Great Migration

• The Great Migration


  The mass movement of over 6 million Southern Black Americans to the North and West between 1915 and 1970
• The Great Migration

  1. Initial wave: Most migrants moved to major Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York

  2. Later: Many began to head West to Los Angeles and San Francisco
• Economic motivations for the Great Migration

  • Desire to escape oppressive economic conditions in the South
  • Promise of greater prosperity in the North
• Conditions for African Americans in the South after enslavement

  1. Forced to become sharecroppers, a system in which small farmers rented farm space, supplies, and tools to harvest a crop

  2. Reliant on white farmers

  3. Severely restricted economic mobility

  4. Barely surviving from year to year

  5. Unemployed with the fall in demand for agricultural workers due to boll weevil damage
• African Americans were granted the right to vote through the passing of the 15th amendment
• Restrictions on African American voting rights in the South

  White Southerners passed legislation to prevent African Americans from exercising this right through literacy tests, poll taxes, and the grandfather clause
• In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson led to the legalisation of segregation
• Segregation of public facilities

  • Perpetuated poverty and limited the social and economic mobility of African Americans
• Acts of terror by white Southerners against African Americans


  • KKK's re-emergence and racist ideology
  • Murder of African Americans through lynching, bombings, and arson
• Factors leading to the Great Migration

  1. WWI created a huge demand for workers in Northern factories

  2. 5 million men left to serve in the armed forces

  3. New restrictions on foreign immigrants

  4. Some sectors desperate for workers and paid African Americans to migrate North
• WWI was the first time that Black labour was in demand outside the agricultural South
• After the war ended

  Tension between black and white people increased, often leading to violence and race riots
• Many black Americans found it harder to get employment after the war
• Black migrants began to be concentrated in growing ghettos such as Harlem in New York City and South Side Chicago
• The growing Black population began to be perceived as a threat to white northerners
• Racial tension increased beyond the borders of the Southern states, worsened by a revival of the KKK whose membership rose from 100,000 in 1921 to 4 million in 1924