who was involved in the great migration

The Great Migration mainly involved millions of African Americans leaving the rural U.S. South and moving to cities in the North, Midwest, and West between about the 1910s and 1970.

Who was involved in the Great Migration?

• The migrants were primarily Black sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and laborers from Southern states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and the Carolinas.

• They moved to industrial and urban centers like Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Los Angeles seeking factory jobs, better schools, and safety from racial violence.

Key groups and communities

• Southern white landowners and employers were indirectly involved because they depended on Black labor and tried to discourage or restrict people from leaving.

• Northern white employers, factory owners, and labor recruiters actively encouraged migration, offering railroad fare and promises of work in steel mills, slaughterhouses, automobile plants, and other industries.

• Black churches, mutual-aid societies, and fraternal organizations in Northern cities helped new arrivals find housing, jobs, and community support.

Influential individuals and leaders

• Black newspaper editors such as Robert S. Abbott of the Chicago Defender promoted migration by running train schedules, job ads, and stories about better opportunities in the North.

• Civil rights leaders, intellectuals, and artists—including figures like W.E.B. Du Bois and later activists shaped by migration—helped frame the move as part of a broader struggle for freedom and citizenship.

• Many later-famous Americans were themselves migrants or children of migrants, including writers, musicians, athletes, and actors, whose families left the South during this period.

Government and policy context

• Local and state governments in the South enforced Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial terror, creating the hostile conditions that pushed people to leave.

• Northern and Western city governments, real-estate boards, and federal housing policies shaped where migrants could live through segregation, redlining, and restrictive covenants, even as they offered more economic opportunity than the South.

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