Southern Exodus Changes Everything
Picture this: six million African Americans leaving the rural South for northern cities between 1910 and 1970. This wasn’t just people moving house – it was an entire population reshaping the face of America. 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 numbers tell an incredible story. From the earliest U.S. population statistics in 1780 until 1910, more than 90% of the African-American population lived in the American South. But by 1970, everything had flipped. By 1970, more than 10.6 million African Americans lived outside the South, 47% of the nation’s total. This massive movement fundamentally transformed American cities from coast to coast.
Two Waves of Urban Transformation
The Great Migration didn’t happen all at once. 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.
The second wave was even bigger. Some historians analyse the Great Migration in two parts, a first Great Migration (1910–40), during which about 1.6 million people moved from mostly rural areas in the South to northern industrial cities, and a Second Great Migration (1940–70), which began after the Great Depression and during it, at least five million people—including townspeople with urban skills—moved to the North and West. Within twenty years of World War II, a further 3 million Black people migrated throughout the United States.
Urban Jobs Create the Pull North
World War I created a perfect storm for migration. 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. 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 industrial boom changed everything. African Americans made substantial gains in industrial employment, particularly in the steel, automobile, shipbuilding, and meatpacking industries. Between 1910 and 1920, the number of Black workers employed in industry nearly doubled from 500,000 to 901,000. This wasn’t just about individual opportunities – it was about reshaping entire urban economies.
Cities Transform Into Black Metropolises
The concentration of migrants in specific cities created something unprecedented. Because the migrants concentrated in the big cities of the north and west, their influence was magnified in those places. Cities that had been virtually all white at the start of the century became centers of Black culture and politics by mid-century.
Chicago became the poster child of this transformation. In Chicago for instance, the neighborhood of Bronzeville became known as the “Black Metropolis”. From 1924 to 1929, the “Black Metropolis” was at the peak of its golden years. The foundation of the first African American YMCA took place in Bronzeville, and worked to help incoming migrants find jobs in the city of Chicago. These weren’t just neighborhoods – they were entire parallel cities within cities.
Housing Crisis Sparks Urban Tensions
The massive influx of people created severe housing shortages. Populations increased so rapidly among both African-American migrants and new European immigrants that there were housing shortages in most major cities. With fewer resources, the newer groups were forced to compete for the oldest, most run-down housing.
This competition led to violence. Riots broke out in several northern cities as white residents expressed their resentment and fears. In July 1918 violent confrontations occurred in Philadelphia as African Americans began to move into white neighborhoods and the residents there fought to keep them out. 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.
Segregation Takes Root in Northern Cities
Northern cities responded to the migration with systematic segregation. 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.
This created a pattern that would define American cities for decades. Mortgage discrimination and redlining in inner city areas limited the newer African-American migrants’ ability to determine their own housing, or obtain a fair price. In the long term, the National Housing Act of 1934 contributed to limiting the availability of loans to urban areas, particularly those areas inhabited by African Americans. As shown in figure 1, the level of residential segregation in the North increased significantly during the Great Migration.
Birth of Urban Black Culture
Despite the challenges, the concentration of Black Americans in cities created something extraordinary. 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. This migration gave birth to a cultural boom in cities such as Chicago and New York.
The infrastructure of Black urban life took shape. The northern “Black metropolises” developed an important infrastructure of newspapers, businesses, jazz clubs, churches, and political organizations that provided the staging ground for new forms of racial politics and new forms of Black culture. This wasn’t just about survival – it was about creating entirely new forms of American culture that would influence the entire nation.
Urban Renewal as Response to Migration
Cities didn’t just passively accept the demographic changes. Shi et al. (2022) explore the extent to which urban renewal was a response to increased Black migration and find that cities with more migration responded by undertaking more urban renewal projects and displacing more families in the process. We show that cities receiving high inflows of Black migrants due to plausibly exogenous factors exhibited a marked increase in the likelihood of ever initiating an urban renewal project as well as an increase in the total number of such projects undertaken. Urban renewal programs were federally subsidized local efforts aimed at the clearance of “blighted” urban neighborhoods for redevelopment and rehabilitation.
The consequences were devastating for Black communities. LaVoice, 2019 also finds that Black neighborhoods were disproportionately more likely to be targeted for “slum” clearance and redevelopment even after accounting for the extent of blight. These findings echo the concerns about urban renewal programs raised in the broader literature, including the relocation of families and lack of good quality replacement housing, the disproportionate impact on low-income Black families, and loss of cohesive neighborhoods and social capital.
The Urbanization Revolution
The Great Migration fundamentally changed African American life from rural to urban. Moreover, the African-American population had become highly urbanized. In 1900, only one-fifth of African Americans in the South were living in urban areas. By 1960, half of the African Americans in the South lived in urban areas, and by 1970, more than 80% of African Americans nationwide lived in cities.
This transformation went beyond simple geography. This period marked the transition for many African Americans from lifestyles as rural farmers to urban industrial workers. In contrast to their largely rural settlement patterns at the beginning of the Great Migration, in 1970, eight in 10 Black residents lived in metropolitan areas, with one in four living in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or Detroit. It was a complete reimagining of African American life.
White Flight and Suburban Expansion
The migration triggered a counter-movement that reshaped American cities. 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.
This created a new urban geography. Meanwhile, the threat of a “black invasion” in predominantly white communities also expedited the pace of “white flight.” Segregationists sought refuge in the outlying suburbs, effectively siphoning off their tax dollars and other resources from cities, which led to the under-evaluation of urban space. Widespread “white flight” to the suburbs further isolated these neighborhoods from communities where employment opportunities and tax bases were growing.
Economic Competition and Labor Dynamics
The influx of Black workers created complex economic dynamics in northern cities. Because so many people migrated in a short period of time, the African-American migrants were often resented by the urban European-American working class (many of whom were recent immigrants themselves); fearing their ability to negotiate rates of pay or secure employment, the ethnic whites felt threatened by the influx of new labor competition.
Despite the tensions, the economic impact was transformative. 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. The migration didn’t just change who lived in cities – it changed how American cities functioned economically.
Modern Echoes of the Great Migration
Today’s urban migration patterns still reflect the Great Migration’s legacy. This analysis examines how recent urban growth patterns have shifted from the peak pandemic period and now signal a trend toward demographic revival. This includes reduced out-migration and smaller population losses in major metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, as well as shifts from sharp losses to gains in urban core areas such as San Francisco and Washington, D.C..
The patterns established during the Great Migration continue to evolve. Since the Civil Rights Movement, the trend has reversed, with more African Americans moving to the South, albeit far more slowly. Dubbed the New Great Migration, these moves were generally spurred by the economic difficulties of cities in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, growth of jobs in the “New South” and its lower cost of living, family and kinship ties, and lessening discrimination.
The Lasting Urban Legacy
The Great Migration was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements in history—perhaps the greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation. In sheer numbers, it outranks the migration of any other ethnic group—Italians or Irish or Jews or Poles—to the United States. This movement didn’t just move people – it fundamentally restructured American urban life.
The transformation was complete and lasting. The Great Migration fueled an important shift in the demographic center and the role of African Americans in the United States. As a result, by 1970 Africans Americans had transformed from a rural and southern population to an urban and northern one. Cities became the battlegrounds where America’s racial future would be decided, and the infrastructure of modern urban Black life – from businesses to churches to political organizations – became the foundation for the civil rights movement and beyond.
