The Great Migration (1916-1970)
The movement of six million Black Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest, and West over six decades. Driven by Jim Crow segregation, racial violence, and the collapse of Southern agriculture, the migration transformed the demographics, politics, and culture of the United States.
Events
The Baseline — A Nation Within the South
At the 1910 census, more than 90 percent of Black Americans lived in the Southern states, the vast majority in rural areas, bound to the sharecropping system and subject to Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, and lynching. Nearly 3,500 Black Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1968, and the boll weevil's devastation of the cotton economy was beginning to destroy the region's agricultural base.
Location: Southern United States
Northern Industry Recruits Southern Labor
World War I cut off European immigration just as Northern industry faced wartime labor shortages. Railroads, steel mills, and meatpacking plants sent labor agents South, and the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, promoted migration North. By 1919, hundreds of thousands had boarded trains to Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York, launching the First Great Migration (1910-1940), which moved roughly 1.6 million people.
Location: Chicago, Illinois, USA
The Red Summer of 1919
The arrival of Black migrants ignited violent competition over jobs and housing. In Chicago, the drowning of a Black teenager at a segregated beach sparked five days of riots that killed 38 people and left thousands homeless. Similar violence erupted in Washington, D.C., and dozens of other cities during the Red Summer, revealing that Northern racism, while legally distinct from Jim Crow, posed its own dangers.
Location: Chicago, Illinois, USA
The Harlem Renaissance
Migration concentrated Black populations in Northern cities, and in Harlem the new community produced an unprecedented flowering of literature, music, and art. Writers and artists such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Duke Ellington made the neighborhood the cultural capital of Black America, giving the migration a global cultural voice in the Harlem Renaissance.
Location: New York City, New York, USA
The Second Great Migration Begins
World War II defense production opened a second, even larger wave of migration. At least five million Black Americans moved between 1940 and 1970, reaching not only Northern industrial cities but also Los Angeles, Oakland, and Seattle as defense shipyards and aircraft plants recruited Southern workers. Black migrants still faced segregated housing and employment, confined by restrictive covenants and federal redlining to underserved urban neighborhoods.
Location: United States
A. Philip Randolph Forces the March on Washington Movement
Labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened a mass march of Black workers on Washington to protest discrimination in the defense industry. Facing the prospect of 100,000 marchers, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in defense employment and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee. The episode showed the growing political leverage of Black voters concentrated in Northern cities by migration.
Location: Washington, D.C., USA
The Migrant Electorate and the Civil Rights Coalition
By the 1960s, migration had made Black voters decisive in Northern swing states, pushing civil rights to the center of national politics. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed with the support of urban Black constituents and their representatives, dismantled the legal framework of Jim Crow that had originally driven the exodus. Urban uprisings from 1965 onward, including in Watts, Detroit, and Newark, also highlighted the unfinished struggles of the migrants' Northern communities.
Location: Washington, D.C., USA
The Migration Ends and Reverses
By the 1970 census, just over half of Black Americans still lived in the South, while nearly half lived in the North and West, and more than 80 percent of Black Americans nationwide lived in cities. With the migration era over, a slow reversal began: the New Great Migration saw Black Americans returning to Southern cities, drawn by economic growth, family ties, and changed social conditions.
Location: United States