The Great Migration refers to the movement of an estimated six to seven million African Americans out of the rural American South to cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, occurring roughly between 1910 and 1970. The term is sometimes divided into a First Great Migration (c. 1910-1930) and a Second Great Migration (c. 1940-1970), separated by a slowdown during the Great Depression. Some scholars date the beginning of black out-migration from the South earlier, to the post-Reconstruction “Exoduster” movement of the late 1870s, though that earlier movement was smaller in scale and directed largely toward rural settlement in Kansas and other Plains states rather than northern cities.
At the outset of the migration, about 90 percent of the African-American population lived in the South and a majority worked in agriculture. By 1970, fewer than half of African Americans lived in the South, and most lived in cities. The scale of the relative population shift, and which causal factors should be weighted most heavily in explaining it, are addressed further on the History page and in Debate and Viewpoint pages linked below.
Historians and economists generally agree on the broad outline of the migration's causes: a combination of “push” factors in the South - Jim Crow segregation, disfranchisement, sharecropping and the crop-lien credit system, convict leasing, lynching and other racial violence, and periodic agricultural crises such as boll weevil infestations - and “pull” factors in the North, principally labor demand in wartime and postwar industry combined with reduced European immigration during and after World War I. There is less agreement on the relative weight of these factors, and on how much weight to give migrants' own agency and decision-making as opposed to external economic and social pressure; older “push-pull” framings have been challenged by historians emphasizing that migrants actively weighed options and organized collectively through migration clubs and kinship networks rather than simply responding to circumstance.
Migrants who relocated North generally saw substantial gains in earnings, educational access, and political and civil rights, including the ability to vote, relative to conditions in the Jim Crow South. At the same time, migrants encountered discrimination in northern housing and labor markets, residential segregation enforced through restrictive covenants and later mortgage redlining, and, in several cities, organized racial violence, including riots in East St. Louis (1917), Chicago (1919) and other cities during the 1919 “Red Summer,” and Detroit (1943). A separate and more contested body of research, summarized below, examines whether these northern gains persisted across generations or were substantially eroded by mid-century changes in urban policy, industrial structure, and policing.
There is broad consensus among historians and economists that the migration was driven by a combination of southern racial oppression and northern labor demand, and that it produced large, measurable improvements in income, education, and civic participation for the migrants themselves relative to their counterfactual circumstances in the South. See Consensus: Causes of the Migration. There is no comparable consensus on the migration's longer-run, multigenerational economic effects; this is treated as an active research debate rather than settled, below.