Last month marks one hundred years since the beginning of one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements in history, when six million African-Americans began to move north within their own country in an effort to seek safety.

What is now known as the Great Migration started in 1916 and ended in the 1970s after millions of African-American’s moved from the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West.

This year marks one hundred years since the beginning of the Great Migration

This leaderless revolution started when several hundred African-American families headed north from the Alabama Cotton Belt through fear of lynch mobs and dire poverty.

At the time, Jim Crow was in operation, which was the name of the state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the south and was considered a way of life.

Segregation, increased racism, the widespread violence of lynching (3,500 African-Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1968), and lack of social and economic opportunities in the South were the primary push factors for migration.

The first families of the Great Migration came from a town named Selma, and fled in an effort to escape the night rides and hanging trees that came with the Jim Crow South.

One of these quiet defectors confided in The Chicago Defender in February 1916 that the “treatment doesn’t warrant staying.”

This was the start of six million African-Americans over six decades migrating within the borders of their own country in order to seek asylum.

They moved from 14 states of the South, especially Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, with big cities being the principal destination of the Southerners.

During World War I many migrants also partly moved from the South due to the employment prospects caused by labour shortages in northern factories that resulted in thousands of jobs being available to African-Americans in steel mills, railroads, meatpacking plants, and the automobile industry.

African-American’s consequently built the bombers and tanks used in the war, as at the time enlistment in the army for black people consisted mainly of support roles.

After the Great Depression, an advance in African-American’s finding work took place after workers in the steel and meatpacking industries organised into labour unions under the interracial Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

The unions ended the segregation of many jobs, and African-Americans began to advance into more skilled jobs and supervisory positions previously informally reserved for Caucasians.

African-Americans often encountered residential discrimination, where white home owners and realtors prevented migrants from purchasing homes or renting apartments in white neighbourhoods.

By the late 1950s African Americans were hyper-urban, being far more densely concentrated in inner cities than other groups.

By the end of the Great Migration African-American’s had become an urbanized population, with more than 80 per cent of black people in America living in cities.

A bare majority of 53 per cent remained in the South, while 40 per cent lived in the North, and 7 per cent in the West.

Now, one of the largest internal migrations of humans in history has created what we now consider the modern American city.

Ruby Brown
AMES Australia Staff Writer