Great Migration (African American)

Causes and motivations

• Push factors: Legalized segregation, racial violence including lynching, disfranchisement, and the limited economic prospects of sharecropping and tenant farming in the South encouraged many to leave.
• Pull factors: Industrial growth in northern and midwestern cities offered steady factory and service employment, especially during and after the two world wars, when labor demand rose. The presence of established Black communities and perceived political freedoms also attracted migrants.
• Family and information networks: Letters, newspapers, and early migrants' reports helped others plan moves and find housing and work in destination cities.

Phases and patterns

Scholars often divide the migration into at least two large waves. The first major movement began around World War I and continued through the 1930s, when thousands left to fill industrial jobs. A larger second wave accelerated during and after World War II, lasting into the 1960s. Over those decades roughly six million African Americans moved northward and westward, reshaping cities such as Chicago, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. For concise statistical summaries and maps, see contemporary overviews and archival compilations (migration statistics).

Consequences and legacy

• Urban growth and community building: Migrants founded churches, businesses, newspapers, and social institutions that formed vibrant Black urban neighborhoods.
• Cultural impact: The migration helped fuel artistic and intellectual movements — most famously the Harlem Renaissance — and influenced music, literature, and visual arts.
• Political change: Concentration in cities expanded African American voting power and political organization, which contributed to the later civil rights era and shifts in party alignments.
• Structural challenges: Many migrants faced housing discrimination, segregation in employment and schools, overcrowding, and later, the effects of deindustrialization and urban disinvestment.

Artistic representation and study

The Great Migration has been the subject of extensive artistic and scholarly attention. One celebrated visual record is Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Series (1940–41), a sequence of small tempera panels that narrate the movement in vivid, accessible scenes. Academic studies and oral histories continue to examine how migration altered family structures, labor patterns, and regional identities. For curated exhibitions and interpretive resources, consult cultural institutions and scholarly surveys (cultural resources, academic overviews).

Beginning in the late 20th century some demographers identified a "New Great Migration": a net return of African Americans to the South from the 1970s onward. This reverse flow has been attributed to improved economic opportunities in the Sun Belt, changing industrial geographies, lower living costs, and family ties, as well as to evolving patterns of race relations. Together, the Great Migration and its later reversal are central to understanding modern American urban development, politics, and culture.