The Great Migration Moves Millions of Black Southerners North
Wartime factory jobs and the hope of escaping Jim Crow pull African Americans out of the rural South by the millions
Quick facts
- Scale
- More than 6 million people, 1910 to 1970
- Destinations
- Chicago, Detroit, New York, and other Northern and Western cities
- Related violence
- The Red Summer of 1919
What happened
Starting around 1916, as World War I cut off European immigration and pulled men into the army, Northern factories recruited Black Southern workers to fill vacant industrial jobs. The National Archives dates the Great Migration from 1910 to 1970, during which more than 6 million Black Americans left the rural South for cities in the North, Midwest, and West. Migrants left behind sharecropping, disenfranchisement, and the constant threat of lynching, but many found Jim Crow's informal cousin waiting in Northern cities: segregated housing, exclusion from unions and better jobs, and periodic explosions of white mob violence, including the Red Summer of 1919 when race riots broke out in more than three dozen American cities as white residents violently resisted the demographic change.
Why it matters
The Great Migration built the urban Black political and institutional base, in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and beyond, that would later fund and organize the civil rights movement, and it exposed the limits of moving north: segregation without statute proved just as durable as segregation by law, a tension that resurfaced in the Watts riots of 1965.
How we know
The National Archives' African American Heritage research guide documents the migration's scale and timeline from census and immigration records, and traces the wartime labor shortage that opened industrial jobs to Black workers for the first time.
Sources
- National Archives. The Great Migration (1910-1970) · Primary source (author-declared)archives.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- HISTORY (A&E Networks). Great Migration: Definition, Causes & Impact · Reputable sourcehistory.com · The domain "history.com" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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