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.

• Migration-as-liberation viewpoint - emphasizes the migration as a successful exercise of agency that secured tangible gains in freedom, income, and political voice for millions of African Americans, whatever the obstacles encountered in the North. See great-migration-liberation-viewpoint.
• Structural-limits viewpoint - holds that gains from migration were substantially constrained, and in some respects later reversed, by northern housing discrimination, deindustrialization, and policy choices made by northern governments and institutions in response to Black in-migration. See great-migration-structural-limits-viewpoint.
• Agency-centered historiographical viewpoint - within migration historiography, holds that migrants should be understood primarily as self-directed actors pursuing strategic life choices, in contrast to older “push-pull” models that framed them as responding passively to external forces. See great-migration-agency-viewpoint.
• Continuity-of-racism viewpoint - holds that the migration is best understood as evidence that racial discrimination was a national rather than a strictly regional phenomenon, since migrants encountered segregation, violence, and exclusion in the North as well as the South. See great-migration-continuity-of-racism-viewpoint.

• The 1919 Chicago Race Riot and the broader wave of urban racial violence known as Red Summer remain a documented controversy over causation and culpability, with historical accounts differing on the relative roles of housing competition, labor competition, and organized white resistance. See great-migration-red-summer-controversy.
• Economist Ellora Derenoncourt's research arguing the migration's long-run economic gains were substantially eroded by mid-century northern policy has prompted methodological debate among economic historians. See great-migration-derenoncourt-thesis-controversy.

• History: great-migration-history
• Debate: great-migration-causes-debate
• Debate: great-migration-long-run-economic-effects-debate
• Viewpoint Debate: great-migration-liberation-viewpoint-structural-limits-viewpoint-debate
• Consensus: great-migration-causes-consensus
• Controversy: great-migration-red-summer-controversy
• Controversy: great-migration-derenoncourt-thesis-controversy
• Related Debate: New Deal – black Americans Net Effects Debate
• Related Main Topic: Jim Crow
• Related Main Topic: Redlining
• Related Main Topic: United States of America - 20th Century History

1. Isabel Wilkerson, *The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration* (New York: Random House, 2010).
2. Nicholas Lemann, *The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America* (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
3. James N. Gregory, *The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America* (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
4. Ellora Derenoncourt, “Can You Move to Opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration,” *American Economic Review* 112, no. 2 (2022): 369-408.
5. William J. Collins and Marianne H. Wanamaker, “Selection and Economic Gains in the Great Migration of African Americans: New Evidence from Linked Census Data,” *American Economic Journal: Applied Economics* 6, no. 1 (2014): 220-252.
6. “The Great Migration (1910-1970),” U.S. National Archives, Research Our Records: African American Heritage, accessed June 26, 2026, https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/migrations/great-migration.
7. “Great Migration,” *Encyclopaedia Britannica*, accessed June 26, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Migration.