The Great Migration

The early twentieth century was a period of increasing urbanization in America. In 1920 the census showed that for the first time in U.S. history the majority of Americans lived in cities. However, while white Americans had been gradually moving into urban areas over the course of a century, black Americans became city-dwellers much more suddenly. Vast numbers of African Americans moved to northern cities between the 1910s and 1940s in a population shift known as the Great Migration (or the Great Black Migration).

In 1910 about 90 percent of the African American population of the United States lived in the South, with 78 percent living in rural areas. Economic factors such as crop failures in the South, the labor vacuum created by World War I, and the stemming of European immigrants after 1914, plus political factors such as segregation, discrimination, and lynching in the South, led to a...