Between 1915 and 1970, more than 6 million African-Americans moved out of the South to cities across the Northeast, Midwest and West. This relocation -- called the Great Migration -- resulted in massive demographic shifts across the United States. Between 1910 and 1930, cities such as New York, Chicago and Cleveland saw their African-American populations grow by about 40 percent, and the number of African-Americans employed in industrial jobs nearly doubled. "[The Great Migration] had such an effect on almost every aspect of our lives -- from the music that we listen to to the politics of our country to the ways the cities even look and feel. The suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where [African-Americans] could live in the North. And ... the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration." Continue reading from PBS
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. Continue reading from University of Washington - America's Great Migration Project
