The Great Migration

From the South to the North

Facts about the Great Migration• Between 1910 and 1930• Black Americans move

from the South to the North

• Over 1 million participated!

• Destination: New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh

• In 1910…89% of Blacks lived in the South, 80% in rural areas

• By the end of 1920…40% lived in cities

Hard, back-breaking labor day in and day out

PUSH FACTORS(Pushing Blacks out of the South)

• 1913-1915: Falling cotton prices brought on an economic depression

• Boll weevil insects destroy cotton crop

• Severe floods destroy houses and farms along the Mississippi River

• Jim Crow Laws in the South: Segregated schools, restaurants, hotels, railroad cars, and hospitals

• Black were kept from voting due to a literacy test and a poll tax (this didn’t apply to Whites)

Pushing Blacks out of the South

Falling cotton prices

Severe floods destroy land

Boll Weevil attacks crops

Jim Crow laws

“…I am fed up

With Jim Crow laws,

People who are cruel

And afraid,

Who lynch and run,

Who are scared of me

And me of them

I pick up my life

And take it away

On a one-way ticket-

Gone up North

Gone out West

Gone!”

PULL FACTORS(Pulling Blacks into the North)

• Northern industries were having an economic boom!

• WWI had limited European immigration

• North needs workers• Americans who go off to

war…leave their jobs open• Railroad companies pay

their travel expense• Labor recruiters visit the

South

• Salaries higher in the North

• #s of strikes in the North because unions began to organize and demand decent wages…Blacks were willing to become replacement workers

• Black newspapers encourage Blacks to move

Moving North…“Some said goodbye

cheerfully…others fearfully, with terrors of known dangers in their mouths…others

in eagerness for distance said nothing.

The daybreak found them gone. The wind

said North.”-Zora Neale Hurston

How Blacks were received in the North

• Tensions had escalated • Summer of 1919…More

than 25 urban race riots• NAACP urged Blacks to

protest racial violence• Antilynching laws

weren’t passed…but the number of lynchings dropped

• Whites were alarmed!

How Blacks were received in the North…

• East St. Louis Race Riot of 1917– Whites were angry about

Black workers in a factory holding government contracts

– One of the worst incidents of racial antagonism in the US during WWI

– Whites stabbed, clubbed, and hung blacks; driving 6,000 from their homes. 40 Blacks and 8 Whites were killed.

The Chicago Defender

•The most influential black newspaper in the US in the early and mid-20th century

•Played a leading role in this northern migration by Blacks

•Founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott

•Attacking white oppression and lynchings of Blacks

•Langston Hughes held a popular column

•Encouraged Blacks to escape racismmove North!

What slowed this migration down?

• The Great Depression after 1929 (the Stock Market Crash)…the economy was no longer booming

• World War II (many Black Americans sign up for the war)