth- century African American history. It nationalized the black population, establishing a more politically active, proud, and self-assured black population in the urban industrial North. By the late 1920s, only 42 percent of African American men were farm workers, and black entrepreneurs owned more than seventy thousand businesses. The number of black teachers, professional training institutions, and hospitals had increased dramatically, and by 1930 the black literacy rate had topped 80 percent. The Great Migration laid the groundwork for a more racially and culturally diverse country and a more inclusive American democracy.
Bibliography
Arnesen, Eric. Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002. Analyzes the causes of the Great Migration and the origins of black political organization using period publications.
Harrison, Alferdteen. Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1992. Focuses on the cultural and socioeconomic effects on both the areas of origin and destination.
Sernett, Milton C. Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press Books, 1997. Explores the role of the Great Migration in transforming black churches into centers for social activism.
Trotter, Joe William Jr., ed. The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. A collection of essays examining the role of black social networks in spurring the exodus from the South.
Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random, 2010. Discusses the history of the Great Migration through the stories of a number of individual African Americans who made the trek.