by Scott Sosebee
Demographers will tell you that where people live quite often determines quite a bit about who those people are, their social ideas, the culture they practice, their economic standing, even their political leaning. The divide between urban and rural peoples in the United States, for example, is one of the biggest chasms in our society today. Statistics tell us that today, in the 21st century slightly more than 80% of all U.S. residents live in what is described as an urban area, a zone the Census Bureau designates as a place with a population greater than 5,000, a measurement that has been fairly constant for the past fifty years. When the statistic is broken down into different groups the figures have the same consistency. For example, almost 85% of all non-Hispanic Whites, and just over 80% of African American reside in urban-designated areas.
When we compare those numbers to the past, there are some striking pictures that jump out at us. For example, in 1870, among African Americans, almost 90% lived in what was designated as rural areas, compared with about 70% of White Americans. Even more striking are the numbers when it comes to the region in which people lived. Just over 90% of African Americans, in 1870, lived in the South, while today that sum is 56%. Obviously, something occurred in those 150+ years among African Americans that wholly transformed those numbers. What occurred is a transformation that historians have designated “The Great Migration,” a mass movement of people that converted African Americans from an almost solely southern, agricultural people to ones that live all over the nation and are highly concentrated in urban areas. It was one of the largest movements of people in United States history, an exodus of more than six million African Americans from the American South. It was not an “overnight” transformation, but one that lasted decades. When historians and demographers are asked to pin when The Great Migration took place, most place the era from the 1910s to the 1970s, and the driving force behind the movement was an attempt to escape racial violence, find economic opportunity, but most of all to escape the intense oppression of the Jim Crow strictures in the South.
The Great Migration is most usually broken into two phases, and both of them coincided with—and were the effect of—both World Wars. The first phase can be delegated as 1910 through 1940. During that period, as many as two million Blacks left the South for other parts of the country. Of course, much of this one had to do with Black southerners leaving the South and relocating to mostly northern and midwestern states. They were lured by the growing industrialization in the nation and jobs in those growing factories. The vast majority of those migrants relocated to cities such as Chicago, New York, and Detroit. The movement particularly accelerated when U.S. participation in World War I began in 1917 as African American workers began to replace those who had been drafted and went to war.
Those who fled the South had hoped to find more than jobs in the northern states. Economic opportunities were fine, but they also hoped that they could escape the racial animus that had become a daily burden in the South. On that front, they were sorely disappointed. While they may not have faced the institutional oppression of a Jim Crow-like system in the non-southern states, they still confronted injustices and difficulties caused by racism in their new homes. The “Red Summer” of 1919, characterized by a series of White supremacist attacks and race riots in places such as Chicago, Washington D.C., and Omaha, Nebraska were just one indication of the growing racial tension in their new homes. Most of the friction was rooted in White resentment from having to now encounter African Americans living within neighborhoods that were once wholly White.
The next period, 1940 through the 1970s, followed the same pattern, but represented even a greater number of migrants that relocated. This period saw an even greater trek to the largest northern and midwestern cities, but also a more continental movement. For example, in 1940, just less than 10% of Chicago’s population was African American—and that was a large increase from the not quite 2% of the population in 1910. However, by the 1980 census, that percentage had ballooned to over 40%, and today, interestingly, that percentage has declined to under 30%, but that is another story. World War II was one of the biggest impetuses for the movement. As the U.S. began to prepare for entry into the war, the nation’s defense industry expanded production, and that created a great number of jobs, work that provided ample opportunities for African Americans. This migration continued even after the war as the United States did not disable their defense plants, but instead moved into even greater production with the advent of the Cold War. Also, the devastation of Europe led to an even greater growth in American manufacturing as the nation began to export goods on an even greater global scale. The patterns of migration during this period were also more varied. During this period, the migrants still traveled to those cities and regions in the north, but they also moved west, particularly to California to cities such as Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and even farther afield to Portland and Seattle. Oakland offers perhaps the most striking example. The 1940 census shows that slightly less than 3% of the city’s population was African American, but in the 1990 census that percentage had grown to a whopping 45%.
Black people who migrated during this second period found some of the same conditions as did those who moved during the first. Housing discrimination was probably the most egregious, as title discrimination and “red-lining” confined Blacks to traditional neighborhoods and often sub-standard housing. Those same restrictions created the foundation for still-existing racial disparities in wealth in the United States. But, the Great Migration had another even more foundational affect. The migration of African Americans throughout the United States, and the subsequent problems but also awareness affiliated with the movement, can be attributed as a stimulus for the civil rights movement.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee the Executive Director of the Association and can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.