The Great Migration
Verified recordThe Great Migration was the movement of approximately six million African Americans out of the rural South and into the cities of the North, Midwest, and West between roughly 1916 and 1970.[1][3] It stands among the largest internal migrations in American history: a relocation of a people undertaken family by family, without charters or government aid, that redrew the demographic, political, and cultural map of the United States.[1]
The migration unfolded in two great waves: the first (1916–1940) drawn north by wartime labor demand and driven out by Jim Crow; the second (1940–1970), larger still, extending the routes west to California. Its consequences run through nearly every record in this archive, from the Harlem Renaissance to the northern spread of the blues.[2][4]
1.Origins and causes
The push came from the South itself. Disenfranchisement, sharecropping debt, segregated schooling, and the constant threat of racial violence made full citizenship impossible under Jim Crow.[1] The boll weevil's destruction of the cotton economy in the 1910s cut away even the meager living the land had offered.[4]
The pull came from the North. The First World War halted European immigration just as Northern factories strained to meet wartime demand, and labor agents went south recruiting. The Chicago Defender, passed hand to hand in barbershops and churches across the South, urged its readers northward in print, publishing train schedules and job listings beside its editorials.[5]
2.The first wave, 1916–1940
Roughly 1.6 million people left in the first wave, settling mainly in the industrial cities of the North and Midwest: Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York.[3] Chicago's Black population grew from about 44,000 in 1910 to more than 230,000 by 1930; Detroit's multiplied twentyfold in the same span.[2]
Arrival was not deliverance. Migrants met restrictive covenants, overcrowded and overpriced housing, and hostile labor markets, and the Red Summer of 1919 made plain that the North kept its own violence.[2] Still they built churches, newspapers, lodges, and businesses, the institutions that anchored the neighborhoods to come.
3.The second wave, 1940–1970
The Second World War opened the defense industries, and the second wave, some five million people, moved not only north but west, to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and Portland.[3] By 1970, for the first time in American history, more than half of Black Americans lived outside the South, and roughly eight in ten lived in cities.[1][3]
4.Legacy and the return
The Great Migration transformed American culture wholesale: it carried the blues up the Mississippi to Chicago, gospel into the storefront churches of the North, and concentrated the voting power that would help carry the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.[4] It made Harlem, Bronzeville, and Paradise Valley, and with them the renaissance the movement's children wrote.
Since around 1970 the flow has reversed. The 'New Great Migration' has drawn Black Americans, especially college-educated younger generations, back to the metropolitan South, to Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Charlotte, closing the circle the first departures opened.[6]
The migration was not a drift of labor toward wages. It was a collective act of self-determination, six million decisions to refuse Jim Crow, made family by family against every institution built to prevent them.[1] The archive holds the movers as the authors of the century that followed, of its music, its politics, and its cities, and files every downstream record accordingly.
The family archive is admissible here. Photographs, letters, deeds, church programs, funeral bulletins, business records, recordings — the things that were kept when no institution was keeping them. A keeper reviews everything before it is admitted, and your name stays on it.