The Great Migration

The Great Migration was the movement of 2 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest and West from 1910 to 1930.African Americans migrated to escape racism and prejudice in the South, as well as to seek jobs in industrial cities.


Some historians differentiate between a First Great Migration (1910–40), numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration (1940 to 1970), in which 5 million or more people moved and to a wider variety of destinations. From 1965–70, 14 states of the South, especially Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, contributed to a large net migration of blacks to the other three cultural (and census-designated) regions of the United States.By the end of the Second Great Migration, African Americans had become an urbanized population. More than 80 percent lived in cities. Fifty-three percent remained in the South, while 40 percent lived in the North and 7 percent in the West.


A reverse migration has gathered strength since 1965, dubbed the New Great Migration, the term for demographic changes from 1965 to the present which are a reversal of the previous 35-year trend of black migration within the United States. Since 1965, deindustrialization of cities in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, growth of jobs in the "New South", family and kinship ties, and improving racial relations have all acted to attract African Americans to the Southern United States in substantial numbers. As early as 1975-1980, seven southern states were net black migration gainers. African-American populations continue to drop throughout much of the Northeast, particularly with black emigration out of the state of New York as well as out of Northern New Jersey, as they rise in the Southern United States.