The Great Migration: Six Million Journeys That Reshaped America

Between 1910 and 1970, approximately six million Black Americans left the states of the former Confederacy for the cities of the North, Midwest, and West. It is, by a wide margin, the largest voluntary internal migration in American history. Isabel Wilkerson's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 book The Warmth of Other Suns established it in the public mind as a single cohesive historical event. Before Wilkerson, most American historical writing treated it as a demographic background pattern rather than the deliberate, collective, generation-spanning decision that it was.

The migration had two distinct waves. The first, roughly 1916 to 1940, was driven primarily by the labor demands of Northern industrial cities during World War I and the economic pull of the Chicago Defender's recruitment campaigns, which urged Southern Black workers to come north and directly provided train fare and job placement assistance. By 1930, Chicago's Black population had grown from 44,000 to 234,000.

The second wave, 1940 to 1970, was larger — roughly five million people — and more geographically distributed, reaching Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and Detroit in numbers that transformed those cities. The push factors were the mechanization of Southern agriculture, the collapse of sharecropping, and the intolerable conditions of Jim Crow; the pull factors were the wartime and postwar industrial boom and the comparative (though incomplete) freedoms of the North.

The cultural consequences are impossible to overstate. Chicago blues, Detroit Motown, West Coast jazz, New York hip-hop — every major Black American music tradition of the twentieth century was either invented or perfected by migrants and their children. Gwendolyn Brooks wrote her Chicago poems as a migrant's daughter. Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man as a migrant. The migration produced the conditions for the civil rights movement itself by concentrating Black voting populations in Northern and Western cities where the Voting Rights Act could be made to matter.

The migration also produced the modern American racial geography that persists to this day — the hypersegregation of Northern cities, the redlining of migrant neighborhoods, the concentration of disinvestment that followed. To understand any major American city's current form is to understand the Great Migration. It is the single most important demographic event in twentieth-century American history.