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The 'Great Migration' was the movement of over a million^[2] African Americans out of the rural Southern United States from 1914 to 1950. African Americans migrated to escape the widespread racism of the South, to seek out employment opportunities in urban environments, and to pursue what was widely perceived to be a "better life" in the North.^[2]

Contents

Causes

Effects

Demographic changes

Discrimination and working conditions

Integration, and non-integration

References

Causes

When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed (1863) less than 8 percent of the African-American population lived in the Northeast or Midwest. Even by 1900, approximately 90 percent of all African-Americans still resided in former slave-holding states.^[4]
Most African Americans who participated in the migration moved to large industrial cities, such as New York, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Baltimore, Maryland; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Detroit, Michigan; Chicago, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; St. Louis, Missouri; Oakland, California and Los Angeles, California, as well as to many smaller industrial cities. People tended to take the cheapest rail ticket possible; this resulted in, for example, people from Mississippi moving to Chicago and people from Texas moving to Los Angeles. The North saw its black population rise about 20 percent between 1910 and 1930. Cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Cleveland saw some of the biggest increases.
African-Americans moved as individuals or small groups. There was for the most part no government assistance. They migrated because of a variety of push and pull factors. The number one push factor was the racial climate in the South: in the North, there were better schools for African-American children.
# Many African-Americans believed they could avoid the racial segregation of Jim Crow laws in the South by seeking refuge in the supposed "Promised Land" of the North where there was thought to be less racial persecution;
# The boll weevil infestation of Southern cotton fields in the late 1910s forced many sharecroppers to search for alternative employment opportunities;
# The enormous expansion of war industries created new job openings for blacks—not in the factories but in the service jobs that new factory workers vacated;
# World War I and the Immigration Act of 1924 effectively put a halt to the flow of European immigrants to the emerging industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest, causing shortages of workers in the factories;
# Anti-immigration legislation after the war resulted in similar labor shortages;
# The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and its aftermath displaced hundreds of thousands of African-American farm workers;
# After 1940, as the U.S. rearmed for World War II (see Homefront-United States-World War II), industrial production in the Northeast, Midwest and West increased rapidly;
# The postwar economic boom offered additional opportunities for black workers in northern cities.

Effects

Demographic changes

The identities of many of the United States' modern cities were forged in this period. For instance, in 1910, the African American population of Detroit was just 6,000; by the start of the Great Depression in the United States in 1929, this figure had risen to 120,000. Other cities, such as Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore and New York City, also experienced surges in their African American populations.
In the South, the departure of hundreds of thousands of African Americans caused the black percentage of the population in most Southern states to decrease. In Mississippi and South Carolina, for example, blacks decreased from about 60% of the population in 1930 to about 35% by 1970.

Discrimination and working conditions

While the Great Migration helped educated African Americans obtain non-menial jobs, enabling a measure of class mobility, the migrants encountered more subtle forms of discrimination in the North. Because so many people had migrated in so short a period of time, the African American migrants were often considered unwelcome by working class Northerners, who feared that their ability to negotiate rates of pay, or even to secure employment at all, was threatened by the influx of labor.
The migrants also discovered that the open discrimination of the South was only more subtly manifest in the North. Mortgage discrimination and redlining in inner city areas limited the migrants' ability to determine their own housing, or even to get a fair price on that housing. The National Housing Act of 1934 contributed to limiting the availability of loans to urban areas, particularly those areas inhabited by African Americans; the Act is often considered to have precipitated inordinate urban decay in black-populated urban areas.[2]

Integration, and non-integration

As African Americans migrated, they became increasingly integrated into society. As they became increasingly closer to Caucasians, the divide that existed between them became increasingly stark. It also became more apparent that African Americans needed to not only be as good but better at what they do than their Caucasian counterparts to be considered equal to them. This period marked the transition of many African Americans from lifestyles as rural farmers to urban industrial workers.^[5]
While African Americans were most often relegated to support roles during WWII, oftentimes these roles would be exceedingly hazardous. A munitions explosion at Port Chicago claimed the lives of over 200 African Americans in 1946; when some of the workers refused to resume work until conditions were made less hazardous, as many as 50 were tried for mutiny and imprisoned.[3]
During the migration, migrants would commonly move as a community rather than as individuals or families. This tendency may have contributed to maintaining the "racial divide" in the North, perhaps even accentuating it; as many Southern cultural and linguistic traits were sustained by the African American migrants from the South, these cultural differences themselves came to enhance a sense of "otherness".^[6] Some prejudices that emerged in this period, as stereotypes ascribed to "black" people, seem to have been derived from the migrants' rural cultural traditions, which were maintained in stark contrast to the urban environments in which they resided.^[7]

References

1. [1]
2. The Great Migration
3. The Great Migration
4. The African-American Mosaic
5. Humanities and Social Sciences Online. Michigan State University..
6. [4]
7. [5]


★ Arnesen, Eric. ''Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents'' (2002).

★ Grossman, James R. ''Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration'' (1991).

★ Lemann, Nicholas. ''The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America'' (1992), on the 1940-60 migration.

★ Scott, Emmett J., ''Negro Migration during the War'' (1920).

★ Sernett, Milton. ''Bound for the Promised Land: African Americans Religion and the Great Migration'' (1997).