what is the great migration?

The Great Migration usually refers to the mass movement of African Americans from the rural U.S. South to cities in the North, Midwest, and West between about 1910 and 1970.

Quick Scoop

• It was a huge relocation: about 6 million Black Americans left Southern states for places like Chicago, Detroit, New York, Cleveland, and Philadelphia.

• Main reasons included escaping racist violence and Jim Crow segregation, searching for better jobs, and seeking more political and social freedom.

• Historians often split it into two waves:
  • First Great Migration: roughly 1910–1940, mostly from rural South to Northern industrial cities.

* Second Great Migration: roughly 1940–1970, larger numbers moving to both North and West, especially during and after World War II.

Why it happened

• Southern conditions:
  • Violent white supremacy (lynchings, intimidation), disenfranchisement, and rigid Jim Crow laws.

* Sharecropping and failing cotton crops (boll weevil infestations, floods) kept many Black farmers in deep poverty.

• Northern and Western “pull” factors:
  • Industrial labor shortages during World War I and World War II as European immigration slowed and many white workers were drafted.

* Recruiters, newspapers like the Chicago Defender, and family networks spread word that factory jobs and higher wages were available in Northern cities.

What changed because of it

• It reshaped the racial and cultural map of the United States, turning cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia into major centers of Black life.

• It helped fuel new forms of Black culture and politics, including the Harlem Renaissance, later civil rights activism, and new styles in music, art, and literature.

• At the same time, migrants often faced housing discrimination, job ceilings, and racism in their new cities, leading to segregated neighborhoods and tensions that lasted for decades.

In short, when people ask “what is the Great Migration?”, they’re usually talking about this 20th‑century Black exodus from the Southern countryside to Northern and Western cities—and how it transformed American society.

TL;DR: The Great Migration was the 1910s–1970 mass movement of millions of African Americans out of the segregated, violent Jim Crow South into Northern and Western cities, seeking safety, better jobs, and greater freedom, profoundly changing U.S. demographics and culture.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.