# The Great Migration Between **roughly 1910 and 1970**, approximately **six million Black Americans** left the rural South for the industrial cities of the North, Midwest, and West. It was the largest internal migration in United States history, and it transformed the country's demographic, cultural, and political geography. The Great Migration is conventionally divided into two phases: the **First Great Migration (1910–1940)**, driven by WWI industrial labor demand and the collapse of cotton, which moved roughly 1.6 million people; and the **Second Great Migration (1940–1970)**, driven by WWII defense production and agricultural mechanization, which moved roughly 5 million more. The Great Migration matters for the KB as **the demographic engine of 20th-century American racial politics.** Without it, the [[Civil Rights Movement]] has no urban political base, the Democratic Party does not become the party of civil rights, Nixon and Reagan have no [[Southern Strategy]] to run, the suburbs do not form as a white political identity, the "inner city" does not exist as a coded term, and the [[Great Replacement Theory]] has no century-long ancestor. Every major race-coded right-wing political move from 1948 to the present — Dixiecrats, Goldwater, Nixon's Southern Strategy, Reagan's welfare queens, [[Willie Horton]], "law and order," Trump's Central Park Five ads, [[Tucker Carlson]]'s replacement monologues — is downstream of the population movement that this event describes. It is also the **flip side of [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]]**: the 1877 [[Compromise of 1877]] made the South uninhabitable for Black political participation; the Great Migration is what six million people did about it. The KB pairs these two events as cause and consequence. ## What Happened ### The First Great Migration (1910–1940) **Push factors:** - **[[Jim Crow Era]] terror.** Between 1877 and 1950, roughly 4,000 documented lynchings enforced racial hierarchy. State-level disenfranchisement (poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, white primaries) stripped Black voters from registration rolls — in Louisiana, Black registration fell from 130,344 in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904. - **The cotton economy's collapse.** The boll weevil reached the Mississippi Delta in 1913 and devastated cotton yields. Sharecropping and debt peonage — slavery's direct economic successor — became even more extractive as yields fell. - **The failure of federal enforcement.** The [[Compromise of 1877]] had withdrawn federal troops; by 1910, there was no federal will to enforce the 14th or 15th Amendments. The Supreme Court's *Plessy v. Ferguson* (1896) had ratified "separate but equal" as constitutional. **Pull factors:** - **WWI labor demand.** The war cut European immigration from ~1.2 million/year to near zero. Northern industry — steel in Pittsburgh and Gary, meatpacking in Chicago, autos in Detroit, shipping in Philadelphia and New York — faced an acute labor shortage and began recruiting Southern Black workers directly. - **The Black press.** The *Chicago Defender*, under Robert Abbott, ran a deliberate campaign from 1917 onward urging Southern Black readers to migrate. The paper was smuggled into the South by Pullman porters. It published train schedules, job listings, and letters from successful migrants. - **The Pullman network.** Black porters on the Pullman sleeping cars became the informal logistics backbone of the migration — passing information, carrying newspapers, escorting migrants North. **Destinations:** Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis. Chicago's Black population went from 44,000 in 1910 to 234,000 in 1930 — a five-fold increase in two decades. ### The Second Great Migration (1940–1970) **New push factors on top of old ones:** - **The mechanical cotton picker.** IBM's International Harvester H-series cotton picker (commercialized 1944) made sharecropping labor obsolete. A single machine replaced 50 workers. By 1970, 98% of the South's cotton was machine-picked. The agricultural jobs that had kept Black Southerners rural simply disappeared. - **Continued racial terror.** [[Emmett Till]] (1955), the Birmingham church bombing (1963), and thousands of lesser-known acts of violence made clear that federal civil rights law was only as strong as its enforcement — which remained minimal until the mid-1960s. **New pull factors:** - **WWII defense production.** Roosevelt's **Executive Order 8802 (1941)**, pushed by A. Philip Randolph's threatened March on Washington, banned racial discrimination in defense industries — the first federal civil-rights executive order since Reconstruction. Black workers entered aircraft plants, shipyards, and munitions factories at unprecedented scale. - **California and [[the West]].** Unlike the First Migration, the Second went heavily to Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. The Black population of Los Angeles went from 63,000 in 1940 to 763,000 by 1970. - **Post-war industrial expansion.** The auto, steel, and chemical industries absorbed migrants into the unionized industrial working class. **Scale:** Approximately 5 million people between 1940 and 1970 — three times the First Migration. By 1970, 47% of Black Americans lived outside the South, up from 10% in 1900. The United States went from an overwhelmingly Southern, rural Black population to an overwhelmingly urban, Northern/Western one, in two generations. ### The demographic before/after | Year | % Black Americans in the South | % Urban | Largest Black-population cities | |------|-------------------------------|---------|-------------------------------| | 1900 | 90% | 22% | New Orleans, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, New York | | 1940 | 77% | 49% | New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore | | 1970 | 53% | 81% | New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington, LA | ## Why It Matters: Four Through-Lines The Great Migration is not merely a historical demographic event. It is the **upstream cause** of four political dynamics that still structure American right-wing politics. ### 1. Southern Strategy and Coded Racial Politics The Great Migration created, for the first time in American history, **large concentrated Black voting populations outside the Jim Crow South** — populations that could actually vote. This had three political consequences that the right has been reacting to ever since: - **The Democratic realignment.** Black migrants entering Northern cities found the Democratic Party's urban machines (Chicago's under Anton Cermak and then Richard J. Daley; New York's Tammany Hall in its late phase) willing to enroll them as voters. [[FDR's New Deal]] coalition absorbed Black voters in the North even while maintaining Jim Crow Democrats in the South. By 1948, when Truman integrated the military and the Dixiecrats walked out, the Democratic Party's racial coalition had inverted. Within two generations, it would complete the flip — Goldwater (1964) won only Arizona and five Deep South states; Nixon (1968, 1972) built the [[Goldwater Nomination]] coalition into a national majority. - **The Southern Strategy's vocabulary.** Every piece of coded right-wing racial language from 1968 forward — "law and order," "states' rights," "welfare queen," "inner city," "urban crime," "illegitimacy," "dependency," "busing," "forced integration," "quotas," "affirmative action" — refers to one of two populations created by the Great Migration: the Black residents of Northern cities, or the white suburbanites who fled from them. [[Lee Atwater]]'s famous 1981 admission about Nixon's strategy ("You start out in 1954 by saying 'N-word, n-word, n-word.' By 1968 you can't say that — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights...") is a direct description of how the vocabulary of anti-Black politics was restructured around the geography the Great Migration had produced. - **The [[Welfare Reform Act]] of the 1990s.** "Welfare" in American political discourse means AFDC/TANF, which means (in the imagined frame) single Black mothers in Northern cities. This frame is a direct product of the Great Migration combined with 50 years of media coding. The 1996 welfare reform was sold to white voters on the basis of this frame, though the actual recipients were (and are) disproportionately white. ### 2. Redlining, FHA, and the Racial Wealth Gap As Black migrants arrived in Northern cities, the federal government, the banking industry, and the real estate industry built an **infrastructure of racial containment** around them. See [[Redlining and Housing Discrimination]] for the full treatment; the Great Migration is its precondition. **Mechanisms:** - **HOLC maps (1935–1940).** The Home Owners' Loan Corporation produced "residential security" maps that color-coded neighborhoods from A (green, "best") to D (red, "hazardous"). Every neighborhood with a Black population — no matter how affluent — was redlined. The maps were used by the FHA and the VA to guide mortgage underwriting for decades. - **FHA discrimination (1934–1968).** The Federal Housing Administration's official *Underwriting Manual* explicitly instructed appraisers to avoid neighborhoods with "incompatible racial elements." Of the $120 billion in FHA-backed mortgages issued between 1934 and 1962, less than 2% went to Black families. - **Restrictive covenants.** Legally enforceable (until *Shelley v. Kraemer*, 1948) and then socially enforced, racial covenants barred Black families from buying in most new subdivisions. Levittown, NY — the template for American suburbia — excluded Black families until the 1960s. - **Blockbusting.** When the covenants broke, real estate operators deliberately engineered rapid racial turnover — selling one house to a Black family, then panicking white residents into selling at discount prices, then reselling to incoming Black families at a premium. The process was enormously profitable for the operators and enormously destructive of both communities. **The result:** The post-WWII creation of the American white middle class through homeownership — the single largest wealth-building event in American history — was **racially rigged by federal policy**. The Black migrants who had done the same thing (left the rural South, taken industrial jobs, sought to buy homes) were systematically excluded from the wealth-building mechanism. The current Black-white racial wealth gap (median Black household wealth is roughly 10–15% of median white household wealth) is the compounded downstream effect. The right-wing political implication: the suburbs that formed through FHA redlining became **the electoral base of modern conservatism**. Orange County, California; the Detroit exurbs; the Philadelphia Main Line; the Atlanta perimeter. These are not accidents of geography. They are the political geography the Great Migration + redlining + white flight produced. See [[White Flight and Suburbanization]] for this dynamic in detail. ### 3. Demographic Anxiety and the Great Replacement Lineage The [[Great Replacement Theory]] conspiracy — the claim that white populations are being deliberately "replaced" by non-white immigrants — is usually traced to [[Renaud Camus]]'s 2011 book *[[Le Grand Remplacement]]*. But the **American version of demographic-anxiety politics is a century older**, and its first target was not immigrants. It was Black migrants from the American South. **The Red Summer (1919).** As Black Southern migrants arrived in Northern cities during and after WWI, white mobs attacked Black neighborhoods in more than two dozen cities. Chicago's 1919 race riot killed 38 people; Washington, D.C., Knoxville, Omaha, Elaine (Arkansas), and others saw similar violence. The framing — *they are arriving, they are taking our jobs, they are moving into our neighborhoods* — is the same structural anxiety that today's replacement discourse applies to Latin American and Arab immigrants. **1920s scientific racism and immigration restriction.** Madison Grant's *The Passing of the Great Race* (1916) and Lothrop Stoddard's *The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy* (1920) were the intellectual scaffolding for the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which cut Southern and Eastern European immigration. Grant and Stoddard's eugenic anxieties were also applied to Black migration — the "Negro problem" framed as a problem of population movement and contact. **The 1950s–60s "white backlash."** By the time the Second Great Migration peaked, the shape of American demographic anxiety was set: white urban neighborhoods feared "invasion," suburbs formed as racial escape hatches, and integration was framed as a demographic threat rather than a civil-rights question. Boston's 1974–76 busing riots, the ROAR movement, [[Charles Stenvig]] in Minneapolis, [[Louise Day Hicks]] in Boston, [[Frank Rizzo]] in Philadelphia — a generation of explicitly racial Northern urban politics ran on the claim that Black residents were overwhelming white neighborhoods. **The lineage to today.** Renaud Camus's European replacement theory arrives in American right-wing discourse in the mid-2010s ([[Richard Spencer]], [[Pat Buchanan]], eventually Tucker Carlson) and slots neatly into the pre-existing American frame. The target expanded — now Latin American immigrants, Muslims, and non-white immigration generally — but the **grammar is unchanged**: a white population under demographic siege, elite betrayal ("they're bringing them in to replace you"), urgency about birthrates and population shares. Every element was present in the Red Summer a hundred years earlier. The Great Migration is not merely an ancestor of the Great Replacement discourse. It is the **first large-scale demographic movement that white Americans framed in replacement terms**, and the rhetorical template has been stable ever since. ### 4. Labor, Unions, and Black Political Power The Great Migration moved Black Americans out of agricultural debt peonage and into **industrial wage labor**, most of it unionized. This was politically consequential in four ways: - **Union power.** The CIO's organizing drives in the 1930s–40s (UAW, USW, the packinghouse workers) depended on Black labor; the resulting unions became some of the most racially integrated institutions in 20th-century American life. Black union density peaked in the 1970s at nearly 30% — higher than white density. Union politics became one of the core infrastructures of Black political power. - **Civil rights movement infrastructure.** Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 while supporting a **sanitation workers' strike**. A. Philip Randolph, the most consequential pre-1960 civil rights strategist, was the president of the **Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters**. The March on Washington was co-organized by Randolph and funded substantially by industrial unions. The civil rights movement was, in a real sense, **a movement of organized Black industrial workers in migrated Northern cities**, not primarily a movement of Southern agricultural workers. - **Urban political machines and the rise of Black elected officials.** Chicago elected Oscar Stanton De Priest to Congress in 1928 — the first Black Congressman in the 20th century, and the first from outside the South. The migration enabled Black political representation at every level from city council to Congress. The Congressional Black Caucus, founded in 1971, was institutionalizing political power that the Great Migration had created. - **The destruction of industrial jobs and the political consequences.** The 1970s–80s deindustrialization — NAFTA, the collapse of Detroit and the Rust Belt, union busting under Reagan and after — fell disproportionately on the Black industrial working class that the Second Great Migration had built. The political collapse of this class is a large part of the context for both the Black political disillusionment of the 1990s–2000s and the Rust Belt white political realignment of 2016. Both are downstream of the same deindustrialization event, acting on the same labor geography that the Great Migration had produced. The right-wing political implication: the industrial working class that Reagan Democrats, Trump Republicans, and the "populist right" all claim to represent **was built by the Great Migration** — and then destroyed by the bipartisan economic policy consensus of the 1980s–2000s. The identity politics of the contemporary right is in large part an attempt to reconstitute a white version of this destroyed class on ethnonational rather than economic grounds. ## The Template, Updated The KB's recurring pattern — expansion of rights → violent backlash → "compromise" that sacrifices the expansion — applies to the Great Migration as well, with a twist: the migration itself was **an attempt to escape the "compromise" that had already been made** (the [[Compromise of 1877]]) by moving to a jurisdiction where Black rights might be enforceable. The North, of course, produced its own version of the backlash cycle: | Phase | Northern version | |-------|------------------| | Rights-expansion-by-migration | 1910–1970: Six million Black Americans leave Jim Crow; Black voting, union membership, homeownership, officeholding in Northern cities | | Violent backlash | Red Summer 1919, Detroit 1943, Boston busing 1974–76, white flight, blockbusting pushback | | "Compromise" that sacrificed the expansion | HOLC/FHA redlining, racial covenants, suburban zoning, the Southern Strategy, the "inner city" frame, deindustrialization | | Narrative construction | "Crime," "welfare dependency," "broken families," the Moynihan report's weaponization, the "culture of poverty," [[Charles Murray]]'s *[[Losing Ground]]* | | Institutional capture | The suburban electoral base of movement conservatism; federal housing and policing policy; the Reagan-era restructuring of the American city | ## See Also - [[Compromise of 1877]] — The deal that made the South uninhabitable for Black political participation; direct cause of the migration - [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] — The destruction of Southern Black citizenship that the migration was a response to - [[The Lost Cause]] — The mythology that justified the South's racial terror regime - [[White Flight and Suburbanization]] — The reactive white-population movement the Great Migration triggered - [[Redlining and Housing Discrimination]] — The policy machinery that contained the migration's destinations - [[Brown v. Board of Education]] — The 1954 decision that catalyzed the Second Migration's political endgame - [[Goldwater Nomination]] — The 1964 turning point of the Southern Strategy; only state Goldwater won outside the Deep South was Arizona - [[Shelby County v. Holder]] — The 2013 decision that gutted the VRA protections the migration had fought to win - [[Welfare Reform Act]] — The 1996 law that weaponized the "urban Black mother" frame the migration + media coding had created - [[Great Replacement Theory]] — Contemporary heir to the demographic-anxiety politics the migration first provoked - [[Civil Rights Era Backlash Ecosystem]] — The organizational map of the reactionary response