great migration thesis

The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration

When millions of African-Americans fled the South in search of a better life, they remade the nation in ways that are still being felt

Isabel Wilkerson

In 1963, the American mathematician Edward Lorenz, taking a measure of the earth’s atmosphere in a laboratory that would seem far removed from the social upheavals of the time, set forth the theory that a single “flap of a sea gull’s wings” could redirect the path of a tornado on another continent, that it could, in fact, be “enough to alter the course of the weather forever,” and that, though the theory was then new and untested, “the most recent evidence would seem to favor the sea gulls.”

At that moment in American history, the country had reached a turning point in a fight for racial justice that had been building for decades. This was the year of the killing of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, of Gov. George Wallace blocking black students at the schoolhouse door of the University of Alabama, the year of the March on Washington, of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” By then, millions of African-Americans had already testified with their bodies to the repression they had endured in the Jim Crow South by defecting to the North and West in what came to be known as the Great Migration. They were fleeing a world where they were restricted to the most menial of jobs, underpaid if paid at all, and frequently barred from voting. Between 1880 and 1950, an African-American was lynched more than once a week for some perceived breach of the racial hierarchy.

“They left as though they were fleeing some curse,” wrote the scholar Emmett J. Scott, an observer of the early years of the migration. “They were willing to make almost any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket and they left with the intention of staying.”

The migration began, like the flap of a sea gull’s wings, as a rivulet of black families escaping Selma, Alabama, in the winter of 1916. Their quiet departure was scarcely noticed except for a single paragraph in the Chicago Defender , to whom they confided that “the treatment doesn’t warrant staying.” The rivulet would become rapids, which grew into a flood of six million people journeying out of the South over the course of six decades. They were seeking political asylum within the borders of their own country, not unlike refugees in other parts of the world fleeing famine, war and pestilence.

Until that moment and from the time of their arrival on these shores, the vast majority of African-Americans had been confined to the South, at the bottom of a feudal social order, at the mercy of slaveholders and their descendants and often-violent vigilantes. The Great Migration was the first big step that the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.

“Oftentimes, just to go away is one of the most aggressive things that another person can do,” wrote John Dollard, an anthropologist studying the racial caste system of the South in the 1930s, “and if the means of expressing discontent are limited, as in this case, it is one of the few ways in which pressure can be put on.”

The refugees could not know what was in store for them and for their descendants at their destinations or what effect their exodus would have on the country. But by their actions, they would reshape the social and political geography of every city they fled to. When the migration began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the time it was over, in the 1970s, 47 percent of all African-Americans were living in the North and West. A rural people had become urban, and a Southern people had spread themselves all over the nation.

Merely by leaving, African-Americans would get to participate in democracy and, by their presence, force the North to pay attention to the injustices in the South and the increasingly organized fight against those injustices. By leaving, they would change the course of their lives and those of their children. They would become Richard Wright the novelist instead of Richard Wright the sharecropper. They would become John Coltrane, jazz musician instead of tailor; Bill Russell, NBA pioneer instead of paper mill worker; Zora Neale Hurston, beloved folklorist instead of maidservant. The children of the Great Migration would reshape professions that, had their families not left, may never have been open to them, from sports and music to literature and art: Miles Davis, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Jacob Lawrence, Diana Ross, Tupac Shakur, Prince, Michael Jackson, Shonda Rhimes, Venus and Serena Williams and countless others. The people who migrated would become the forebears of most African-Americans born in the North and West.

The Great Migration would expose the racial divisions and disparities that in many ways continue to plague the nation and dominate headlines today, from police killings of unarmed African-Americans to mass incarceration to widely documented biases in employment, housing, health care and education. Indeed, two of the most tragically recognizable descendants of the Great Migration are Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy killed in Mississippi in 1955, and Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Cleveland boy shot to death by police in 2014 in the city where his ancestors had fled. Their fates are a reminder that the perils the people sought to escape were not confined to the South, nor to the past.

The history of African-Americans is often distilled into two epochs: the 246 years of enslavement ending after the close of the Civil War, and the dramatic era of protest during the civil rights movement. Yet the Civil War-to-civil rights axis tempts us to leap past a century of resistance against subjugation, and to miss the human story of ordinary people, their hopes lifted by Emancipation, dashed at the end of Reconstruction, crushed further by Jim Crow, only to be finally, at long last, revived when they found the courage within themselves to break free.

A little boy boarded a northbound train with his grandmother and extended family, along with their upright piano and the rest of their worldly possessions, stuffed inside wooden crates, to begin their journey out of Mississippi. It was 1935. They were packed into the Jim Crow car, which, by custom, was at the front of the train, the first to absorb the impact in the event of a collision. They would not be permitted into the dining car, so they carried fried chicken and boiled eggs to tide them over for the journey.

The little boy was 4 years old and anxious. He’d overheard the grown-ups talking about leaving their farm in Arkabutla, to start over up north. He heard them say they might leave him with his father’s people, whom he didn’t know. In the end they took him along. The near abandonment haunted him. He missed his mother, who would not be joining them on this journey; she was away trying to make a stable life for herself after the breakup with his father. He did not know when he would see her again.

His grandfather had preceded them north. He was a hardworking, serious man who kept the indignities he suffered under Jim Crow to himself. In Mississippi, he had not dared stand up to some white children who broke the family’s wagon. He told the little boy that as black people, they had no say in that world. “There were things they could do that we couldn’t,” the boy would say of the white children when he was a grown man with gray hair and a son of his own.

The grandfather was so determined to get his family out of the South that he bought a plot of land sight unseen in a place called Michigan. On the trip north, the little boy and his cousins and uncles and aunts (who were children themselves) did not quite know what Michigan was, so they made a ditty out of it and sang it as they waited for the train. “Meatskin! Meatskin! We’re going to Meatskin!”

They landed on freer soil, but between the fears of abandonment and the trauma of being uprooted from his mother, the little boy arrived with a stutter. He began to speak less and less. At Sunday school, the children bellowed with laughter whenever he tried. So instead, he talked to the hogs and cows and chickens on the farm, who, he said years later, “don’t care how you sound.”

The little boy went mute for eight years. He wrote down the answers to questions he was asked, fearing even to introduce himself to strangers, until a high school English teacher coaxed him out of his silence by having him read poetry aloud to the class. That boy was James Earl Jones. He would go on to the University of Michigan, where he abandoned pre-med for theater. Later he would play King Lear in Central Park and Othello on Broadway, win Tony Awards for his performances in  Fences  and in  The Great White Hope  and star in films like  Dr. Strange­love ,  Roots ,  Field of Dreams  and  Coming to America .

The voice that fell silent for so long would become among the most iconic of our time—the voice of Darth Vader in  Star Wars , of Mufasa in  The Lion King , the voice of CNN. Jones lost his voice, and found it, because of the Great Migration. “It was responsible for all that I am grateful for in my life,” he told me in a recent interview in New York. “We were reaching for our gold mines, our freedom.”

The desire to be free is, of course, human and universal. In America, enslaved people had tried to escape through the Underground Railroad. Later, once freed on paper, thousands more, known as Exodusters, fled the violent white backlash following Reconstruction in a short-lived migration to Kansas in 1879.

But concentrated in the South as they were, held captive by the virtual slavery of sharecropping and debt peonage and isolated from the rest of the country in the era before airlines and interstates, many African-Americans had no ready means of making a go of it in what were then faraway alien lands.

By the opening of the 20th century, the optimism of the Reconstruction era had long turned into the terror of Jim Crow. In 1902, one black woman in Alabama seemed to speak for the agitated hearts that would ultimately propel the coming migration: “In our homes, in our churches, wherever two or three are gathered together,” she said, “there is a discussion of what is best to do. Must we remain in the South or go elsewhere? Where can we go to feel that security which other people feel? Is it best to go in great numbers or only in several families? These and many other things are discussed over and over.”

The door of escape opened during World War I, when slowing immigration from Europe created a labor shortage in the North. To fill the assembly lines, companies began recruiting black Southerners to work the steel mills, railroads and factories. Resistance in the South to the loss of its cheap black labor meant that recruiters often had to act in secret or face fines and imprisonment. In Macon, Georgia, for example, a recruiter’s license required a $25,000 fee plus the unlikely recommendations of 25 local businessmen, ten ministers and ten manufacturers. But word soon spread among black Southerners that the North had opened up, and people began devising ways to get out on their own.

Southern authorities then tried to keep African-Americans from leaving by arresting them at the railroad platforms on grounds of “vagrancy” or tearing up their tickets in scenes that presaged tragically thwarted escapes from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. And still they left.

On one of the early trains out of the South was a sharecropper named Mallie Robinson, whose husband had left her to care for their young family under the rule of a harsh plantation owner in Cairo, Georgia. In 1920, she gathered up her five children, including a baby still in diapers, and, with her sister and brother-in-law and their children and three friends, boarded a Jim Crow train, and another, and another, and didn’t get off until they reached California.

They settled in Pasadena. When the family moved into an all-white neighborhood, a cross was burned on their front lawn. But here Mallie’s children would go to integrated schools for the full year instead of segregated classrooms in between laborious hours chopping and picking cotton. The youngest, the one she had carried in her arms on the train out of Georgia, was named Jackie, who would go on to earn four letters in athletics in a single year at UCLA. Later, in 1947, he became the first African-American to play Major League Baseball.

Had Mallie not persevered in the face of hostility, raising a family of six alone in the new world she had traveled to, we might not have ever known his name. “My mother never lost her composure,” Jackie Robinson once recalled. “As I grew older, I often thought about the courage it took for my mother to break away from the South.”

Mallie was extraordinary in another way. Most people, when they left the South, followed three main tributaries: the first was up the East Coast from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston; the second, up the country’s central spine, from Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas to St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and the entire Midwest; the third, from Louisiana and Texas to California and the Western states. But Mallie took one of the farthest routes in the continental U.S. to get to freedom, a westward journey of more than 2,200 miles.

The trains that spirited the people away, and set the course for those who would come by bus or car or foot, acquired names and legends of their own. Perhaps the most celebrated were those that rumbled along the Illinois Central Railroad, for which Abraham Lincoln had worked as a lawyer before his election to the White House, and from which Pullman porters distributed copies of the  Chicago Defender  in secret to black Southerners hungry for information about the North. The Illinois Central was the main route for those fleeing Mississippi for Chicago, people like Muddy Waters, the blues legend who made the journey in 1943 and whose music helped define the genre and pave the way for rock ’n’ roll, and Richard Wright, a sharecropper’s son from Natchez, Mississippi, who got on a train in 1927 at the age of 19 to feel what he called “the warmth of other suns.”

In Chicago, Wright worked washing dishes and sweeping streets before landing a job at the post office and pursuing his dream as a writer. He began to visit the library: a right and pleasure that would have been unthinkable in his home state of Mississippi. In 1940, having made it to New York, he published  Native Son  to national acclaim, and, through this and other works, became a kind of poet laureate of the Great Migration. He seemed never to have forgotten the heartbreak of leaving his homeland and the courage he mustered to step into the unknown. “We look up at the high Southern sky,” Wright wrote in  12 Million Black Voices . “We scan the kind, black faces we have looked upon since we first saw the light of day, and, though pain is in our hearts, we are leaving.”

Zora Neale Hurston arrived in the North along the East Coast stream from Florida, although, as was her way, she broke convention in how she got there. She had grown up as the willful younger daughter of an exacting preacher and his long-suffering wife in the all-black town of Eatonville. After her mother died, when she was 13, Hurston bounced between siblings and neighbors until she was hired as a maid with a traveling theater troupe that got her north, dropping her off in Baltimore in 1917. From there, she made her way to Howard University in Washington, where she got her first story published in the literary magazine  Stylus  while working odd jobs as a waitress, maid and manicurist.

She continued on to New York in 1925 with $1.50 to her name. She would become the first black student known to graduate from Barnard College. There, she majored in English and studied anthropology, but was barred from living in the dormitories. She never complained. In her landmark 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she mocked the absurdity: “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry,” she wrote. “It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

She arrived in New York when the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and cultural flowering in the early years of the Great Migration, was in full bloom. The influx to the New York region would extend well beyond the Harlem Renaissance and draw the parents or grandparents of, among so many others, Denzel Washington (Virginia and Georgia), Ella Fitzgerald (Newport News, Virginia), the artist Romare Bearden (Charlotte, North Carolina), Whitney Houston (Blakeley, Georgia), the rapper Tupac Shakur (Lumberton, North Carolina), Sarah Vaughan (Virginia) and Althea Gibson (Clarendon County, South Carolina), the tennis champion who, in 1957, became the first black player to win at Wimbledon.

From Aiken, South Carolina, and Bladenboro, North Carolina, the migration drew the parents of Diahann Carroll, who would become the first black woman to win a Tony Award for best actress and, in 1968, to star in her own television show in a role other than a domestic. It was in New York that the mother of Jacob Lawrence settled after a winding journey from Virginia to Atlantic City to Philadelphia and then on to Harlem. Once there, to keep teenage Jacob safe from the streets, she enrolled her eldest son in an after-school arts program that would set the course of his life.

Lawrence would go on to create “The Migration Series”—60 painted panels, brightly colored like the throw rugs his mother kept in their tenement apartment. The paintings would become not only the best-known images of the Great Migration but among the most recognizable images of African-Americans in the 20th century.

Yet throughout the migration, wherever black Southerners went, the hostility and hierarchies that fed the Southern caste system seemed to carry over into the receiving stations in the New World, as the cities of the North and West erected barriers to black mobility. There were “sundown towns” throughout the country that banned African-Americans after dark. The constitution of Oregon explicitly prohibited black people from entering the state until 1926; whites-only signs could still be seen in store windows into the 1950s.

Even in the places where they were permitted, blacks were relegated to the lowest-paying, most dangerous jobs, barred from many unions and, at some companies, hired only as strike breakers, which served to further divide black workers from white. They were confined to the most dilapidated housing in the least desirable sections of the cities to which they fled. In densely populated destinations like Pittsburgh and Harlem, housing was so scarce that some black workers had to share the same single bed in shifts.

When African-Americans sought to move their families to more favorable conditions, they faced a hardening structure of policies and customs designed to maintain racial exclusion. Restrictive covenants, introduced as a response to the influx of black people during the Great Migration, were clauses written into deeds that outlawed African-Americans from buying, leasing or living in properties in white neighborhoods, with the exception, often explicitly spelled out, of servants. By the 1920s, the widespread use of restrictive covenants kept as much as 85 percent of Chicago off-limits to African-Americans.

At the same time, redlining—the federal housing policy of refusing to approve or guarantee mortgages in areas where black people lived—served to deny them access to mortgages in their own neighborhoods. These policies became the pillars of a residential caste system in the North that calcified segregation and wealth inequality over generations, denying African-Americans the chance accorded other Americans to improve their lot.

In the 1930s, a black couple in Chicago named Carl and Nannie Hansberry decided to fight these restrictions to make a better life for themselves and their four young children. They had migrated north during World War I, Carl from Mississippi and Nannie from Tennessee. He was a real estate broker, she was a schoolteacher, and they had managed to save up enough to buy a home.

They found a brick three-flat with bay windows in the all-white neighborhood of Woodlawn. Although other black families moving into white neighborhoods had endured firebombings and mob violence, Carl wanted more space for his family and bought the house in secret with the help of progressive white real estate agents he knew. He moved the family late in the spring of 1937. The couple’s youngest daughter, Lorraine, was 7 years old when they first moved, and she later described the vitriol and violence her family met in what she called a “hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house.” At one point a mob descended on the home to throw bricks and broken concrete, narrowly missing her head.

But not content simply to terrorize the Hansberrys, neighbors then filed a lawsuit, forcing the family to move out, backed by state courts and restrictive covenants. The Hansberrys took the case to the Supreme Court to challenge the restrictive covenants and to return to the house they bought. The case culminated in a 1940 Supreme Court decision that was one of a series of cases that together helped strike a blow against segregation. But the hostility continued.

Lorraine Hansberry later recalled being “spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German Luger, doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court.”

In 1959, Hansberry’s play  A Raisin in the Sun , about a black family on Chicago’s South Side living in dilapidated housing with few better options and at odds over what to do after the death of the patriarch, became the first play written by an African-American woman to be performed on Broadway. The fight by those who migrated and those who marched eventually led to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which made such discriminatory practices illegal. Carl Hansberry did not live to see it. He died in 1946 at age 50 while in Mexico City, where, disillusioned with the slow speed of progress in America, he was working on plans to move his family to Mexico.

The Great Migration laid bare tensions in the North and West that were not as far removed from the South as the people who migrated might have hoped. Martin Luther King Jr., who went north to study in Boston, where he met his wife, Coretta Scott, experienced the depth of Northern resistance to black progress when he was campaigning for fair housing in Chicago decades after the Hansberrys’ fight. He was leading a march in Marquette Park, in 1966, amid fuming crowds. One placard said: “King would look good with a knife in his back.” A protester hurled a stone that hit him in the head. Shaken, he fell to one knee. “I have seen many demonstrations in the South,” he told reporters. “But I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”


Out of such turmoil arose a political consciousness in a people who had been excluded from civic life for most of their history. The disaffected children of the Great Migration grew more outspoken about the worsening conditions in their places of refuge. Among them was Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, to a lay minister who had journeyed north from Georgia, and a mother born in Grenada. Malcolm was 6 years old when his father, who was under continuous attack by white supremacists for his role fighting for civil rights in the North, died a violent, mysterious death that plunged the family into poverty and dislocation.

Despite the upheaval, Malcolm was accomplished in his predominantly white school, but when he shared his dream of becoming a lawyer, a teacher told him that the law was “no realistic goal for a n-----.” He dropped out soon afterward.

He would go on to become known as Detroit Red, Malcolm X and el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, a journey from militancy to humanitarianism, a voice of the dispossessed and a counterweight to Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement.

At around the same time, a radical movement was brewing on the West Coast. Huey Newton was the impatient son of a preacher and itinerant laborer who left Louisiana with his family for Oakland, after his father was almost lynched for talking back to a white overseer. Huey was a toddler when they arrived in California. There, he struggled in schools ill-equipped to handle the influx of newcomers from the South. He was pulled to the streets and into juvenile crime. It was only after high school that he truly learned to read, but he would go on to earn a PhD.

In college he read Malcolm X and met classmate Bobby Seale, with whom, in 1966, he founded the Black Panther Party, built on the ideas of political action first laid out by Stokely Carmichael. The Panthers espoused self-determination, quality housing, health care and full employment for African-Americans. They ran schools and fed the poor. But they would become known for their steadfast and militant belief in the right of African-Americans to defend themselves when under attack, as had been their lot for generations in the Jim Crow South and was increasingly in the North and West.

Perhaps few participants of the Great Migration had as deep an impact on activism and social justice without earning the commensurate recognition for her role as Ella Baker. She was born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia, to devout and ambitious parents and grew up in North Carolina. After graduating from Shaw University, in Raleigh, she left for New York in 1927. There she worked as a waitress, factory worker and editorial assistant before becoming active in the NAACP, where she eventually rose to national director.

Baker became the quiet shepherd of the civil rights movement, working alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall and W.E.B. DuBois. She mentored the likes of Stokely Carmichael and Rosa Parks and helped to create the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—the network of college students who risked their lives to integrate buses and register blacks to vote in the most dangerous parts of the South. She helped guide almost every major event in the civil rights era, from the Montgomery bus boycott to the march in Selma to the Freedom Rides and the student sit-ins of the 1960s.

Baker was among those who suggested to King, then still in his 20s, that he take the movement beyond Alabama after the success of the bus boycott and press for racial equality throughout the South. She had a keen understanding that a movement would need Southern origins in order for participants not to be dismissed as “Northern agitators.” King was at first reluctant to push his followers in the aftermath of the taxing 381-day boycott, but she believed that momentum was crucial. The modern civil rights movement had begun.

Baker devoted her life to working at the ground level in the South to organize the nonviolent demonstrations that helped change the region she had left but not forsaken. She directed students and sharecroppers, ministers and intellectuals, but never lost a fervent belief in the power of ordinary people to change their destiny. “Give light,” she once said, “and people will find the way.”

Over time, as the people of the Great Migration embedded themselves in their cities, they aspired to leading roles in civic life. It could not have been imagined in the migration’s early decades that the first black mayors of most major cities in the North and West would not be longtime Northerners, as might have been expected, but rather children of the Great Migration, some having worked the Southern fields themselves.

The man who would become the first black mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, was born on a cotton plantation in Calvert, Texas, to sharecroppers Crenner and Lee Thomas Bradley. The family migrated to Los Angeles when he was 7 years old. Once there his father abandoned the family, and his mother supported him and his four siblings working as a maid. Bradley grew up on Central Avenue among the growing colony of black arrivals from the South. He became a track star at UCLA and later joined the Los Angeles police force, rising to lieutenant, the highest rank allowed African-Americans in the 1950s.

Seeing limits on his advancement, he went to law school at night, won a seat on the city council, and was elected mayor in 1973, serving five consecutive terms.

His name would become a part of the political lexicon after he ran for governor of California in 1982. Polls had overestimated support for him due to what was believed to be the reluctance of white voters to be truthful with pollsters about their intention to vote for his white opponent, George Deukmejian. To this day, in an election involving a non-white candidate, the discrepancy between polling numbers and final outcomes due to the misleading poll responses of white voters is known as the “Bradley Effect.” In the 1982 election that Bradley had been favored to win, he lost by a single percentage point.

Still, he would describe Los Angeles, the place that drew his family out of Texas, as “the city of hope and opportunity.” He said, “I am a living example of that.”

The story of African-Americans on this soil cannot be told without the Great Migration. For many of them, the 20th century was largely an era of migrating and marching until freedom, by law and in their hearts, was won. Its mission over, the migration ended in the 1970s, when the South had sufficiently changed so that African-Americans were no longer under pressure to leave and were free to live anywhere they chose. From that time, to the current day, a new narrative took hold in popular thought that has seized primarily on geographical census data, gathered every ten years, showing that since 1975 the South has witnessed a net increase of African-Americans, many drawn (like other Americans) to job opportunities and a lower cost of living, but also to the call of their ancestral homeland, enacting what has come to be called a “reverse migration.”

The phrase and phenomenon have captured the attention of demographers and journalists alike who revisit the trend after each new census. One report went so far as to describe it as “an evacuation” from the Northern cities by African-Americans back to the place their forebears had fled. But the demographics are more complex than the narrative often portrayed. While hundreds of thousands of African-Americans have left Northern cities, they have not made a trail to the farms and hamlets where their ancestors may have picked cotton but to the biggest cities of the South—Atlanta, Houston, Dallas—which are now more cosmopolitan and thus more like their Northern counterparts. Many others have not headed South at all but have fanned out to suburbs or smaller cities in the North and West, places like Las Vegas, Columbus, Ohio, or even Ferguson, Missouri. Indeed, in the 40 years since the migration ended, the proportion of the South that is African-American has remained unchanged at about 20 percent—far from the seismic impact of the Great Migration. And so “reverse migration” seems not only an overstatement but misleading, as if relocating to an employer’s Houston office were equivalent to running for one’s life on the Illinois Central.

Richard Wright relocated several times in his quest for other suns, fleeing Mississippi for Memphis and Memphis for Chicago and Chicago for New York, where, living in Greenwich Village, barbers refused to serve him and some restaurants refused to seat him. In 1946, near the height of the Great Migration, he came to the disheartening recognition that, wherever he went, he faced hostility. So he went to France. Similarly, African-Americans today must navigate the social fault lines exposed by the Great Migration and the country’s reactions to it: white flight, police brutality, systemic ills flowing from government policy restricting fair access to safe housing and good schools. In recent years, the North, which never had to confront its own injustices, has moved toward a crisis that seems to have reached a boiling point in our current day: a catalog of videotaped assaults and killings of unarmed black people, from Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991, Eric Garner in New York in 2014, Philando Castile outside St. Paul, Minnesota, this summer, and beyond.

Thus the eternal question is: Where can African-Americans go? It is the same question their ancestors asked and answered, only to discover upon arriving that the racial caste system was not Southern but American.

And so it was in these places of refuge that Black Lives Matter arose, a largely Northern- and Western-born protest movement against persistent racial discrimination in many forms. It is organic and leaderless like the Great Migration itself, bearing witness to attacks on African-Americans in the unfinished quest for equality. The natural next step in this journey has turned out to be not simply moving to another state or geographic region but moving fully into the mainstream of American life, to be seen in one’s full humanity, to be able to breathe free wherever one lives in America.

From this perspective, the Great Migration has no contemporary geographic equivalent because it was not solely about geography. It was about agency for a people who had been denied it, who had geography as the only tool at their disposal. It was an expression of faith, despite the terrors they had survived, that the country whose wealth had been created by their ancestors’ unpaid labor might do right by them.

We can no more reverse the Great Migration than unsee a painting by Jacob Lawrence, unhear Prince or Coltrane, erase  The Piano Lesson , remove Mae Jemison from her spacesuit in science textbooks, delete  Beloved . In a short span of time—in some cases, over the course of a single generation—the people of the Great Migration proved the worldview of the enslavers a lie, that the people who were forced into the field and whipped for learning to read could do far more than pick cotton, scrub floors. Perhaps, deep down, the enslavers always knew that. Perhaps that is one reason they worked so hard at such a brutal system of subjugation. The Great Migration was thus a Declaration of Independence. It moved those who had long been invisible not just out of the South but into the light. And a tornado triggered by the wings of a sea gull can never be unwound.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

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Isabel Wilkerson | | READ MORE

Isabel Wilkerson is a former Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize winner. She is the author of the best-selling The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration .

African American Heritage

The Great Migration (1910-1970)

Boys outside of the Stateway Gardens Housing Project on the South Side of Chicago, May, 1973 ( NAID 556163 )

The Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United States history. Approximately six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states roughly from the 1910s until the 1970s. The driving force behind the mass movement was to escape racial violence, pursue economic and educational opportunities, and obtain freedom from the oppression of Jim Crow.

The Great Migration is often broken into two phases, coinciding with the participation and effects of the United States in both World Wars. The First Great Migration (1910-1940) had Black southerners relocate to northern and midwestern cities including: New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. When the war effort ramped up in 1917, more able bodied men were sent off to Europe to fight leaving their industrial jobs vacant. The labor supply was further strained with a decline in immigration from Europe and standing bans on peoples of color from other parts of the world. All of this afforded the opportunity for the Black population to be the labor supply in non-agricultural industries. 

Although the migrants found better jobs and fled the South entrenched in Jim Crow, many African Americans faced injustices and difficulties after migrating. The Red Summer of 1919 was rooted in tensions and prejudice that arose from white people having to adjust to the demographic changes in their local communities. From World War I until World War II, it is estimated that about 2 million Black people left the South for other parts of the country.

World War II brought an expansion to the nation’s defense industry and many more jobs for African Americans in other locales, again encouraging a massive migration that was active until the 1970s. During this period, more people moved North, and further west to California's major cities including Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as well as Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. Within twenty years of World War II, a further 3 million Black people migrated throughout the United States.

Black people who migrated during the second phase of the Great Migration were met with housing discrimination, as localities had started to implement restrictive covenants and  redlining, which created segregated neighborhoods, but also served as a foundation for the existing racial disparities in wealth in the United States.

Records in this topic cover migratory information and trends captured by various branches and agencies of the government, including employment and housing. There are also records reflecting cultural and social aspects of the lives of those who participated and were impacted by the Great Migration.

Search the Catalog for Records relating to the Great Migration (1910-1970)

Blogs on the Great Migration from Rediscovering Black History

Text Message: Records Relating to African American History in the National Register of Historic Places

Unwritten Record: Spotlight Photographer - John H. White

Library of Congress: Research Guide - Great Migration, Finding Pictures

Digital Public Library of America: Great Migration Primary Source Set

Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America

Unexampled Courage, May 21, 2019

Franklin roosevelt and world war ii, towards racial equality, jun 4, 2014.

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The Great Migration

By: History.com Editors

Updated: December 15, 2023 | Original: March 4, 2010

The Great Migration was the relocation of more than 6 million Black Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West from about 1916 to 1970. Driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws, many Black Americans headed north, where they took advantage of the need for industrial workers that arose during the First World War. During the Great Migration, Black people began to build a new place for themselves in public life, actively confronting racial prejudice as well as economic, political and social challenges to create a Black urban culture that would exert enormous influence in the decades to come.

What Caused the Great Migration?

After the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, racial inequality persisted across the South during the 1870s, and the segregationist policies known as " Jim Crow " soon became the law of the land.

Black Southerners were still forced to make their living working the land due to Black codes and the sharecropping system, which offered little in the way of economic opportunity, especially after crop damage resulting from a regional boll weevil infestation in the 1890s and early 1900s.

And while the Ku Klux Klan had been officially dissolved in 1869, the KKK continued underground after that, and intimidation, violence and lynching of Black southerners were not uncommon practices in the Jim Crow South.

Did you know? Around 1916, when the Great Migration began, a factory wage in the urban North was typically three times more than what Black people could expect to make working the land in the rural South.

The Great Migration Begins

When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, industrialized urban areas in the North, Midwest and West faced a shortage of industrial laborers, as the war put an end to the steady tide of European immigration to the United States.

With war production kicking into high gear, recruiters enticed Black Americans to come north, to the dismay of white Southerners. Black newspapers—particularly the widely read Chicago Defender —published advertisements touting the opportunities available in the cities of the North and West, along with first-person accounts of success.

Life for Migrants in the City

By the end of 1919, some scholars estimate that 1 million Black people had left the South, usually traveling by train, boat or bus; a smaller number had automobiles or even horse-drawn carts.

In the decade between 1910 and 1920, the Black population of major Northern cities grew by large percentages, including New York City (66 percent), Chicago (148 percent), Philadelphia (500 percent) and Detroit (611 percent).

Many new arrivals found jobs in factories, slaughterhouses and foundries, where working conditions were arduous and sometimes dangerous. Female migrants had a harder time finding work, spurring heated competition for domestic labor positions.

Aside from competition for employment, there was also competition for living space in increasingly crowded cities. While segregation was not legalized in the North (as it was in the South), racism and prejudice were nonetheless widespread.

After the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially based housing ordinances unconstitutional in 1917, some residential neighborhoods enacted covenants requiring white property owners to agree not to sell to Black people; these would remain legal until the Court struck them down in 1948.

Rising rents in segregated areas, plus a resurgence of KKK activity after 1915, worsened Black and white relations across the country. The summer of 1919 began the greatest period of interracial strife in U.S. history at that time, including a disturbing wave of race riots.

The most serious was the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 —it lasted 13 days and left 38 people dead, 537 injured and 1,000 Black families without homes.

Impact of the Great Migration

As a result of housing tensions, many Black residents ended up creating their own cities within big cities, fostering the growth of a new, urban, Black culture. The most prominent example was Harlem in New York City, a formerly all-white neighborhood that by the 1920s housed some 200,000 Black people.

The Black experience during the Great Migration became an important theme in the artistic movement known first as the New Negro Movement and later as the Harlem Renaissance , which would have an enormous impact on the culture of the era.

The Great Migration also began a new era of increasing political activism among Black Americans, who after being disenfranchised in the South found a new place for themselves in public life in the cities of the North and West. The civil rights movement directly benefited from this activism.

Black migration slowed considerably in the 1930s, when the country sank into the Great Depression , but picked up again with the coming of World War II and the need for wartime production. But returning Black soldiers found that the GI Bill didn’t always promise the same postwar benefits for all.

By the 1970s, when the Great Migration ended, its demographic impact was unmistakable: Whereas in 1900, nine out of every 10 Black Americans lived in the South, and three out of every four lived on farms, by 1970 the South was home to only half of the country’s Black population, with only 20 percent living in the region’s rural areas. The Great Migration was famously captured in Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America ’ s Great Migration .

The Great Migration (1910-1970). National Archives . The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration. Smithsonian Magazine . Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North. NPR: Fresh Air .

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• The Great Migration

Written by: Glenda Gilmore, Yale University

By the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain the causes and effects of international and internal migration patterns over time

Suggested Sequencing

Use this Narrative after the Jim Crow and Progressivism Narrative to have students explore how Jim Crow laws encouraged African Americans to migrate away from the South.

In the summer of 1901, two young, black, southern women debated the question, “Is the South the Best Place for the Negro?” Addie Sagers, born in Alabama, took the affirmative side of the debate. The South, she argued, gave African Americans the opportunity to succeed in business and the professions. Because of discrimination in northern workplaces, perpetuated by unions as well as employers, a black person could be only a “bell boy, waiter, cook, or a house maid.” Sagers pointed out that there were only 11 black teachers in Chicago’s schools. She argued that the disenfranchisement law might serve as motivation for black youth to seek more education to pass the literacy test it required. She did not yet realize that the literacy test would be unfairly administered to prevent any African Americans from passing it.

Sagers’ opponent, Laura Arnold, got the best of the debate. She pointed out that for black southerners the “judges of his illiteracy are his enemies, one of whom recently said, no Negro could explain a clause of the Constitution to his satisfaction.” Arnold emphasized the wave of violence and lynchings being perpetrated against southern African Americans. “My friends!” she warned, “You sleep over a volcano, which may erupt at any moment, and only your lifeless bodies will attest that you believed the South to be the best home for the Negro.” Even the economic success that Sagers lauded brought danger, Arnold argued: “Displease by look, word, or deed a white man and if he so desires, your property is likely to be reduced to ashes, and the owner a mangled corpse.”

Their debate marks the intertwined personal and political motivations that prompted approximately 1.6 million southern African Americans to move north in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Push factors – reasons to leave the South, including segregation, sharecropping, disfranchisement, violence, and racism – motivated many. But pull factors were at work as well. Industrial jobs slowly opened to African Americans in the North, they found themselves able to vote and even be elected to office, and vibrant neighborhoods with distinct cultures grew in northern cities. Despite heavy discrimination, particularly in employment and housing, black southerners began to build communities in the North, prompting the chain migration of family and neighbors. In the first decade, many of those who migrated were educated, urban people who had skills and resources to make the trip and to earn a livelihood in northern cities. But during World War I, as the United States geared up for war and northern factory workers joined the armed forces, the number of migrants increased dramatically. One scholar writing in 1920 commented, “They left as though they were fleeing some curse.”

Impoverished black farmers began to move from farms to southern cities in large numbers after 1910, and many continued from there to northern cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, New York, and Chicago. Rural southern African Americans worked chiefly as sharecroppers, planting and harvesting crops on white landowners’ farms for a percentage of the profit (often 50 percent). Many sharecroppers ended the year in debt, especially after the boll weevil began to move across the South in 1892 and decimated cotton crops. In 1900, nearly half of southern farmers did not own land, and a majority of them were African Americans. Under the thumb of white landowners and in constant debt to them, many of these sharecroppers compared their situations to slavery.

The majority of sharecropping families, like this group of families pictured in West Point, Mississippi, in 1909, were unable to escape the cycle of debt incurred through the sharecropping system.

Ernest Grey, born on a Sea Island off Savannah, Georgia, had few prospects in life. His father sent him to live with a woman in Beaufort, South Carolina, where he worked as a sharecropper. He ran away to work at a fertilizer plant in Savannah: “I wanted to get away from down there.” In 1916, a labor recruiter promised free passage north on a train but left the group in Paoli, Pennsylvania, at a railroad shanty, where they were to work on the railroad. Grey made his way to Philadelphia, where he found work in a Campbell Soup factory, but even in the city he had to “be careful” because the factory was in a white neighborhood. Nonetheless, Grey did not return to the South for 70 years, and he never saw his relatives again.

From 1910 to 1930, approximately 1.3 million black southerners moved north and west in several different migrant streams that generally depended on the transportation available to them. African Americans from the East Coast typically went to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and New York. New York City’s black population more than doubled during that decade, from 152,000 to 328,000. From the middle South, black residents of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky moved to Chicago and mid-Western industrial cities, where car manufacturers and related industries began to employ African Americans. For example, Detroit’s population grew from 41,000 in 1910 to 120,066 in 1920. Arkansians, Louisianans, and Texans went to places like Saint Louis and California.

This map shows the migrant streams of southern African Americans during the Great Migration from 1916 to 1930. (credit: “Great Migration” by Bill of Rights Institute/Flickr, CC BY 4.0)

Chicago became so familiar to black southerners that they called it by the nickname “Chi.” The black-owned newspaper The Chicago Defender wrote countless stories urging migration from the South, and people in the Deep South passed the paper from hand to hand. Labor agents advertised in thee Defender , drawing countless letters like this one from a woman in Mobile, Alabama, who was eager to emigrate in 1917. “I bore the reputation of a first class laundress . . . [and] much experience with all of the machines in the laundry. . . . You will do me a noble favor with an answer in the earliest possible moment with a description all about the work.” The Defender offered cheap train tickets from the South to Chicago for three dollars on special trains at particular times. Afraid of losing its cheap labor force and its sharecroppers, Mississippi banned distribution of the paper.

Black southerners also went to mid-sized cities across the North. When Moundville, Alabama, sharecropper Garther Roberson settled up his debt, he immediately put his clothes in a sack, left his wife and six-month-old son, and took the train to Ypsilanti, Michigan, where his brother had migrated. A year later, he sent for his family. He worked in a foundry, sang in the Baptist church choir, and became a Baptist minister. He faced down the Ku Klux Klan in Ypsilanti in the 1920s, began carrying a gun, and became a community leader. His son graduated from an integrated high school and went to work for Ford Motor Company, and his daughter became a social worker. By the mid-1930s, Ypsilanti hosted a close-knit black community, with a physician, real estate agents, ministers, and business owners, and a thriving chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

By the 1970s, six million black southern refugees from the Jim Crow states had moved to the North or the West. Their children and grandchildren were writers, artists, professionals, service workers, and factory employees. As historian Isabelle Wilkerson put it, the Great Migration ” moved those who had long been invisible not just out of the South, but into the light.”

Review Questions

1. Push factors at work in the Great Migration of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century included all the following except

• literacy tests
• Jim Crow laws
• fear of lynching and personal violence
• expansion of industrial jobs

2. Many of the first African Americans who left the South to move north during the Great Migration were

• educated urban dwellers with resources
• sharecroppers
• people from the Appalachian foothills
• unemployed factory workers

3. Migration of southern African American sharecroppers increased dramatically in the early twentieth century because

• their skills transferred easily to northern factories
• they followed the progress of the boll weevil northward
• they sought to escape economic hardship
• they saved enough to purchase their own homes

4. Black southern migrants found the northern cities to be

• free of economic and social discrimination
• lacking in economic opportunity
• controlled by Jim Crow legislation
• sources of discrimination and prejudice as well as opportunity

5. Black southern migrants to northern cities generally settled in

• no recognizable pattern
• cities along existing transportation networks
• locations selected by their ministers
• cities chosen by the factories that paid for their tickets

6. Most black southerners who moved north during the Great Migration

• returned to the South after earning enough money to buy a farm
• remained in the North despite discrimination
• found little to no opportunity for advancement in the North
• moved to farming communities in the North

Free Response Questions

• Analyze the push factors that led more than one million African Americans to move from the South to the North in the early twentieth century.
• Discuss the conditions southern African Americans encountered in the North during the Great Migration.

AP Practice Questions

“If You are a Stranger in the City If you want a job. If you want a place to live. If you are having trouble with your employer. If you want information or advice of any kind. Call upon The CHICAGO LEAGUE ON URBAN CONDITIONS AMONG NEGROES 3719 South State Street. Telephone Douglas 9098. T. Arnold Hill, Executive Secretary. No charges – no fees. We want to help YOU.”

Front of a card distributed by the Chicago Urban League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (now the Chicago Urban League), c. 1920

1. This document was created in response to

• demobilization of the integrated military after the end of World War I
• radicalism and labor activism associated with the Red Scare
• nativism aimed at Southern and Eastern Europeans
• limited economic opportunity and racial segregation in the South

2. Which of the following best contextualizes this document?

• The Spanish-American War
• The Socialist Party platform
• The Harlem Renaissance

3. This document was primarily intended to

• publicize federal programs designed to help immigrants and migrants
• gain votes for the urban political machines operating in major American cities
• promote union membership among newly hired workers
• offer community-based services to those recently arrived from southern states

Primary Sources

DeVore, Donna. “Interview with interview with Ernest Grey, July 12, 1984.” Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History: University of Kentucky Libraries . https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt7z610vtd5w

Letters to the Chicago Defender . http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5332/

“One-Way Ticket. Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration Series.” Museum of Modern Art . https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2015/onewayticket/visualizing-the-great-migration/

Roberson, S. L. Interview with Tony Ingram, July 26, 1981. African American Oral History Archive, 028, Ypsilanti District Library, Ypsilanti, Michigan. http://history.ypsilibrary.org/oral-histories/s-l-roberson/

Scott, Emmett J. ” Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916-1918.” The Journal of Negro History 4, no. 3 (1919): 290-340.

Scott, Emmett J. “Negro Migration During the War.” In Preliminary Economic Studies of the War . Vol. 16. Edited by David Kinley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1920. Reproduced at http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/migrations/text1/scottwwi.pdf

“The Great Migration, 1920 to 1970.” U.S. Census Bureau . https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/020/

Suggested Resources

Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II . New York: Anchor, 2009.

Daniel, Pete R. The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 . Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Harrison, Alferdteen. Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South . Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

“Lynchings by year and race.” http://famous-trials.com/legacyftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html

Marks, Carol. Farewell-We’re Good and Gone: The Great Migration . Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Tolnay, Stewart, Katherine J. Curtis White, Kyle D. Crowder, and Robert M. Adleman. ” Distances Traveled during the Great Migration: An Analysis of Racial Differences among Male Migrants.” Social Science History 29, no. 4 (2005):523-548.

Wilkerson, Isabelle. ” The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/long-lasting-legacy-great-migration-180960118/

Wilkerson, Isabelle. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration . New York: Vintage: 2011.

Related Content

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

The Great Migration Causes and Effects Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

The period between 1910 and 1970 witnessed a massive movement of African-Americans from the United States’ rural south to the urban north (Spencer, 1987). Historians estimate that more than 6 million African-Americans were involved in this great exodus.

The United States’ population experienced a significant change during the Great Migration. New York and Chicago were some of the northern cities that witnessed the influx of African-Americans.

Before this migration, the population of African-Americans in these cities was only about 2 percent.

A clear demonstration of the changes caused by the Great Migration was the doubling of the number of African-Americans working in industries.

Several factors contributed towards The Great Migration. First, there was a worsening racial situation in the South especially due to the Jim Crow laws. This situation brought about educational, economic and social marginalisation.

Other factors were the pursuance of employment opportunities in the rapidly expanding industrial sector in the North and better education facilities (Johnson, 2012).

Moreover, the boll weevil infestation, coupled with the plummeting world cotton prices, adversely affected a large part of the Southern cotton fields forcing sharecroppers and labourers to migrate in search of alternative means of employment (Spencer, 1987).

Considering that this was an era of war, there were numerous opportunities in the North for African-Americans. In addition, the First World War and the Immigration Act of 1924 significantly minimised the movement of European immigrants to the burgeoning industrial centres of the North (Spencer, 1987).

As a result, there were more opportunities for African-Americans in various factories due to the need for labour to meet the increasing demand for industrial goods.

The 1927 Mississippi Floods also contributed to the Great Migration as they displaced a large number of African-American farmers and labourers.

Due to the massive movement of people to the North, there was a considerable increase in the demand for housing. This brought about hostility between the immigrants and the locals.

As a result, residential segregation gained favour in several cities with the motive of ensuring that blacks stayed away from the neighbourhoods that whites inhabited.

Even though the Supreme Court declared municipal residence segregation as unconstitutional, whites adopted a formal deed restriction, which bound the owners of white property in a particular neighbourhood not to sell to blacks (White, 2005).

Due to the restrictions regarding housing, several African-American neighbourhoods mushroomed in the cities. Harlem became the largest city predominantly inhabited by blacks.

The hostility between African-Americans and whites also presented itself in matters relating to employment. Whites, especially the working class, were afraid of the threat posed by the immigrants concerning labour.

Whites feared that African-Americans would negatively affect their pay rates and their ability to secure employment.

The whites’ tendency to protect what they considered as their territory created a racial divide that sometimes resulted in violence.

The Great Migration had a significant influence on various aspects of lives. The key areas concern language and culture due to the influx of people from different backgrounds.

As more African-Americans settled in the North, they transformed their rural lifestyle to fit into the urban culture and in the process introduced the black culture. Furthermore, the Great Migration had negative effects in the Southern states as the black population declined immensely in these states.

For example, in Mississippi and South Carolina, both of which experienced massive movements, the black population declined to about 35 percent by 1970s (Johnson, 2012).

Johnson, D. (2012). Important Cities in Black History. FactMonster.com . Retrieved from https://www.factmonster.com/us/us-cities/cities-black-history

Spencer, R. C. (1987). The Great Migration of Afro-Americans, 1915-40, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR . Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1987/03/art5full.pdf

White, K. (2005). Women in the Great Migration: Economic Activity of Black and White Southern-Born Female Migrants in 1920, 1940, and 1970. Social Science History, 29 (3), 413-455.

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The Great Migration hero

The Great Migration Study Project

Since 1988, the goal of The Great Migration Study Project has been to compile comprehensive genealogical and biographical accounts of the twenty thousand English men, women, and children who settled in New England between 1620 and 1640.

The project’s published works, containing thousands of sketches, are necessary resources for any genealogist, historian, or descendant with early New England interests and connections. Directed by Robert Charles Anderson, FASG.

The goal of the Great Migration Study Project is to create comprehensive biographical and genealogical accounts of all immigrants to New England from 1620 to 1640, from the arrival of the Mayflower to the decline of immigration resulting from the beginning of the Civil War in England. The Project was conceived by Robert Charles Anderson and was proposed to the New England Historic Genealogical Society early in 1988. Anderson and the Society quickly reached an agreement and the Project officially began on 15 November 1988.

The major, comprehensive surveys of immigrants to New England were published in the last third of the nineteenth century or the first third of the twentieth century:  Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England  (1860–1862);  Austin’s Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island  (1887); Pope’s Pioneers of Massachusetts (1900); Noyes, Libby and Davis’s  Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire  (1928–1939). All of these compendia remain valuable resources and will continue so for many years. They have, however, been superseded in many places by the last century and more of published genealogical research.

For each immigrant to New England, whether an unattached individual or a family group, our approach is to survey the most important compiled accounts of the immigrant, whether in the survey sources noted above, in separate monographs or in the periodical literature. These accounts are then checked against a wide range of original source material, including vital records, church records, deeds, probate records, court records, and a variety of other types of documents. All of this material is then examined and cross-correlated, with special attention to discrepancies between sources, whether primary or secondary. The final goal is a comprehensive account of the individual which synthesizes what is known at the date of publication and will serve as a solid foundation for future research.

The entire time period of the Great Migration has been divided into smaller chronological chunks, within which range of years the sketches are published in alphabetic order. The first series of volumes covered the immigrants who arrived in the years from 1620 through 1633. The three volumes of this first series,  The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633 , published in 1995, contained more than nine hundred sketches. (Although these three volumes cover two-thirds of the time period under investigation, they only contain about one-sixth of the total number of immigrants. Beginning in 1634 and running until the end of that decade the annual rate of migration became much higher.)

The second series of volumes covers those who arrived in 1634 and 1635 and bears the title The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England , 1634–1635, and consists of seven volumes: A and B (1999); C through F (2001); G and H (2003); I through L (2005) ; M through P (2007) ; R and S (2009) ; and T through Y (2011). For the first two of these seven volumes, Anderson was joined as author by George F. Sanborn Jr. and Melinde Lutz Sanborn.

In 2004 a portion of the first series was revisited, by extracting about two hundred sketches of those who had resided in those earliest years in Plymouth Colony. The sketches were updated, to take into account the wide range of new research in this area since 1995, and were also revised, correcting those errors that had been discovered in the original research and also upgrading the sketches with some material not included in the original version. The resulting volume is  The Pilgrim Migration: Immigrants to Plymouth Colony, 1620–1633 . In 2012 a similar update was undertaken for those immigrants who had arrived in 1629 and 1630 under the aegis of the Massachusetts Bay Company. The resulting volume is The Winthrop Fleet: Massachusetts Bay Company Immigrants to New England, 1629-1630.

In 1990 the Great Migration Study Project commenced publication of the quarterly Great Migration Newsletter , which ran for 25 volumes, ceasing publication at the end of 2016. Each issue of the Newsletter includes as its centerpiece a lengthy Focus article, which examines closely one of the early New England towns or an important set of early records. The Newsletter also includes shorter articles, editorial commentary and a Recent Literature section, which surveys current monographic and periodical literature relating to the Great Migration and its immigrants. All 100 issues, with a comprehensive index, are available for purchase as a single volume.

Published in 2015, The Great Migration Directory: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1640, lists all known immigrants by head of household with their English origin, date of migration, principal residences in New England, and best available bibliographic citation. In 2018 Robert Charles Anderson published a seminal narrative work, Puritan Pedigrees: The Deep Roots of the Great Migration to New England , in which he explores the “why” of the Great Migration and reveals the many genealogical, social, intellectual, and religious connections among these first migrants. The Mayflower Migration: Immigrants to Plymouth, 1620 , published in 2020 for the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower , provides updated sketches of all passengers covered in 2004’s The Pilgrim Migration .

Robert Charles Anderson, FASG

Robert Charles Anderson is Director of the Great Migration Study Project. He has been dedicated to genealogical research since 1972 and earned a Master’s degree in colonial American History from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1983. He has been an editorial consultant to the  New England Historical and Genealogical Register  since 1989.

Publications

The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England 1634-1635

Purchase all volumes of this series at the NEHGS Bookstore.

The Great Migration Directory: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1640

One of the most important genealogical and historical sources ever published for New England! Covering individuals not included in p

The Mayflower Migration: Immigrants to Plymouth, 1620

This sixteenth book in the Great Migration Study Project opens with an essay on what led up to the sailing of the Mayflower and

The Pilgrim Migration: Immigrants to Plymouth Colony, 1620-1633

This popular book from the Great Migration series is now available in paperback.

The Winthrop Fleet Massachusetts Bay Company: Immigrants to New England, 1629–1630

In early 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company received a royal charter that allowed the Com­pany to carry on the work, begun earlier in the

Puritan Pedigrees: The Deep Roots of the Great Migration to New England

In this ground-breaking historical narrative, Robert Charles Anderson reveals the "why" of the Great Migration to New England that

The Complete Great Migration Newsletter, Volumes 1-25

Under the leadership of Robert Charles Anderson, the Great Migration Study Project aims to compile authoritative genealogical and biograp

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The Great Migration was the movement of some six million African Americans from rural areas of the Southern states of the United States to urban areas in the Northern states between 1916 and 1970. It occurred in two waves, basically before and after the Great Depression . At the beginning of the 20th century, 90 percent of Black Americans lived in the South. By 1970 nearly half of all Black Americans lived in Northern cities. 

Many African Americans in the South found themselves trapped in sharecropping jobs and other forms of debt peonage with no hope of improvement in their circumstances. Jim Crow laws kept them in an inferior position relative to white people, and they were denied political rights. There were more jobs available in the North , and, though racism was rampant, racial segregation was not mandated there. Black people embarked on the Great Migration seeking economic and social opportunity.

The greater economic and educational opportunities led to an explosion of artistic expression in music and literature. Black migrants and their children created the Harlem Renaissance , changed the sound of the blues music that they brought north with them, desegregated sports, and became involved in politics. The Great Migration arguably was a factor leading to the American civil rights movement .

Great Migration , in U.S. history, the movement of millions of African Americans from rural communities in the South to urban areas in Northern states during the 20th century. In 1900 nearly eight million Black people—about 90 percent of all Black Americans—lived in the South. From 1916 to 1970, during the Great Migration, an estimated six million Black Southerners relocated to the North and West .

The massive stream of European emigration to the United States , which had begun in the late 19th century and waned during World War I , slowed to a trickle as a result of changes to immigration policy during the early 20th century. One consequence of these changes was that urban industries faced labor shortages.

The Great Migration addressed these shortfalls, particularly during both World War I and World War II , when defense industries required even more workers in their factories. Although the pace at which Black Americans relocated from Southern states to Northern ones slowed during the Great Depression , it surged again in the late 1940s and continued for several decades.

Factors encouraging Black people to leave the South were poor economic conditions—exacerbated by the limitations of sharecropping and other forms of debt slavery , farm failures, and crop damage from the boll weevil —as well as ongoing racial oppression in the form of Jim Crow laws and other types of institutional racism . They were drawn to the North by encouraging reports of good wages and living conditions that spread by word of mouth and that appeared in African American newspapers. With advertisements for housing and employment and firsthand stories of newfound success in the North, the Chicago Defender , for example, became one of the leading promoters of the Great Migration.

In addition to Chicago , other cities that absorbed large numbers of Black migrants include Detroit , Michigan; Cleveland , Ohio; and New York City .

Many Black people sought, and found, better civil and economic opportunities by leaving the South. Many were, however, not able to escape racism in the North, where they experienced segregated housing and education, poor working conditions and low pay, and other forms of racial discrimination . Black people also, at times, experienced outbreaks of violence in Northern cities, and during the 1920s they faced the effects of a surge in membership in the Ku Klux Klan , a hate organization, particularly in the Midwest . Migrants sometimes encountered social challenges from the Black establishment in the North, whose members would look down on the “country” manners of the newcomers.

The effects of the Great Migration were profound and lasting. Its place in the history of Black people in the United States can be best understood as part of the broader arc of that history . The Great Migration significantly altered urban and rural populations throughout the United States across multiple generations , and it reshaped numerous Northern urban centers. It also, arguably, made the American civil rights movement possible.

The Great Migration transformed many specific aspects of American culture: the Harlem Renaissance , desegregation in professional sports, and the spread of blues , jazz , and other forms of music through so-called race records are just a few examples.

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The Great Migration and Residential Segregation in American Cities during the Twentieth Century

Christine leibbrand.

1 University of Washington

Catherine Massey

2 Welch Consulting

J. Trent Alexander

3 University of Michigan

Katie R. Genadek

4 The U.S. Census Bureau and University of Colorado Boulder

Stewart Tolnay

The Great Migration from the South and the rise of racial residential segregation strongly shaped the twentieth-century experience of African Americans. Yet, little attention has been devoted to how the two phenomena were linked, especially with respect to the individual experiences of the migrants. We address this gap by using novel data that links individual records from the complete-count 1940 Census to those in the 2000 Census long form, in conjunction with information about the level of racial residential segregation in metropolitan areas in 1940 and 2000. We first consider whether migrants from the South and their children experienced higher or lower levels of segregation in 1940 relative to their counterparts who were born in the North or who remained in the South. Next, we extend our analysis to second-generation Great Migration migrants and their segregation outcomes by observing their location in 2000. Additionally, we assess whether second-generation migrants experience larger decreases in their exposure to segregation as their socioeconomic status increases relative to their southern and/or northern stayer counterparts. Our study significantly advances our understanding of the Great Migration and the “segregated century.”

Introduction

During the first three-quarters of the twentieth-century, more than eight million African Americans abandoned the South. The first wave of this “Great Migration,” between 1910 and 1940, saw most migrants heading to major urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest. Gradually, western urban areas also became attractive destinations, with their popularity accelerating during and after World War II. By the time the Great Migration concluded in the early 1970s, it had dramatically transformed the demographic profile of the African American population. A historically southern and agricultural population became divided roughly evenly between the South and North and grew much less tied to the rural countryside and far more concentrated in urban areas ( Gregory 2005 ; Price-Spratlen 2008 ; Tolnay 2003 ; Wilkerson 2010 ).

Throughout the Great Migration, the flow of black migrants was heavily directed to a relatively small number of northern and western destination cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia ( Gregory 2005 ; Tolnay 2003 ). This is, in part, because these were largely the places where the small, preexisting northern black population was located before the Great Migration began ( Gregory 2005 ). As such, these cities were more likely to contain black media outlets and social networks that could inform potential migrants about life outside of the South and sources of assistance such as job and housing opportunities for new arrivals ( Gregory 2005 ; Price-Spratlen 1998 , 1999a , 1999b , 2008 ). They were also cities conveniently reached by interregional railroad lines and highways ( Black et al. 2015 ; Gregory 1989 ; Lemann 1991 ). Moreover, ample job opportunities in industries such as food processing and manufacturing made large northern cities appealing destinations ( Gregory 2005 ; Tolnay 2003 ; Wilkerson 2010 ).

As the Great Migration unfolded, the black populations in these northern gateway cities skyrocketed. The increasing numbers of blacks in northern and western cities frequently led to backlash among the white population, increasing racial hostility, and growing efforts among whites to isolate the black population economically, socially, and residentially ( Gregory 2005 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ; Muller 2012 ). Using a variety of methods, including racial steering by realtors, redlining by lenders, restrictive covenants, violence, and white flight, whites successfully isolated the growing black population within the inner city ( Jackson 1985 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ; Spring et al. 2013 ). As a result of these measures, northern metropolitan areas grew more racially segregated as the Great Migration ran its course ( Massey and Denton 1993 ). Many social scientists (e.g., Bouston 2010 , 2016 ; Cutler et al. 1999 ; Massey and Denton 1993 , Wilson 1978 , 1987 ) identify the Great Migration, and the concomitant growth of the black population, as an important cause of the “rise of segregation” during the first seven decades of the twentieth century. 1

Despite the potential importance of the Great Migration for shaping the racially segregated environments of the North, relatively little attention has been devoted to the residential patterns of its participants, including their exposure to highly segregated urban areas. Yet, metropolitan-level segregation has been shown to have substantial, negative associations with numerous outcomes for blacks throughout their life course, including their educational, economic, social, and health outcomes ( Charles 2003 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ; Thompson-Miller et al. 2015 ). The extent to which the Great Migration shaped the segregation exposure of migrants and their children therefore has potentially profound implications for how we understand the benefits and costs of the Great Migration both in the short and long term. Moreover, heterogeneous segregation experiences across Great Migration migrants and nonmigrants in the North relative to those who remained in the South have important implications for how we understand regional disparities in residential segregation and, as a result, regional disparities in racial stratification. This exploration therefore has important implications for the literatures on the Great Migration, segregation, internal migration, and racial stratification.

In this study we use novel data that links records for individuals from the 1940 complete-count and 2000 long-form US censuses. With these data, we identify first-and second-generation Great Migration migrants, the former being parents who were born in the South and who had migrated out of the South by 1940 and the latter being children who either migrated out of the South with their parents by 1940 or who were born in the North to southern-born parents by 1940. Further, we link second-generation migrants to their 2000 Census household records, allowing us to examine the segregation experiences of the second generation later in life. While our primary focus is on these later-life outcomes among second-generation migrants and their second-generation southern and northern stayer counterparts, the second generation’s coresidence in 1940 with their parents also allows us to investigate the residential experience of first-generation migrant and nonmigrant parents. With these data, we seek answers to the following questions:

• Were first-generation black migrant parents and their children located in more highly segregated metropolitan areas in 1940 than their counterparts among northern stayers (native, northern-born blacks) and southern stayers (those who were born in the South and who remained in the South)?
• Were second-generation black migrants more successful at obtaining residence in less racially segregated metropolitan areas by 2000 than their counterparts who were the children of northern stayers or southern stayers?
• Were second-generation migrants in 2000 more or less successful than northern stayers or southern stayers at translating higher socioeconomic status into less segregated residential locations?

Southern Migrants in the North

Many black Great Migration migrants moved to pursue economic opportunities in the North and to escape the discrimination they faced in the South ( Gregory 2005 ; Tolnay 2003 ; Wilkerson 2010 ). However, persistent discrimination existed in the North as well. Indeed, as the Great Migration progressed, the black population in destination metropolitan areas rapidly increased, causing the local white power structure to respond with containment strategies that limited the neighborhoods in which African Americans were permitted to reside. This was accomplished by real-estate agents refusing to show blacks potential residences in nonblack sections of the metropolitan area ( Massey and Denton 1993 ) and was augmented by the practice of redlining in which lenders denied mortgages to blacks outside of traditionally “black areas” (ibid.). Furthermore, restrictive covenants adopted by many neighborhoods prevented homeowners or landlords from marketing their properties to blacks ( Jackson 1985 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ; Sharkey 2013 ). These discriminatory practices were sometimes buttressed by bombings and other violence ( Massey and Denton 1993 ; Meyer 2001 ).

Eventually, the restricted “black areas” of the city could no longer contain their growing African American populations. Black residents gradually diffused into adjacent neighborhoods that had not been part of the traditional inner-city ghetto. Through a process of residential “invasion” and “turnover,” blacks moved in and whites moved out of these transitional zones ( Bouston 2010 , 2016 ; Freedman 1950 ; Jackson 1985 ; Taeuber and Taeuber 1965a ). Newly developed suburbs, augmented highway systems, and easily available, low-cost mortgages facilitated “white flight” from the inner city, as the ghetto grew but remained relatively concentrated within the larger urban area ( Jackson 1985 ).

With their white populations increasingly located in the developing suburbs and their black populations remaining concentrated in the inner city, northern metropolitan areas experienced decades of increasing racial residential segregation ( Cutler et al. 1999 ; Glaeser and Vigdor 2012 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ). This increasing segregation profoundly shaped the economic and social opportunities available to blacks in the North and continues to do so today. Indeed, metropolitan-level segregation differentially allocates opportunities throughout metropolitan areas so that blacks are often isolated in the most disadvantaged areas, while whites live in areas with higher proportions of social and economic opportunities ( Massey and Denton 1993 ). Supporting this conclusion, numerous studies have found that metropolitan-level segregation has been associated with a variety of negative consequences for blacks in recent decades, including greater exposure to crime ( Baumer et al. 2012 ; Hipp 2011 ; Peterson and Krivo 2010 ; Sampson 2012 ) and environmental hazards ( Crowder and Downey 2010 ; Morello-Frosch and Lopez 2006 ), worse health outcomes ( LaVeist et al. 2011 ), reduced wealth ( Oliver and Shapiro 2006 ; Shapiro et al. 2013 ), a lower likelihood of homeownership ( Logan and Parman 2017b ), and poorer life chances for children ( Ananat 2011 ; Andrews et al. 2017 ; Card and Rothstein 2007 ; Condron et al. 2013 ; Massey and Fischer 2006 ; Quillian 2014 ).

Very little research examines the association between segregation and blacks’ outcomes prior to 1980. However, Collins and Margo (2000) show that segregation’s negative influences may have started only around 1980. Specifically, they find that, prior to 1970, segregation was associated with lower probabilities of idleness among blacks and was not associated with single-motherhood status (ibid.). 2 Segregation could therefore have had some beneficial associations with blacks’ outcomes in earlier periods by, for example, promoting the growth of black businesses and decreasing educational segregation among the black population. The early potential benefits of segregation for black employment outcomes are also reflective of the extent to which white hostility limited white patronage of black businesses and the hiring of blacks in predominantly white firms. These benefits would have declined with the advent of civil rights legislation and the resulting increase in opportunities for middle-class blacks to move out of the ghetto, translating into a rise in the negative consequences of segregation for blacks (ibid.). While the argument that segregation’s harmfulness has intensified over time is compelling, for almost all decades, Collins and Margo find that segregation is associated with lower earnings for blacks relative to whites. This study also did not attend to other potentially negative associations between segregation and blacks’ outcomes, such as individuals’ health or the quality of their schools. Exposure to segregation prior to 1980 was therefore also likely still harmful in important ways for blacks, though its harmfulness may have been subtler in the context of limited economic opportunities outside of black areas during the Jim Crow era.

An additional change that has potentially shifted the meaning of segregation is the increasing dispersal of blacks out of central cities and to suburban areas in recent decades. 3 While suburbs differ from central cities in many important respects, considerable research has shown that the suburbs minorities move to tend to exhibit levels of segregation, impoverishment, and disadvantage that are similar to many central cities ( Charles 2003 ; Kneebone and Berube 2014 ; Kneebone and Holmes 2015 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ; Pattillo 2005 ). Thus, the increasing suburbanization of blacks has largely not translated into increasing racial equality in residential attainment and segregation is still expected to be associated with worse outcomes for blacks in both central cities and suburbs.

Thus, while the nature and potential impact of segregation has changed over time, metropolitan-level segregation has consistently been shown to profoundly disadvantage blacks in almost all facets of life and to substantially widen racial disparities in outcomes, particularly after 1980. Because Great Migration migrants and their children tended to be drawn to cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York City that were, and remain, particularly segregated, it is possible that neglecting the relationship between northward migration and segregation outcomes may therefore cause us to overestimate the benefits of the Great Migration for migrants and their children. Indeed, while the Great Migration was motivated by a desire to improve life chances, its correspondence with a rise in segregation suggests that, over time, it may have limited the benefits of migrating north.

The Rise of Segregation

As shown in figure 1 , the level of residential segregation in the North increased significantly during the Great Migration. To summarize the history of residential segregation we rely on two common measures. The Dissimilarity Index (DI) refers to the unevenness with which two populations (in our case, blacks and nonblacks) are distributed throughout a metropolitan area. It can take on values ranging from 0.0 to 1.0 and can be interpreted roughly as the proportion of the metropolitan population that would need to change neighborhoods (usually defined as census tracts) for the two groups to be distributed evenly throughout the urban area. The Isolation Index (II), which can also range from 0.0 to 1.0 and is also calculated at the metropolitan level, measures “the extent to which minority members are exposed only to one another” ( Massey and Denton 1988 : 288). As a rule of thumb, values between 0.0 and 0.3 for both indices are considered low, values between 0.3 and 0.6 are moderate, while values greater than 0.6 represent extreme levels of residential segregation. Both indices are presented for metropolitan areas in the South and non-South 4 from 1890 through 2000. 5

Dissimilarity and isolation indices for metropolitan areas in the South and non-South, 1890–2000.

Source: Glaeser and Vigdor (2012) . See text for more information.

Note: DI = Dissimilarity Index; II = Isolation Index.

At the turn of the twentieth century, before the Great Migration commenced, the average DI stood at 0.411 in the non-South, while the II averaged only 0.063. 6 By 1940, after the first wave of the Great Migration, both indices had soared to 0.734 and 0.335, respectively. Although the intensity of the Great Migration strengthened during and after World War II, the major urban areas in the North and South had already largely achieved their segregation apexes. Indeed, between 1940 and the culmination of the Great Migration in 1970, residential segregation stabilized at these relatively high levels, then began a protracted decline, reaching 0.502 and 0.144, for dissimilarity and isolation, respectively, in 2000. The temporal and spatial (i.e., variation across northern metropolitan areas) correspondence between the Great Migration and levels of racial residential segregation has supported claims by many scholars that the two phenomena are causally related ( Bouston 2010 , 2016 ).

The overall similarity in segregation trends for the non-South and South from 1900 to 1970 shown in figure 1 might seem to contradict the existence of a linkage between black migration and residential segregation. However, the interregional mobility that characterized the Great Migration was also accompanied by significant rural-to-urban relocation within the South. For example, the percentage of southern African Americans living in urban areas soared from 17 percent in 1900 to 67 percent in 1970. 7 The processes that led to the increasing residential concentration of blacks in northern inner cities and the exodus of whites from central cities to suburbs also transpired in southern urban areas. 8 While the structure and organization of southern and northern cities and suburbs differed in many respects ( Gregory 2005 ; Grigoryeva and Ruef 2015 ; Grossman 1989 ), and these differences likely influenced their respective “rise in segregation,” it is not surprising that metropolitan areas in both regions experienced increasing racial residential segregation during the era of the Great Migration.

As the Great Migration subsided after 1970, levels of racial residential segregation in both the South and non-South began to decline. This decline was partially fueled by increasing migration among blacks to metropolitan areas with relatively small existing black populations, a migration trend in marked contrast to that which occurred during the Great Migration ( Sander et al. 2018 ). However, the improvement was not equally distributed throughout the nation. Southern, western, and smaller metropolitan areas experienced the largest improvements ( Charles 2003 ; Glaeser and Vigdor 2012 ; Logan 2013 ; Logan et al. 2004 ; Reibel and Regelson 2011 ; Rugh and Massey 2010 ). In contrast, some major urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest maintained very high levels of segregation between their black and nonblack populations at the close of the twentieth century. For example, in 2000 the DI in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York remained at 0.779, 0.842, 0.670, and 0.687, respectively—all squarely within the range of “high” segregation levels and all popular destinations during the Great Migration.

Southern Migrants and Residential Segregation in the North

Despite the connections that scholars have drawn between the Great Migration and trends in racial residential segregation, we still know relatively little about the experiences of the participants in the Great Migration. Were the migrants and their children more likely than northern-born or sedentary southern blacks to reside in highly segregated metropolitan areas? While the segregation outcomes of migrants and their children have not been explored empirically, research on the neighborhood attainment of Great Migration migrants offers mixed evidence on what we may expect to find. Specifically, using data for a subset of nonsouthern cities from the 1960 US Census, Taeuber and Taeuber (1965b ) concluded that African American migrants were more likely than northern stayers to reside in “newly invaded areas” that were becoming more racially diverse. However, Taeuber and Taeuber did not restrict their analysis of residential patterns to blacks migrating from the South versus blacks migrating from other non-South states. Additionally, Tolnay et al. (2000) found that while recent migrants to the North (i.e., those who moved between 1965 and 1970) lived in more integrated and prosperous neighborhoods than the neighborhoods of their northern-born counterparts, migrants who had left the South in the more distant past (i.e., prior to 1965) resided in less desirable neighborhoods than recent southern migrants and the northern born. Given that it is not entirely clear whether migrants lived in better neighborhoods than northern stayers, it is similarly unclear whether they would live in less segregated metropolitan areas. Moreover, the higher levels of segregation exhibited by northern urban areas suggest that it is probable that migrants in the North and their children would live in more segregated metropolitan areas relative to southern stayers. However, no research that we know of explores the segregation outcomes of southern-born Great Migration migrants and/or their children relative to southern stayers. We therefore have little guidance regarding the extent to which migrants and their children live in more or less segregated metropolitan areas than southern stayers.

Prior studies of the relative economic standing of southern-born migrants in the North also offer somewhat conflicting guidance regarding their corresponding relative exposure to residentially segregated environments. For example, compared to northern stayers, black southern migrants were more likely to be employed ( Tolnay 2001 ), spent more of their working lives in full-time jobs ( Lieberson and Wilkinson 1976 ), earned higher incomes ( Lieberson 1978 ; Long and Heltman 1975 ; Masters 1972 ), and exhibited lower rates of separation and divorce ( Tolnay 1997 , 1998 ; Tolnay and Crowder 1999 ). First-generation migrants may have been able to harness these socioeconomic resources to reside in less segregated metropolitan areas than native northerners. However, the limited research on second-generation migrants suggests that their levels of education, earnings, and likelihood of living in poverty were virtually identical to those of equivalent black northern stayers and only modestly better than equivalent southern stayers ( Alexander et al. 2017 ).

These findings suggest that, when assessing the exposure of southern migrants to conditions of residential segregation in the North, it is advisable to distinguish between the experiences of first- and second-generation movers. On this point, prior research has drawn parallels between the Great Migration of African Americans to international migration (ibid.; Restifo et al. 2013 ). That is, differences in social, economic, and cultural conditions that prevailed in the American South and non-South, particularly during the early stages of the Great Migration, were akin to parallel differences that often exist between less developed and more developed nations that typically mark the origins and destinations of international migrants. Many studies of the adaptation experiences of international migrants have revealed that the second generation fares better than the first generation, largely because of their greater accumulation of human and social capital such as education, language skills, friendship networks, and work experience that are more suitable for success in the destination area ( Boyd 2009 ; Boyd and Grieco 1998 ; Chiswick and Debburman 2004 ; Farley and Alba 2002 ; Kalmijn 1996 ; Park and Myers 2010 ; Reitz et al. 2011 ; Sakamoto et al. 2010 ; Thomas 2012 ; Trejo 2003 ). Yet, such generational differences found among international migrants do not necessarily mean that second-generation Great Migration migrants enjoyed residential locations that were superior to those of northern-born blacks. In fact, as noted in the preceding text, recent research indicates that the children of participants in the Great Migration had educations and incomes in later life that were statistically indistinguishable from those of children of northern-born parents, and only modestly superior to those of sedentary southerners ( Alexander et al. 2017 ). Nevertheless, we have no knowledge about whether these relationships would hold for segregation outcomes and our expectations about these relationships are also hampered by the lack of research on the segregation outcomes of first-generation Great Migration migrants. As such, we have very little information about how Great Migration experiences may have shaped the short- and long-term segregation experiences of migrants and their children, which limits our ability to understand the broader benefits and costs of the Great Migration in important and underappreciated ways.

Theory and Hypotheses

Theoretical guidance for anticipating differences by migration status in the likelihood of residing in more highly segregated urban areas can be gleaned from the “Big Three” perspectives that have been widely used in research on locational attainment, residential mobility, and residential segregation (see e.g., Krysan and Crowder 2017 ). The “spatial assimilation model” argues that group differences in socioeconomic status are often reflected in residential outcomes—with less desirable neighborhoods, lower mobility from poor to nonpoor neighborhoods, concentration in central cities, and greater exposure to racial residential segregation observed for lower status individuals and families. The “place stratification model” acknowledges the important role of socioeconomic status but also points to the separate influence of discrimination and institutional barriers that deny some groups access to better neighborhoods and opportunities for upward residential mobility. A third perspective identifies the influence of group differences in preferences for residing near members of one’s own racial or ethnic group versus members of a different racial or ethnic group. We agree with Krysan and Crowder (2017) that the elements of the “Big Three” are (1) not quite as distinct from each other as prior research has often assumed and (2) not necessarily an exhaustive set of explanatory factors. And, we acknowledge that these theoretical perspectives are more applicable to variation in exposure to different neighborhood environments than to the distribution of population groups into more or less segregated metropolitan areas. However, they remain useful for framing our hypotheses about the relative exposure of southern migrants, northern stayers, and southern stayers to segregated communities.

The overarching question to be interrogated is the extent to which individuals with different migration histories varied in the level of racial residential segregation that characterized the metropolitan areas in which they lived, both in 1940 and 2000. We begin by investigating the relative exposure to residential segregation experienced by first-generation southern-born migrants in the North and their children—that is, those who were born in the South but resided in the North in 1940 with their children—as compared to northern-born blacks residing in the North in 1940 (“northern stayers”) and southern-born blacks residing in the South in 1940 (“southern stayers”).

We then examine whether second-generation migrants (the children of parents who migrated from the South to the North by 1940) live in more or less segregated metropolitan areas relative to second-generation northern and southern stayers during their later adulthood in 2000. This analysis provides a sense of the long-term association between migration and segregation outcomes as well as an indication of how the Great Migration has shaped individuals’ segregation outcomes over the course of the twentieth century.

Despite the limitations of the “Big Three” as a conceptual framework for understanding group variation in locational attainment, residential mobility, and segregation, we draw from them to anticipate differences in exposure to racial residential segregation among the first and second generation, as defined in the preceding text. More specifically, we draw from the Spatial Assimilation Perspective to hypothesize about the extent to which individual-level sociodemographic characteristics account for any differences in exposure to segregation by migration history. Further, we borrow from the Place Stratification Perspective to examine whether the residential returns to socioeconomic status (i.e., whether higher status individuals live in less segregated neighborhoods) differ by migration status. 9 Our general expectations are as follows:

Hypothesis 1

We expect first- and second-generation southern migrants to live in less segregated metropolitan areas than northern stayers.

Hypothesis 1a

These differences by migration status will, however, be largely explained by corresponding differences in the socioeconomic characteristics of migrants and, for the second generation, the characteristics of second-generation migrants and their parents, consistent with the Spatial Assimilation Perspective.

Hypothesis 2

We expect first- and second-generation southern migrants to live in more segregated metropolitan areas than southern stayers because of the lower average levels of segregation exhibited by southern metropolitan areas.

Hypothesis 2a

These differences will be partially explained by metropolitan-level characteristics such as population size and the size of the black population.

Hypothesis 2b

The gaps between migrants and southern stayers will be larger for the first-generation parents of second-generation migrants than for the second-generation migrants, given the higher prevalence of living in urban areas during the period of the Great Migration and given the wider variety of destination locations in which second-generation migrants are expected to live when compared to first-generation migrants.

Hypothesis 3

Second-generation migrants will be more successful than southern stayers in translating higher socioeconomic status into less segregated residential environments because of generally weaker de jure racial discrimination in the North during much of the twentieth century, consistent with the strong version of the Place Stratification Perspective.

Data and Methods

To test our research hypotheses, we utilize newly available census data linking individuals from the 1940 complete-count census to the 2000 long-form census. 10 We link the 1940 Census to the 2000 Census by utilizing Protected Identification Keys (PIKs), which were produced by the Census Bureau and which uniquely identify individuals in the census. Individual PIK values are created by using probabilistic record linkage techniques to link census respondents to a larger “reference file” comprised of a composite of records from the Social Security Administration and other federal agencies. For a variety of reasons, some census respondents do not receive a PIK (as is detailed in our discussion of the limitations of our findings in the following text). For more information on the linkage procedures, see Massey et al. (2018) .

These linked data allow us to identify individuals who were under 18 years old and living in their parental households in 1940, as well as to examine these same individuals in 2000, 11 when they are about 65–70 years old. Moreover, because we follow children who were living in their parental households in 1940, we can identify their parents in 1940. Because of this, we examine both first- and second-generation Great Migration migrants in 1940 and follow the second generation into their late adulthood in 2000. Our ability to examine individuals in 1940 and 2000 also provides us with a unique opportunity to partially account for the early- and later-life characteristics of individuals, and to thereby help address the potential selectivity of migrants and their children. Consequently, this linked data set is uniquely powerful for examining first- and second-generation migrants’ experiences of segregation and for comparing those experiences to individuals who remained in the South or the North.

We limit our second-generation sample to children 18 years old or younger who lived with one or both parents in the 1940 Census and who could be linked to the 2000 Census. Our first-generation sample solely includes the parents of these second-generation migrants; we therefore do not include first-generation migrants who were not parents. Consequently, our results cannot be generalized to Great Migration migrants who did not have children who had been born by 1940 and who had survived until 2000. We also limit our sample to individuals who were enumerated as black, who were born in the United States, who have reported income and education in 2000, and whose reported race is consistent between 1940 and 2000. 12 Additionally, we restrict our analyses for both 1940 and 2000 to households located in metropolitan areas. Individuals may be included if they were born in nonmetropolitan areas, as long as they reside in a metropolitan area in 1940 for the first-generation analyses and in 2000 for the second-generation analyses. This restriction is necessary for our use of the dissimilarity and isolation indices that are calculated at the metropolitan level.

Second-generation individuals in our sample are grouped into four migration history categories based on the birthplace of their parents, their own birthplace, and their residence in 1940. Specifically, we examine:

The first generation is similarly identified as the parents of (1) southern stayers, (2) southern-born second-generation migrants, (3) northern-born second-generation migrants, and (4) northern stayers. 13 The distinction between these two groups of first-generation migrants (as parents of second-generation migrants born in the South or parents of second-generation migrants born in the North by 1940) allows us to be consistent with our analyses for the second generation, and allows us to compare first-generation individuals who may have spent more time in the North (those whose children were born in the North) to those who may have spent less time in the North (those whose children were born in the South).

Variables of Interest

We examine levels of racial residential segregation between blacks and nonblacks as measured by the metropolitan-level dissimilarity and isolation indices in 1940 and 2000. As mentioned in the preceding text, both measures are fundamental to the study of segregation, though they measure segregation in different ways. Recent research has called into question the value of these measures because their use of the population composition of census tracts to capture metropolitan-level segregation does not necessarily capture individuals’ social environments ( Grigoryeva and Ruef 2015 ; Lee et al. 2008 ; Logan and Parman 2017a ; Reardon and O’Sullivan 2004 ). While the development of new segregation measures is unquestionably valuable for understanding the complexity of segregation and, in particular, for understanding how segregation influences microlevel interactions, the dissimilarity and isolation indices offer important benefits for this analysis. Specifically, both measures have been used by numerous segregation scholars, allowing us to build upon and inform this previous work by filling in gaps in our understanding of the segregation outcomes of first- and second-generation Great Migration migrants. Additionally, these more macrolevel measures of segregation have been found to have important and enduring associations with individuals’ and families’ short- and long-term educational ( Charles 2003 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ; Massey et al. 1987 ), economic ( Flippen 2010 ; Logan and Parman 2017b ; Massey et al. 1987 ; Oliver and Shapiro 2006 ; Shapiro et al. 2013 ; Wagmiller 2007 ), and health ( LaVeist et al. 2011 ; Williams and Collins 2001 ) outcomes, to name a few. Our use of these segregation indices is motivated by our desire to understand how the Great Migration shaped opportunities for migrants and to contextualize these relationships within the narrative of the Great Migration as an important mechanism behind the dramatic increase in metropolitan-level segregation in the twentieth century.

The dissimilarity and isolation indices for 1940 and 2000 have been provided by Cutler et al. (1999) and Glaeser and Vigdor (2001) , respectively. We specifically utilize metropolitan-level segregation measures from 1940 ( Cutler et al. 1999 ) and 2000 ( Glaeser and Vigdor 2001 ), which are constructed from tract-level data concerning black and nonblack population sizes. Cutler et al. construct these indices only for metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with at least 1,000 black residents because dissimilarity indices are not particularly meaningful for metropolitan areas with very small black populations. We solely include MSAs for which segregation data are available from Cutler et al. Additionally, the set of metropolitan areas included in our first-generation 1940 analyses differs from the set of metropolitan areas included in our second-generation 2000 analyses. We do not restrict our analyses to metropolitan areas that were consistent from 1940 to 2000 because we prefer to separately analyze the relationship between migration and segregation for the first generation in 1940 and engage in a separate analysis of the relationship between migration and segregation for the second generation in 2000. This is in recognition of the fact that many metropolitan areas have changed dramatically over this period. We therefore believe it is more meaningful to study the generations and their residential contexts separately. This choice also allows us to capture a more representative group of individuals in 2000 than would be the case if we restricted our analyses to a small subset of metropolitan areas. Further information about the construction of these measures is provided in Cutler et al. (1999) and in Glaeser and Vigdor (2001) .

For the analyses of first-generation migrants in 1940, we only include control variables that are measured in 1940, including the educational attainment and occupational status of the first-generation respondent. For the analyses for second-generation migrants in 2000, we include controls from 1940, when the second generation resided in their parental homes. These controls include the highest grade achieved by either parent, the highest occupational status exhibited by either parent, whether the family owned their own home, and whether the family resided in a metropolitan area in 1940. 14 We also include covariates that are measured in 2000 to account for the individual’s later-life characteristics. These controls include the respondents’ age and age-squared, their gender, marital status, educational attainment (in years), logged individual income for 1999, and whether they have moved to a different state between 1940 and 2000 (to account for the influence of additional migratory events). Because the level of segregation is likely influenced by the population size of the metropolitan area and of the black population, we also include controls for the total metropolitan population size and the black metropolitan population size in 1940 for the first-generation analyses and in 2000 for the second-generation analyses; these measures are also provided by Cutler et al. (1999) and by Glaeser and Vigdor (2001) .

To examine our third question, whether second-generation migrants were more successful at translating higher socioeconomic status into less segregated residential locations, we include interactions between the second generation’s migration status and socioeconomic status, as measured by the individuals’ educational attainment and logged individual income.

We first consider the descriptive results to provide an indication of whether second-generation migrants live in more or less segregated metropolitan areas than their southern and northern stayer counterparts in 1940 and 2000. Toward that end, table 1 depicts the means and standard deviations for our outcomes and covariates by second-generation migration status.

Descriptive statistics for segregation measures and covariates by migration category

Note: Income in unadjusted, nominal values.

The first four rows of the descriptive table highlight the segregation levels experienced by second-generation migrants and their first-generation parents in 1940 and by the second-generation migrants in 2000. These results suggest that the second-generation migrants live in metropolitan areas with higher levels of segregation (as measured by the DI) relative to their southern stayer counterparts in both 1940 and 2000, as expected. However, second-generation migrants live in metropolitan areas with similar levels of segregation (as measured by the DI) relative to northern stayers. Surprisingly, all groups, including southern stayers, live in similarly isolated metropolitan areas in both 1940 and 2000, contrasting with the finding of lower average dissimilarity indices for southern stayers. Moreover, second-generation migrants and northern stayers tend to exhibit slightly higher socioeconomic statuses and to have had parents with higher socioeconomic statuses than southern stayers. As a result, the observed variation in levels of segregation may be shaped by the characteristics of the second generation and their parents.

Segregation in 1940

To explore these possibilities, we turn to figure 2 , which presents the predicted levels of residential segregation from our OLS models examining the level of dissimilarity (left panel) and isolation (right panel) experienced by first-generation respondents (and their second-generation children) in 1940. Each panel contains a lighter set of bars that we refer to as the “bivariate” model and a darker set of bars that we refer to as the “multivariate” model. The bivariate model shows how the dissimilarity and isolation indices vary by migration status absent any controls; the multivariate model shows how the indices vary when individual and contextual controls are introduced. Detailed model results are presented in table 2 ; the bivariate results are presented in columns 1 and 4, and the multivariate results are presented in columns 3 and 6. The figures for the multivariate results hold all covariates constant at their means.

The predicted 1940 segregation outcomes of first-generation Great Migration migrants as measured by the dissimilarity index (left panel) and isolation index (right panel) relative to southern and northern stayers (bivariate predicted values were calculated from results in columns 1 and 3 of table 2 ; multivariate predicted values were calculated from results in columns 3 and 6 of table 2 ).

Source: 1940 and 2000 Census Long-Form Data.

Metropolitan-level dissimilarity index and isolation index in 1940 by first-generation migration status (OLS regressions)

Source: 1940 Census data linked to 2000 Census data.

Note: Robust standard errors in parentheses.

As can be seen in the left panel of figure 2 , the bivariate results for the DI suggest that black southern stayers live in the least segregated metropolitan areas and that only trivial differences in segregation distinguish blacks residing in the North (i.e., northern stayers and migrants). However, the multivariate results displayed in the left panel of figure 2 show that, after the introduction of contextual characteristics—including the total and black population size in the metropolitan area, as well as individual-level socioeconomic characteristics—no statistically significant group differences in the metropolitan-level DI remain. It is therefore largely because of the widely different metropolitan contexts in the South and the North and, to a considerably lesser extent, the varying socioeconomic profiles of migrants and nonmigrants, that southern stayers lived in less segregated metropolitan areas in 1940, as measured by the DI, relative to first-generation migrants and northern stayers. 15

In contrast to the findings for the DI, the bivariate results for the II shown in the right panel of figure 2 suggest that northern stayers enjoyed the lowest levels of residential isolation, though the variation by migration history is quite small. When contextual and individual-level controls are introduced, the multivariate results show that southern migrants in the North are found to be exposed to the highest levels of isolation. Though, again, the group differences in residential segregation, as measured by the II, are very modest in magnitude ranging only from 0.505 for southern stayers to 0.527 for second-generation migrants who were born in the South. These findings are relatively consistent with those of other studies that tend to find that regional variation in segregation is lower when measured using the II relative to the DI ( Massey and Denton 1993 ).

Two findings stand out from our analysis of segregation patterns in 1940. First, all blacks in our analytic sample, regardless of migration history, were exposed to very high levels of residential segregation, whether measured with the DI or the II. 16 Second, although the multivariate evidence for the II suggests somewhat higher levels of segregation for first-generation southern migrants (and their second-generation children) residing in the North, the group differences are minuscule in magnitude, particularly once contextual characteristics including the total population and black population sizes of the metropolitan area are considered.

Segregation in 2000

We next consider whether the relative exposure to segregation for second-generation migrants changed during the twentieth century. As before, we first consider the DI as an indicator of racial residential segregation in the year 2000. These results are summarized in the left panel of figure 3 (as before, with detailed bivariate results presented in column 1 of table 3 and detailed multivariate results presented in column 4 of table 3 ).

The predicted segregation outcomes of second-generation Great Migration migrants in 2000 as measured by the dissimilarity index (left panel) and isolation index (right panel) relative to southern and northern stayers (bivariate predicted values were calculated from results in columns 1 and 4 of table 3 ; multivariate predicted values were calculated from results in columns 5 and 8 of table 3 ).

Metropolitan-level dissimilarity index and isolation index in 2000 by second-generation migration status (OLS regressions)

Compared with the average levels of the DI in 1940 presented in figure 2 , the level of segregation experienced by our sample in 2000 was considerably lower, consistent with research showing declines in segregation over time ( Glaeser and Vigdor 2012 ). Turning to differences by migration status, the bivariate results reveal that southern stayers (DI = 0.550) and southern-born second-generation migrants (DI = 0.603) live in significantly less segregated metropolitan areas than northern stayers (DI = 0.612), though these relationships are quite modest, particularly for southern-born second-generation migrants. Northern-born second-generation migrants (DI = 0.624), in contrast, live in more segregated metropolitan areas, although again the difference is minimal. These differentials remain relatively stable in the multivariate models. Southern stayers remain the least segregated (DI = 0.552) and northern-born second generation migrants the most segregated (DI = 0.613). However, the level of segregation experienced by the latter group is no longer significantly different from that observed for northern stayers (DI = 0.612) when control variables are included and, as was the case in bivariate models, group differences in exposure to segregation are quite small. 17

The results for the II in 2000 (right panel of figure 3 ) show, once again, that overall levels of residential segregation for our sample declined significantly between 1940 and 2000. Turning to differences in segregation by migration status, the bivariate patterns reveal very little variation by migration status in the level of segregation as measured by the II, varying only from a low value of 0.348 for southern stayers to a high of 0.376 for northern-born, second-generation migrants. While the difference between northern-born second-generation migrants and northern stayers (II = 0.352) is statistically significant, it is trivial in magnitude. The results from the multivariate models are substantively consistent with those from the bivariate models, revealing, again, little overall variation by migration status in exposure to segregated urban environments—ranging only from a low of 0.346 for southern stayers to a high of 0.388 for northern-born movers. The differences between those two groups and northern stayers (the reference, II = 0.377) are statistically significant, but not substantively meaningful. As was the case for the bivariate models, southern-born second-generation migrants do not exhibit significantly different IIs relative to northern stayers.

The evidence from 1940 and 2000 using both the dissimilarity and isolation indices, yields two major conclusions. First, second-generation Great Migration migrants were exposed to substantially lower levels of residential segregation in 2000 than in 1940 when they resided with their parents. Second, once relevant control variables are taken into account, variation by migration status in the level of exposure to racial residential segregation is minimal. While some intergroup contrasts were large enough to attain statistical significance, the differences were small enough as to be considered not particularly meaningful. In sum, we find little evidence that, by moving north, second-generation migrants gained an advantage over their counterparts who remained in the South, with respect to exposure to racial residential segregation—either in the short or the long term. However, neither were first- or second-generation migrants substantially disadvantaged by their moves North, a finding that is somewhat surprising in light of the consistently higher levels of segregation documented in the North versus the South ( Massey and Denton 1993 ). Additionally, migrants and their children suffered no meaningful residential disadvantage when compared to African Americans with longer histories in the North.

Differing Returns to Socioeconomic Status

While the Great Migration does not seem to be associated with beneficial improvements (nor considerable deterioration) in black first- and second-generation migrants’ exposure to segregation, it remains possible that first- and second-generation migrants did experience larger returns than northern or southern stayers to their socioeconomic status in terms of greater declines in segregation as their educations and/or incomes increased. Indeed, many individuals migrated North because they felt they could not adequately capitalize on their educational attainment and other socioeconomic resources in the South, in part because of a lack of economic opportunities during the Great Migration and because of discrimination. We therefore consider the possibility of such differential returns to socioeconomic status in the attainment of residence in less segregated metropolitan areas in 2000 by separately including two sets of multiplicative interaction terms—one set for migration status and educational attainment ( table 4 ) and a second set for migration status and income ( table 5 ). 18 For ease of interpretation and discussion, we have used the multivariate model results from column 4 of tables 4 and ​ and5 5 to generate predicted levels of residential segregation by migration status and socioeconomic status. The predicted values of the DI by level of education are presented in the left-hand panel of figure 4 , those by income level are highlighted in the right-hand panel. The respective 95 percent confidence intervals for each predicted value are also included in figure 4 . The graphs in figure 4 hold all covariates, other than migration status, education, and income, constant at their mean values. While educational attainment is measured as a continuous years of education variable, we calculate our predicted values in figure 4 by holding educational attainment at meaningful levels (i.e., less than a high school degree, high school degree, some college, and a college degree or more) given that this is a more meaningful comparison than comparing incremental increases by single years of education.

The predicted level of dissimilarity as measured by migration status, educational attainment (left panel) and income (right panel) (calculated from fully specified multivariate results presented in column 4 of tables 4 and ​ and5 5 ).

Sources: 1940 and 2000 Census Long-Form Data.

Metropolitan-level dissimilarity index in 2000 by second-generation migration status interacted with educational attainment (OLS regressions)

Metropolitan-level dissimilarity index in 2000 by second-generation migration status interacted with individual income (OLS regressions)

Figure 4 . (left panel) illustrates that, with respect to residing in less residentially segregated metropolitan areas, southern stayers experienced the weakest returns to educational attainment, with virtually no variation in their DIs by years of schooling. Second-generation migrants, in contrast, receive somewhat greater residential benefits associated with increases in their educational attainment. Specifically, the DIs of northern-born second-generation migrants decline as they proceed from less than a high school degree to a high school degree (a decline of 2.05 percent), from a high school degree to some college (a decline of 4.82 percent), and from some college to a college degree (a decline of 2.20 percent), with a small rebound for individuals with more than a college degree. Southern-born second-generation migrants also experience declines in their segregation indices as their educational attainment increases, though these declines are more modest than they are for either northern-born second-generation migrants or northern stayers.

Turning to the evidence regarding differential returns to income ( figure 4 , right panel) we find further evidence that socioeconomic status is unrelated to levels of residential segregation for southern stayers. For all other groups, the association between earnings and residential segregation is stronger than for southern stayers. However, the findings reveal that it is only the highest income blacks (those with incomes in the upper 75th percentile) that experience lower levels of residential segregation relative to blacks with lower income levels. Across all other income levels, blacks do not experience declining segregation as their incomes increase. In general, these patterns of differential returns to education and income are similar when residential segregation is measured using the II, rather than the DI (results available upon request).

Two final points regarding our investigation of the differential returns to socioeconomic status by migration history deserve emphasis. First, and consistent with the general evidence regarding the overall levels of residential segregation experienced by all members of our sample, the range of residential segregation across all gradients of education and income falls within a very narrow band. For instance, the predicted DI for the most and least educated northern stayers is 0.579 and 0.630, respectively. Similarly, the predicted DI for northern-born second-generation migrants with the highest and lowest incomes is 0.590 and 0.620, respectively. Thus, the quite modest differential returns to socioeconomic status that we have described must be situated within a national context of high levels of residential segregation for all African Americans, regardless of education or income. Second, within that national context, southern stayers were exposed to the lowest levels of residential segregation. Even the least educated (DI = 0.555) and lowest earners (DI = 0.552) among southern stayers reside in less segregated metropolitan areas than the most educated and highest earners among northern stayers (DI = 0.579 and DI = 0.584, respectively) and northern-born second-generation migrants (DI = 0.596 and DI = 0.590), respectively.

Our study is motivated by an interest in how participants in the Great Migration fared throughout the twentieth century with respect to their relative exposure to racially segregated residential environments. Given the dramatic increase in segregation as the Great Migration unfolded, the concentration of Great Migration migrants and their children in particularly segregated metropolitan areas such as Chicago and Detroit, and the powerful associations between segregation and life course outcomes, this investigation is important for understanding the potential short- and long-term benefits and costs of the Great Migration for migrants and their children. It also provides valuable insights into how this transformative migration event may have shaped individuals’ exposures to segregation into the twenty-first century. Our primary focus was on second-generation migrants in their later life, though their coresidence in 1940 with their migrant parents also permitted insights into the residential experience of first-generation migrants.

Contrary to our expectations (and first hypothesis) that first- and second-generation migrants would live in metropolitan areas with lower levels of segregation than northern stayers, we found no meaningful variation in exposure to segregation for migrants and nonmigrants residing in the North. Newcomers from the South therefore neither appeared to benefit from, nor were they disadvantaged by, their migration experiences and shallower roots in the North relative to northern stayers.

In contrast, we found that first- and second- generation migrants resided in more segregated metropolitan areas than southern stayers in both 1940 and 2000 (as posited by Hypothesis 2). However, for first-generation migrants this differential was almost entirely explained by differences in the metropolitan contexts of the South and the North (supporting Hypothesis 2a, that these differentials would be explained by the metropolitan context). For second-generation migrants, contextual, individual, and familial characteristics played little role in explaining these differentials, contrasting with Hypothesis 2a as well as with Hypothesis 2b where we expected that the gaps between migrants and southern-stayers would be larger for the first generation. The somewhat larger gaps in segregation outcomes for the second generation is potentially important and could reflect the fact that segregation is declining less in urban areas in the Northeast and North Central regions of the United States relative to urban areas in the West and South ( Logan et al. 2004 ). Those living in the North may therefore continue to see their segregation outcomes deteriorate relative to individuals living elsewhere in the United States.

Thus, despite the long history of de jure racial discrimination in the South, and a generally hostile cultural context at least through the end of the Great Migration, those African Americans who remained in the South’s metropolitan areas and their children were exposed to somewhat less segregated urban environments than those who left the region prior to 1940, and this was particularly the case for the second generation in their adulthood. This has important implications for how we understand the long-term benefits and costs of the Great Migration, given that segregation structures numerous outcomes throughout the life course. The finding that segregation outcomes were more equitable for the first generation relative to the second generation also suggests the importance of examining the returns to the Great Migration over the long term and indicates that the persistently high levels of segregation in many northern urban areas could progressively erode the intergenerational benefits of moving North.

That being said, scholars have argued that the lower levels of segregation exhibited by the South are due, in part, to the South’s historic reliance on social rather than residential segregation, as exemplified by the Jim Crow laws ( Grigoryeva and Ruef 2015 ; Massey 2001 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ). The lower levels of segregation in the South are also partially reflective of traditional residential patterns in which southern blacks lived in the alleys or side streets adjoining white streets, patterns that often became entrenched during slavery and that later enabled black servants to live near white employers ( Demerath and Gilmore 1954 ; Grigoryeva and Ruef 2015 ; Logan and Martinez 2018 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ). Indeed, Logan and Martinez (2018) find that the South exhibited high levels of segregation in the 1880s when segregation is measured at a small geographic scale, such as at the street segment, alley, or block level (see also Logan and Parman 2017a ). Consequently, while southern stayers were exposed to slightly lower metropolitan levels of segregation, particularly in 2000, this does not necessarily mean they resided in a more equitable residential context. Future investigations of North-South differences in the residential experience of Great Migration participants might benefit from the exploration of alternative, more microlevel orientations to measuring racial residential segregation. In this study we have opted for the more conventional measures of dissimilarity and isolation to maintain greater consistency with the vast majority of past research on racial residential segregation and because these measures have been found to have important associations with a wide variety of life outcomes, as discussed in the preceding text.

Finally, we found that second-generation migrants enjoyed greater residential returns to their socioeconomic status than southern stayers, a finding that supports Hypothesis 3 (that black southern stayers would be the least able to utilize their socioeconomic resources to move into less segregated metropolitan areas). Thus, despite residing in less segregated communities overall, African Americans who remained in the South were less successful than those who left the region at translating higher educations or larger incomes into progressively more integrated residential environments. This finding offers support for many Great Migration migrants’ expectations that they would be better able to capitalize on their socioeconomic resources in the North, in part, because of the expectation that the North had less overt discriminatory barriers to success ( Wilkerson 2010 ). As such, this finding may also offer support for the Place Stratification Perspective and its emphasis on the role of discrimination in shaping racial disparities in outcomes.

Beyond these tests of specific hypotheses, what general conclusions can we glean from our study of the residential experience of Great Migration participants? First, if we use as a basis of comparison the levels of segregation experienced by those who remained in the South, our findings suggest little residential benefit from moving north. This conclusion is generally consistent with recent research that has inferred relatively modest, or no, economic benefits associated with leaving the South, as measured by employment status, income, or occupational prestige (e.g., Alexander et al. 2017 ; Eichenlaub et al. 2010 ; see, however, Boustan 2016).

The finding of no benefits in terms of the segregation outcomes of first- and second-generation Great Migration migrants yields two different interpretations. On the one hand, given the higher levels of segregation documented for northern urban areas relative to southern urban areas ( Iceland 2004 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ), it is surprising and perhaps encouraging that first- and second-generation migrants do not appear to be substantively disadvantaged by their parents’ decisions to migrate North. On the other hand, the minimal variation in levels of segregation by migration status revealed by our analyses could be seen as a discouraging treatise on the entrenched nature of segregation in the United States. Indeed, our findings agree with the general literature on racial residential segregation that shows that residence in segregated urban areas remains a highly prevalent experience for African Americans ( Logan 2013 ; Massey and Rugh 2014 ), though our analysis is unique in showing that black southerners are only slightly less segregated at the metropolitan level relative to comparable northerners. Moreover, the very modest differences in exposure to segregated environments between those with the most education and highest incomes, versus those with the least education and lowest incomes, is reflective of the difficulty that even high socioeconomic status African Americans have escaping segregated communities ( Adelman 2004 ; Charles 2003 ; Iceland and Wilkes 2006 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ; Massey et al. 1987 ; Pattillo 2005 ). Similarly, our covariates, including contextual, parental, and individual characteristics, play a very small role in explaining the relationships we observe among second-generation migrants in 2000. It is also largely only contextual characteristics, and not parental socioeconomic status, that explain the disparities in exposure to segregation among first-generation migrants and nonmigrants. We therefore find little evidence that the Spatial Assimilation Perspective explains our relationships, a finding that is consistent with a variety of studies showing that socioeconomic status explains only a small portion of blacks’ exposure to segregation ( Charles 2003 ; Iceland and Wilkes 2006 ; Pais et al. 2012 ; Sander et al. 2018 ). The small segregation differentials across migration and socioeconomic statuses are therefore perhaps more reflective of the virtual inescapability of segregation for many blacks and the highly stratified nature of the US urban context. This has important implications for blacks’ outcomes in a wide variety of areas of life, as outlined in the preceding text.

Our study is subject to certain limitations that deserve to be noted. Our analyses for second-generation migrants in the year 2000 focus on individuals who were typically between 60–70 years old. We are unable to examine the residential experiences of our sample of second-generation migrants at any time point between 1940 and 2000. Second, our investigation does not include the second generation of migrants who were part of the heavy outmigration of southerners after World War II. Therefore, we are not able to generalize our results to second-generation migrants participating in this later wave of the Great Migration. This is a consequence of data availability. Forward linkage of individuals enumerated in the 1950 US Census to subsequent long-form census samples will be possible after 2022, when the 72-year embargo period for the 1950 Census expires. Our focus on this cohort means that our results may be subject to period effects such as the potentially unique housing and socioeconomic trajectories of a cohort that were largely young adults during the civil rights period and whose decisions of where to live were shaped in important ways by the events occurring during this period. Indeed, Wagmiller et al. (2017) demonstrate that individuals who came of age prior to the 1960s were more consistently residentially segregated than subsequent cohorts. The decreasing consistency of exposure to segregation we observe between parents in 1940 and their children in 2000 suggests that this trend may have been occurring over an even longer term. The importance of period effects for influencing our results should therefore be acknowledged. Additionally, our analysis almost certainly includes some unmeasured error due to failed record linkage. We are unable to assign PIKs for approximately 30 percent of children in the 1940 Census. Among those assigned a PIK in 1940, we were unable to link 30 percent of that total forward to the 2000 Census long form. Our results might be biased by this linkage procedure if, for example, survival to 2000 is related to early-life conditions, education, and income, causing our analysis to focus on a sample with a somewhat more advantaged socioeconomic profile and affecting the validity and generalizability of our results. However, our sample of linked cases from the 1940 Census is highly comparable to the original sample of individuals for whom matches were sought, suggesting this bias is likely minimal (results available upon request). Our analyses of segregation outcomes in 1940 are also reflective of a relatively selective subset of metropolitan areas that had been tracted by 1940. As a result, these analyses may capture a more select group of migrants and nonmigrants. Finally, because of our focus on second-generation migrants, we do not include first-generation migrants who were not parents and whose children could not be linked between the 1940 and 2000 censuses. As such, our first-generation analyses cannot be generalized to the wider population of southerners who moved to the North prior to 1940.

Despite these limitations, ours is the first study to investigate how individual participants in the Great Migration fared with respect to escaping racially segregated urban areas compared to their counterparts in the North and South who had not engaged in interregional migration. Therefore, our findings, and the conclusions they support, represent an important contribution to our understanding of the long-term consequences of one of the most important demographic events in US history. Combined with Boustan’s (2016) conclusion that the Great Migration contributed to “white flight” from northern central cities, our findings offer little reason to believe that the migrants’ decision to leave the South had significant, salutary consequences for their exposure to racial residential segregation. Rather, blacks experience similar levels of segregation regardless of their migration status, region of residence, and socioeconomic status. Despite enormous changes between 1940 and 2000, and despite the dramatic demographic transformations brought on by the Great Migration, the African American experience across the United States therefore has been and remains one of entrenched inequality and systematic residential separation.

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted as a part of the Census Longitudinal Infrastructure Project (CLIP). Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the US Census Bureau. Partial support for this research came from a Shanahan Endowment Fellowship and a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development training grant, T32 HD007543, as well as a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant, P2C HD042828 to the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology at the University of Washington. Support for this research also came from the University of Colorado Population Center (2P2CHD066613). We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

1 See, however, Logan and Parman (2017a ) who measure segregation in smaller geographies (by next-door neighbors) and find little evidence that black migration patterns in the twentieth century drove residential segregation.

2 The nonsignificance of this relationship for single motherhood status for 1940 and 1950 and the inconsistency of a negative relationship between segregation and single motherhood could be a result of the increasing influence of incarceration during this period on the probability of single motherhood, which has limited the availability of partners in black neighborhoods ( Dauria et al. 2015 ; Messner and Sampson 1991 ; South and Lloyd 1992 ).

3 In a separate study (Leibbrand et al. 2018), we explore the relationship between second-generation migration status and neighborhood outcomes including residence in a central city versus a suburban neighborhood. Interested readers can consult this article for further information or contact the corresponding author.

4 We use census-defined regions to classify metropolitan areas within the non-South and South. The non-South includes the Northeast, Midwest (or North Central), and West regions. We therefore do not distinguish between western and northern areas of the United States. Separately examining westerners from northerners would lead to a potential proliferation of comparison groups, including native westerners and those who had migrated from the North to the West and from the South to the West. Given that relatively few blacks migrated to the West, our results for these groups would also be highly tenuous. To ensure that our results are robust and not overly complex, we focus on the South versus North comparison, though distinguishing the potentially unique segregation outcomes of westerners would be a valuable avenue for future research.

5 The information contained in figure 1 is based on data collected and made available by Glaeser and Vigdor (2012) . Segregation measures for 1940 through 2000 are based on census tracts while earlier measures are based on wards. The boundaries for metropolitan areas on which figure 1 is based were not necessarily constant over time.

6 Unlike the DI, the II is affected by the relative sizes of the two populations being compared. This partially accounts for the comparatively low level observed for the II.

7 Derived from data presented in Series A 172–194 Population of Regions, by Sex, Race, Residence, Age, and Nativity: 1790–1970 ( US Bureau of the Census 1975 : 22). The data for 1970 refer to “Negro and Other Races.” However, the small percentage of the “Other Race” population in the South in 1970 makes this a reasonable estimate of the proportion of the southern black population that resided in urban areas.

8 Conventional wisdom regarding regional differences in racial residential segregation has described greater segregation in the non-South than in the South (e.g., Cutler et al. 1999 ; Massey and Denton 1993 ). This is generally true for the DI in figure 1 but not for the II. Logan and Parman (2017a ) have challenged the notion that racial residential segregation was lower in the South using a newly designed measure of segregation for 1880 and 1940 that is based on the race of next-door neighbors within counties, as represented in the original census enumerators’ manuscripts. The Logan-Parman measure allows for the inclusion of rural areas in the computation of segregation scores. That a measure of segregation based on the likelihood of having neighbors of a different race produces a portrait of racial residential separation that differs from traditional segregation measures (which are based on comparing the population distributions within neighborhoods to the overall racial composition of a larger city or metropolitan area) is not surprising. The former offers a more “microlevel” perspective on segregation whereas the latter provides a more “macrolevel” description (see e.g., Logan and Martinez 2018 ). We focus on macrolevel segregation because of its well-established association with a wide variety of important life outcomes for blacks. Given the recency of their development, it is not yet clear what implications microlevel segregation has for employment, educational, health, and other outcomes. Exploring microlevel segregation therefore provides less definitive insight into the potential costs and benefits of the Great Migration than examining more macrolevel measures of segregation.

9 Given that we do not have information on preferences and in light of research showing that preferences for in-group neighbors are strongly determined by individual and neighborhood socioeconomic status and experiences or fears of discrimination ( Adelman 2005 ; Emerson et al. 2001 ; Krysan and Farley 2002 ; Krysan et al. 2009 ), we do not attend to the potentially unique role of preferences here.

10 The Minnesota Population Center and Ancestry.com (2012) provided the complete-count 1940 Census.

11 We did not extend our analysis to the 2001–2015 American Community Surveys because we believed this would exaggerate selection into the matched sample that occurs by requiring survival between 1940 and 2000. Longevity is positively associated with higher education outcomes ( Lleras-Muney 2005 ) and income ( Chetty et al. 2016 ). Given the age of our sample, the relationship between education, income, and mortality may lead to our estimating upper bounds for the benefits experienced by second-generation migrants.

12 About 0.5 percent of the total cases had nonmatching race responses in 1940 and 2000. Because this was not a sufficient number of cases to support a “both” racial category in the analysis, we excluded those cases.

13 We limit “northern stayers” to children for whom both of their parents were born in the North to avoid conflating them with children whose parents experienced a South-to-North migration during their lifetime. The “southern stayers” category, however, includes children with either parent born in the South. For more than 90 percent of southern stayers, both of their parents were born in the South, and excluding the small group of southern stayers who have one parent born in the non-South does not affect our results. We decide to include these individuals in our analyses to ensure that we do not miss any respondents who should be classified as southern stayers.

14 We measure occupational status using occupation scores provided by IPUMS and constructed using median income by occupation from the 1950 Census ( Sobek 1995 ).

15 The detailed regression results reported in table 2 indicate that metropolitan-level contextual characteristics, alone, are able to explain the original bivariate regional difference in dissimilarity indices shown in figure 2 .

16 As mentioned in the “ Background ” section, Collins and Margo (2000) found that segregation may not have been as consistently associated with worse outcomes for blacks in 1940 relative to 1980 and 1990. The universally high exposure of blacks to segregated metropolitan areas in 1940 may therefore not have been unequivocally disadvantageous for their outcomes because segregated black communities exhibited different population compositions in earlier decades relative to later decades ( Vigdor 2002 ). While this is an important point and illustrates that the segregation results for 1940 and 2000 cannot be directly compared, Collins and Margo (2000) still found that segregation was negatively associated with earnings in 1940 and the use of segregation as a tool by whites to isolate the black population illustrates its consistently important role in racial stratification throughout the twentieth century. In this sense, the universally high levels of segregation for blacks in 1940 is problematic.

17 Table 3 contains the full set of results from the regression analysis of both the dissimilarity and isolation indices in 2000. Figure 2 focuses on the patterns observed in the bivariate and fully specified multivariate models, while table 3 also includes the separate results obtained when only 1940 family characteristics are included and when both 1940 and 2000 control variables are considered.

18 We also considered the possibility of differential returns to education and income in 1940, but chose to concentrate on the relative ability of second-generation migrants to translate their own socioeconomic status into lower levels of exposure to residential segregation in 2000. The results of the 1940 analyses are available from the first-listed author upon request.

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America's great migrations

• African American great migrations
• Latin American great migrations
• Asian American and Pacific Islander migrations
• Dustbowl migration to California
• Southern Diaspora (white, black, Latinx)
• Migration history for each state 1850-2020

State-by-state migration histories since 1850

• Massachusetts
• North Carolina

The Great Migration (African American)

by James Gregory

Over the course of the 20th century, more than seven million African Americans left homes in the South to resettle in northern and western states. Historians have long described this exodus as the Great Migration, great not just because of the numbers of people who moved but also because of the social and political consequences. Once a people of the South, Black Americans became increasingly part of the big cities of all regions and in those urban settings steadily gained political and cultural influence. The Great Migration was thus key to the struggles and accomplishments of the long civil rights movement.

This page introduces resources for exploring the Great Migration, including several sets of interactive maps and tables showing where people settled and where they came from decade by decade.

Migration slowed dramatically in the 1930s, then soared during World War II and the two decades following, a period sometimes called the Second Great Migration. After the 1960s, rates of migration began to decline noticeably and by the 1980s former southerners were among those looking for opportunities in the new economy of the South, now renamed the Sunbelt.

The chart at right shows estimates of the volume of migration out of the South during each decade. It is based on calculations using the census survival method reported in James Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America . Since the publication of that book, Leah Platt Bouston ( Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets ) refined the method and clarified data problems that complicate estimates for the 1960s and 1970s. Accordingly, the chart reports only loose estimates for those decades.

Mapping the Great Migration out of the South

The image above is one of the maps and charts that we have developed to demonstrate the numbers of African American migrants leaving the South, the states and cities where they settled, and their states of origin for each decade 1900 to 2000. One map reveals decade-by-decade the number of southerners living in northern and western states. Select a state of origin and see where people went. Another map shows similar data for each metropolitan area where Black southerners settled. A third allows us to highlight a northern or western state and see which southern states contributed the most migrants. Or start with a southern state and see where its people went. Finally an interactive table provides the data behind these visualizations. Explore

Moving South: Reversing the Great Migration 1970-2017

Black Migration History for Individual States 1850-2017

• The Second Great Migration: An Historical Overview
• Black Metropolis
• The Great Migration and Civil Rights Movement
• How to cite and copyright information
• About the project
• Contact James Gregory

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Was the Great Migration a push or pull migration?

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Description

This resource is amazing. The topic is relevant, the resources are rich, and the questions are intriguing. Teachers and students will benefit from this resource. Those who use this resource may consider adding/adapting this resource to facilitate rich collaborative work amongst students, offered supports for academic vocabulary, and dove deeper into suggestions for differentiation, the work would be even more robust. (This comment was crafted by Jerry Price, Josh Parker, Barbara Soots, Ryan Theodoriches, Leslie Heffernan, and Donetta Elsasser)

Quality of Explanation of the Subject Matter: Superior (3)

This source provides excellent information to help students engage in the the question of how Great the Great Migration is. Students work through four questions that help them develop an understanding that racism and discrimination follows African Americans when they leave the South, although life was probably better for most.

Quality of Assessments: Superior (3)

There are four formative performance tasks that build on rigor with each step. In the end, students develop a claim supported by evidence that explains why migrants moved North and how life was different from that in the South.

Quality of Technological Interactivity: Strong (2)

The technological interactivity is there for you to create. The lesson has four sources that can be delivered how you see fit as an instructor. The sources are primary sources including a report on lynching, a census, an oral history, and a letter.

Opportunities for Deeper Learning: Superior (3)

Each task offers scaffolding opportunities to create lists, create chart using data, create original content using evidence, and lastly developing an original argument.

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Washington Social Studies Standards

Learning Domain: History

Standard: Integrate evidence from multiple relevant historical sources and interpretations into a reasoned argument about the past to create claims and counterclaims

Degree of Alignment: Not Rated (0 users)

Learning Domain: Social Studies Skills

Standard: Integrate evidence from multiple relevant historical sources and interpretations into a reasoned argument about the past and its relationship to the present

Standard: Construct arguments using precise and knowledgeable claims, with evidence from multiple and reliable sources, while acknowledging counterclaims and evidentiary weaknesses

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The Great Migration Essay

• 2 Works Cited

The progression of people into and within the United States has had an essential impact on the nation, both intentionally and unintentionally. Progressions such as The Great Migration and the Second Great Migration are examples of movements that impacted the United States greatly. During these movements, African Americans migrated to flee racism and prejudice in the South, as well as to inquire jobs in industrial cities. They were unable to escape racism, but they were able to infuse their culture into American society. During the twentieth century, economic and political problems led to movements such as The Great Migration and The Second Great Migration which impacted the United States significantly. The Great Migration was the …show more content…

Similar to The Great Migration, The Second Great Migration was the movement of more than five million African Americans from the South to the North, Midwest and West from 1941 to 1970. Between 1930 and 1950, the number of Southern tenant farmers was cut roughly in half, while the number of tractors tripled from 1940 to 1950 (“Second Great Migration: Historical Overview”). Adding to the troubles, many planters started to use the mechanized cotton picker. The need for laborers at harvest time was therefore drastically decreased. Besides a terrible economic situation, Southerners, as they had done during the Great Migration, were also fleeing Jim Crow. Also, with little hope of glow in the justice system, African Americans were at the crime of abusive employers, landlords, and almost anyone bent on depriving them of their rights (“Second Great Migration”). Once World War II came about and the United States became engaged in a two-front war against Japan and Germany, production shifted into higher gear. In addition to the usual needs for armaments, clothing, food, and training facilities, the naval war with Japan stimulated increased shipbuilding and the making of naval material, much of it directed to and through Pacific coast ports. The impacts of the Great Migration and Second Migration are still being portrayed in American society. These movements have produced the first vast,

Immigration In The 19th Century Essay

Immigration has always been a major part of America. In fact, without immigration the creation of America would not have been possible. The majority of immigrants came to America for religious freedom and economic opportunities. However, for the most part before the 1870’s most immigrants were Protestants from northern and western Europe. These immigrants often migrated to the United States as families and usually lived on farms with family or friends who had already migrated beforehand. A lot of immigrants came to America with a plan or goal in mind. They often had saved up money for the long immigration overseas, were skilled in a certain trade, or had already been educated at a high level. Sadly, this would not last. Immigration

Thesis Statements

During the Great Migration, African Americans began to build a new place for themselves in public life, actively confronting economic, political and social challenges and creating a new black urban culture that would exert enormous influence in the decades to come.

History of Immigration in the United States Essay

• 10 Works Cited

Throughout the history of the United States immigration has become apart of our country’s fabric which, began centuries ago. Only to become a hot topic in the US in recent years with its primary focus being illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration is when people enter a country without government permission. As of 2008 the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that there are 11 million illegal immigrants in the US which is down from 2007‘s 12.5 million people. Although the Center for Immigration Studies estimates are very different from other estimates that range from 7 to 20 million. While the Pew Hispanic Center estimated in March of 2009 there are 11.1 million illegal immigrants and that number is from March 2007’s peak of 12

Immigration In The 1800s Essay

In the late 1800s , America became the land of new opportunities and new beginnings and New York City became the first landmark for immigrants. New York City was home to Ellis Island, the area in which migrants were to be handed for freedom to enter the nation. Living in New York City gave work and availability to ports. In time the city gave the chance to outsider's to construct groups with individuals from their nation , they were classified as new and old settlers. Old outsiders included Germans, Irish and, English. The new outsiders incorporated those from Italy, Russia, Poland and Austria-Hungary. In 1875, the New York City populace was a little 1 million individuals contrasted with the 3,5 million it held when the new century

The Immigrants of America Essay

• 6 Works Cited

The culture of every ethnic group is beautiful in its own way and worth cherishing. Today, America is known as the great melting pot not for the number of immigrants it has but rather because of the wonderful cultures and traditions the immigrants brought with them. Immigrants do not need to forgo their mother tongue, significant celebrations or customs to become American. However to be socially accepted, they will need to learn English, take part in celebrating national holidays and fulfill their patriotic duties Americans like every other U.S citizens.

Effects Of Immigration In The 1920s

Ever since the creation of the human race, human beings have been prone to moving place to place for new opportunities and beginnings. People who move from one country to another are called immigrants. As nations started to form, their were rules and laws set on who could and could not live in a specific country. Most of these laws included immigrants to go through a lengthy process to get approved to go into the country they desired. However, even after the lengthy process is completed, the country still has the right to deny their entrance. In fear of being rejected, many immigrants decided to illegally cross the borders of other countries causing many problems with the country's society, specially the United States of America. Historians saw a great example of this in the 1920s. The 1920s in America unfolded the greatest wave of immigration in American history; more than 25 million foreigners, also known as immigrants, arrived on American shores (Shmoop). Before the 1920s, immigration in the United States had never been systematically restricted by federal law, however that changed with the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the 1924 Immigration Act. For the first time in American history, these acts imposed a limit on the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States which eventually caused many to enter illegally. Today America is faced with some similar issues with immigration as they did in the 1920s, for example, the number of illegal immigrants in

Research Paper: The Great Migration

The Great Migration was a massive movement of African Americans from the South to the North from 1863 to 1960. The largest spike in this migration occurred from about 1910 to 1920.

Warmth of the Other Suns - George Swanson

Migration in  the  United States, the exodus  of more  than  six million black Americans out

Essay about The Expansion of the Great Black Migration

From the early 1900s – 1920s the Great Black Migration occurred. In addition, the Great Migration occurred in the early 1900s and ended shortly after the Great War. The Great Black Migration was a time where blacks left the south to seek a better lifestyle in the Midwestern, Northern, and Eastern states. Blacks fled the South to seek better jobs, escape racism and discrimination, and to look for better schooling for their children. The Great Black Migration mostly occurred in the states of Illinois, Missouri, New York, and California. During the Great Migration, more than 100,000 blacks migrated to Harlem, New York. In Chicago and New York City, blacks were empowered by black-owned businesses, newspapers, and communities. Newspaper

The Significance of Brown v. Board of Education Essay examples

• 7 Works Cited

The Great Migration was the mass movement of millions of African Americans to the Northeast, Midwest, and West around 1910 to1930. African Americans moved away from the South to escape segregation and violence in search of better opportunities. With the U.S. entering into World War I and troops being sent overseas, more job opportunities opened up for African Americans. Blacks enjoyed the unsegregated cities and the benefits that came along with it like better jobs, schools, and homes. African Americans also got more involved in politics and became an important constituency in the North because they were not prevented from voting and some even ran for political offices.

Immigrants Coming to America

The migration of foreigners to the United States has been one of the most powerful forces shaping American history this was especially true between 1860 and 1920. (American A Narrative History, Pg. 827). When immigrants traveled to the new land it was an arduous journey. Arriving in large cities often without their families or understanding the language was difficult.

Immigration During The Late 1800 's And Early 1900 ' S

Immigration in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s is much different than today, especially of what country they are coming from. In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s most immigrants came from Europe, and a few came from Mexico and Cuba. In the late 1800s and early 1900’s, individuals in numerous parts of the world chose to leave their homes and move to the United States of America. Fleeing yield disappointment, get and work deficiencies, rising expenses, and starvation. Numerous immigrants went to the United States of America, since it was seen as the place that is known for financing open door. Others came looking for individual opportunity or alleviation from political and religious mistreatment. With trust in a brighter future, almost 12 million migrants touched base in the United States somewhere around 1870 and 1900. Amid the 1870s and 1880s, by far most of these individuals were from Germany, Ireland, and Britain - the main wellsprings of movement before the Common War. That would change definitely in

Theodore Roosevelt And Woodrow Wilson : The Progressive Era

At the start of the twentieth century, America was still facing racial inequality post-Civil War and segregation of whites and blacks after the Reconstruction Era. With the blacks being fed up with their current conditions, they participated in the Great Migration, in which they moved from the South to the North for a better life filled with more opportunities; blacks were ready for real reform of American society. Realizing the seriousness of this

Essay about Difficulty of Immigration in the 1900's versus Previously

When most people think about immigration to the United States, they think of the U.S. as being the “land of opportunity,” where they will be able to make all of their dreams come true. For some people, immigration made their lives richer and more fulfilled. This however, was not always the case. A place that is supposed to be a “Golden Land” (Marcus 116) did not always welcome people with open arms. Even after people became legal citizens of the United States, often times the natural born Americans did not treat the immigrants as equals but rather as outsiders who were beneath them in some way. In some situations, people’s lives were made worse by coming to the “land of opportunity.” Often times people were living no better than they

Similarities Between Immigration And African Americans

During the mass immigration era of America, an abundant number of people traveled to the urban industrial society of the United States in aspiration to seek job opportunities and better lives than the ones they left behind. These groups included the Poles, Italians, Chinese, Mexicans, Japanese, East European Jews, and the African- Americans. However, one of these groups mentioned was distinctly different from the rest: the African-Americans. They were already American citizens, who migrated to the northern American cities to free themselves from segregation, oppression, and harsh conditions they experienced in the South and obtain equal rights and opportunities. Although the African-Americans'

Related Topics

• African American
• Southern United States
• Jim Crow laws
• Great Migration
• United States
• Midwestern United States

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The Great Migration Lesson Plan

Students will learn about the Great Migration through discussion, analyzing primary sources in cooperative groups, watching a TED Talk, and reading an excerpt of a secondary source.

To create awareness among students about the societal changes during World War I.

• Analyze the causes and effects of the Great Migration
• Evaluate primary source material from the Great Migration

Kansas Standards for History, Government, and Social Studies • Standard #4 Societies experience continuity and change over time. • Standard #5 Relationships among people, places, ideas, and environments are dynamic. Advanced Placement US History Key Concepts 7.2 Innovations in communications and technology contributed to the growth of mass culture, while significant changes occurred in internal and international migration patterns. Concept Outline II. Economic pressures, global events, and political developments caused sharp variations in the numbers, sources, and experiences of both international and internal migrants. C. In a Great Migration during and after World War I, African Americans escaping segregation, racial violence, and limited economic opportunity in the South moved to the North and West, where they found new opportunities but still encountered discrimination.

Lakisha Odlum. The Great Migration. 2016. Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America, http://dp.la/primary-source-sets/the-great-migration/teaching-guide. (Accessed July 18, 2018.) “The Great Migration and the Power of a Single Decision ~ Isabel Wilkerson.” YouTube, YouTube, 6 Apr. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3qA8DNc2Ss. Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.

“A negro family just arrived in Chicago from the rural South,” Digital Public Library of America, http:// dp.la/item/301a3b1ef3135e75f77478cccb7da403. “During World War I there was a great migration north by southern Negroes,” Digital Public Library of America, http://dp.la/item/202cd2eec8a07f914da3df05d75481b7. “Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916-1918.” The Journal of Negro History, July and October 1919. https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/260GMigration.html.

Block 1 Bell Work: With a table partner, students will compare and contrast the Jacob Lawrence painting and a photograph of an African-American family who just arrived in Chicago. Questions to consider when analyzing these images: 1. How are migrants dressed in both images? 2. How does does their attire reflect their attitudes about migrating to the North? 3. Both images are framed in such a way that the people fill the entire frame, what feeling or mood does this elicit in the viewer? 4. What are some the messages the artists convey by framing their works in such a way? Discuss answers in class.

Teacher led discussion of the Great Migration. Teachers should emphasize the role of World War I, which limited the supply of cheap immigrant labor; the rise of the industrial factory jobs in the North, which depended on cheap labor to function; agricultural difficulties in the South; and the difficulties of life in the Jim Crow South for African American families, such as discrimination, lynching, denial of access to political equality, and the lack of educational opportunities.

3. Document Analysis Activity “Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916-1918.” The Journal of Negro History, July and October 1919. https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/260GMigration.html Students will work in groups of two to analyze the nine letters using the HIPP method. In the HIPP method, students analyze the document for the historical context, intended audience, purpose, and pointof- view.

4. Watch “The Great Migration and the power of a single decision” Isabel Wilkerson TED Talk on YouTube. (17:55) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3qA8DNc2Ss

5. Assignment Read the excerpt from The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (p. 3-15) and answer the guided reading questions.

Block 2 Students will write a timed, in-class long essay (LEQ). They will have 40 minutes to write this essay. Students will be graded based on the Advanced Placement Long Essay Question Rubric. Students will self-grade using the rubric before turning in their essays.

Great Migration LEQ Directions: In your response you should do the following. • Respond to the prompt with a historically defensible thesis or claim that establishes a line of reasoning. • Describe a broader historical context relevant to the prompt. • Support an argument in response to the prompt using specific and relevant examples of evidence. • Use historical reasoning (e.g., comparison, causation, continuity or change over time) to frame or structure an argument that addresses the prompt. • Use evidence to corroborate, qualify, or modify an argument that addresses the prompt. Prompt: Evaluate the extent to which World War I was the primary cause of the Great Migration of African Americans.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson Guided Reading Questions 1. Account of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney Where did she live? When did she leave? Summarize her "leaving" story/account in 1 paragraph.

2. Account of George Swanson Starling Where did he live? When did he leave? Summarize his "leaving" story/account in 1 paragraph.

3. Account of Robert Joseph Pershing Foster Where did he live? When did he leave? Summarize his "leaving" story/account in 1 paragraph.

4. Each "leaving" occurs about 8 years later than the previous one. What similarities do you see between the accounts? What differences? (Continuity and Change Over Time)

5. When did this "silent pilgrimage" (the Great Migration) begin? When did it end?

6. How does the author describe/define the Great Migration? 7. During the Great Migration, how many people left the South? 8. Why does the author argue the Great Migration was a turning point in American History? Do you agree or not? Explain/defend your answer. 9. Where can we see the "imprint" of the Great Migration in urban life? 10. How did the black population of Chicago change because of the Great Migration? 11. What was the ritual of arrival that just about every migrant did? 12. What omission does the book The Warmth of Other Suns address? 13. What types of evidence did historian Isabel Wilkerson use to define/piece together the events of the Great Migration for the three accounts at the beginning of the excerpt? 14. What distortions have miscast the emigrants? 15. In the past 20 years, a different picture has emerged. Describe this new picture. 16. Why were the actions of the people in the Great Migration both "universal and distinctly American"?

Use AP US History LEQ Essay Scoring Guide

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The economic legacy of the Great Migration

• Morgan Sherburne

ANN ARBOR—When black Americans migrated out of the South in the 1930s and ’40s, their children benefited by leaps and bounds, according to a University of Michigan study using U.S. Census data.

Compared to a group that did not leave the South, the children of families who left the South graduated from high school at a rate 11 percent higher than their counterparts, made about $1,000 dollars more per year in 2017 dollars and were 11 percent less likely to be in poverty.

The study, which was published in the journal Demography, was the first to link parents’ 1940 data to their offspring through the U.S. Census. The study authors were U-M Institute for Social Research scientists Catherine Massey and J. Trent Alexander, in collaboration with Stewart Tolnay and Christine Leibbrand at the University of Washington.

At the turn of the 20th century, African-Americans in the South began leaving those states in droves in an event called the Great Migration. In 1900, less than 5 percent of southern-born blacks lived outside of the South. By the mid-20th century, about 20 percent of African-Americans lived outside of their region of birth.

“These parents had mixed experiences. They had higher incarceration rates, but also higher incomes and more economic opportunities,” said Massey, an assistant research scientist at the Population Studies Center. “Our question was how this benefit transmits to children.”

For this study, researchers divvied up the country into two parts: the South and the “non-South.” The South includes 17 southern states such as Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and the Carolinas, and the non-South the rest of the country, including states such as Wisconsin and California. Still, industrial cities such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, Detroit and Philadelphia saw the lion’s share of these migrants.

In this research, Massey and Alexander identified migrants living with their children in 1940, and followed those children through to the long-form Census in 2000, when they were mostly retirement age.

Part of the children’s gains can be attributed to the ambition of their parents. People who were able to make a cross-country move had characteristics that make success more attainable: These parents in particular made more and had higher levels of education than the Southern stayers. Massey and Alexander needed to control for these factors.

The statistics—that children of southern migrants graduate at a rate 11 percent higher than children who stay in the South and had higher incomes—were after controlling for parental characteristics. Before this control, the migrants’ children were between 30 and 48 percent more likely to graduate high school.

“What’s really clear is that a lot of these benefits happened because these parents are self-selecting—they are from a higher portion of the income and education distribution,” Massey said. “But even after we controlled for a parent’s education, occupation and income, we’re still finding these large gains. That suggests that there may be something about the opportunities in the North that they were benefiting from.”

Being able to link parents’ data with their children gave the researchers a crucial look at the children’s gains. If they hadn’t been able to connect the generations, the researchers wouldn’t have been able to control for education and income factors.

“If we had just studied the children of movers, we might have concluded that the children of the Great Migration were extraordinarily successful,” said Alexander, who is a research professor at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. “But knowing the parents were self-selecting and controlling for that allowed us to temper what would have been an extraordinary finding.”

Massey and Alexander hope that creating this set of data that links Census data will generate other compelling research. The data was made available from the Census Bureau via the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers and provided a new source of information for understanding population dynamics across the entire span of the 20th century.

“This is the first research that uses linked 1940 and 2000 Census data to study a population over time,” Alexander said. “I think this will be an important multipurpose data resource.”

More information:

• Study: Second-Generation Outcomes of the Great Migration
• Catherine Massey
• J. Trent Alexander

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Race, gender, and marriage: destination selection during the Great Migration

Affiliation.

• 1 Center for Demography and Ecology, 3456 Social Science Building, 1180 Observatory Drive, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706-1393, USA. [email protected]
• PMID: 15986984
• DOI: 10.1353/dem.2005.0019

Using historical census microdata, we present a unique analysis of racial and gender disparities in destination selection and an exploration of hypotheses regarding tied migration in the historical context of the Great Migration. Black migrants were more likely to move to metropolitan areas and central cities throughout the period, while white migrants were more likely to locate in nonmetropolitan and farm destinations. Gender differences were largely dependent on marital status. Consistent with the "tied-migration" thesis, married women had destination outcomes that were similar to those of men, whereas single women had a greater propensity to reside in metropolitan locations where economic opportunities for women were more plentiful.

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Migration policy, and should you favor your own country?

There is a longstanding debate — for centuries in fact — as to whether you should consider only your national (or regional) interest, or whether you should think in cosmopolitan terms when evaluating policies with cross-national ramifications.

Some commentators, for instance, suggest that American immigration policy should be set to serve the interests of current American citizens only.  Whether or not one agrees, I can understand where that argument is coming from.

But what if an American is evaluating a French decision to take in or exclude some potential Algerian migrants?  You might think the French should take a French point of view, and that the Algerians should take an Algerian point of view.  But is the American allowed to be cosmopolitan in his judgment?  Even if he or she is otherwise a self-regarding nationalist on questions concerning America?

It seems to me Americans should in fact take the cosmopolitan perspective.

Alternatively, you might argue that there are degrees of relation.  American culture, politics, and gdp are much closer to their French equivalents than to anything in Algeria.  So perhaps the American can side with France after all.

But then I wonder about two things.

First, this scheme might count Algerians for less, but it doesn’t seem it counts them for zero .  Maybe America and Algeria have “better rap music” is common, or some degree of religiosity in common, or other points of similarity.

Second, once you start playing this sliding scale game, why look only at the dimension of nation ?  You also could classify people by their taste in music, how smart they are, and many other dimensions.  I first and foremost might decide to identify with people on the grounds of their openness and their desire to travel.  Or how about kindness and generosity as a standard?

As a result, the major moral lines will not cut across nations in any simple way, even if in the final analysis the French people count for more than do the Algerians.

While this is not exactly simple cosmopolitanism in the Benthamite sense, it is just as far from strict nationalism.  Once you let partialism in the door, it seems like a tough slog to argue nationality is the only relevant moral fact for partial sentiments.

It is interesting to look at how people choose their friends.  Most of us have many friends of the same nation, but that is largely for reasons for convenience.  Unless perhaps I were living abroad, it would seem strange to be friends with someone because they were an American .  But it is not strange to be friends with them because they are smart, have good taste in music, like to travel, and so on.  So when it comes to our actual choices, nationality is just one fact of many, and it is (beyond the dimension of practicality) not an especially important fact for how we choose our partial commitments for our own lives.

So why should it be such a dominant factor for how we make moral decisions when it concerns other countries?

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Mavis Staples Is an American Institution. She’s Not Done Singing Yet.

After more than seven decades onstage, the gospel and soul great decided last year that it was time to retire. Then she realized she still had work to do.

By Grayson Haver Currin

Reporting from Chicago and Los Angeles

On a rainy April day in Chicago, Mavis Staples sat in the restaurant of the towering downtown Chicago building where she’s lived for the past four years. For two hours, she talked about the civil rights movement and faith. And finally, she mentioned her old flame Bob Dylan.

The singer-songwriter first proposed to Staples after a kiss at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival; she hid from him during a show at the Apollo decades later, fearing he’d ask again. They’ve remained friends, even taking daily strolls during a 2016 tour together. She’d heard rumors he would soon retire, finally wrapping his fabled Never Ending Tour. Staples knew he would hate it.

“Oh, Bobby : He gotta keep on singing,” Staples said. “I could handle it more than him. I will call him and say, ‘Don’t retire, Bobby. You don’t know what you’re doing.’”

Staples speaks from experience: Late in the summer of 2023, soon after turning 84, she told her manager she was done. She’d been on the road for 76 years, ever since her father, Roebuck Staples, known as Pops, assembled a family band when she was 8. The Staple Singers became a gospel fulcrum of the civil rights movement and, later, a force for bending genres — mixing funk, rock and soul inside their spiritual mission, an all-American alchemy. The band’s mightiest singer and sole survivor since the death of her sister Yvonne in 2018 and brother, Pervis , in 2021, Mavis remained in high demand, a historical treasure commanding a thunderous contralto.

“Being an American and not believing in royalty, meeting her was the closest I’d ever felt,” said Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who marveled at her while watching “ The Last Waltz ” decades before he produced a string of her poignant albums. “I felt the same way when I met Johnny Cash, like meeting a dollar bill or bald eagle.”

A seemingly indomitable extrovert, Staples had deeply resented being homebound during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. So she returned to the road with gusto, playing more than 50 shows last summer. But in July, she missed the end of a moving walkway in Germany and fell on her face. Was this, she wondered, the life she wanted? She’d previously mentioned retirement, but now she insisted.

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