Great Migration

The Great Migration was the movement of six million Black Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest and West between 1910 and 1970. It was driven by racial segregation and discrimination under the Jim Crow laws and by lynchings, and drawn by labor shortages in Northern factories during World War I. Historians divide it into a first migration (1910–1940) of about 1.6 million people and a second (1940–1970) of at least five million. Most migrants settled in the largest cities, among them New York City, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, where they built culturally influential communities; by 1970 more than 80% of Black Americans lived in cities.