4.2 Causes of the Great Migration

Push factors from the South

African Americans fled the South to escape Jim Crow segregation, racial violence (including lynching), disenfranchisement, and exploitative economic systems like sharecropping and tenant farming. Boll weevil infestations and flooding also devastated cotton crops, worsening rural poverty and pushing families to seek opportunity elsewhere.

Pull factors to the North

Northern industrial cities offered wage-labor jobs in factories, meatpacking, and steel mills, especially as World War I cut off European immigration and increased demand for labor. Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender advertised these opportunities, encouraging migration through personal networks, kinship ties, and organized labor recruitment.

Scale and significance

Between roughly 1910 and 1970, over six million African Americans moved from the rural South to cities in the North, Midwest, and West in what's called the Great Migration. This demographic shift reshaped urban Black communities, fueled the Harlem Renaissance, and laid groundwork for later civil rights activism.

Key terms

Push factors

Conditions in the South that drove Black Americans to leave, including Jim Crow laws, racial violence, and sharecropping poverty.

Pull factors

Conditions attracting migrants North, such as industrial jobs, higher wages, and reduced (though still present) racial restrictions.

Sharecropping

An exploitative farming system where tenants worked land for a share of crops, often trapping them in debt to landowners.

Chicago Defender

An influential Black newspaper that publicized Northern job opportunities and encouraged Southern Black families to migrate.

Great Migration

The movement of over six million African Americans from the rural South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities, roughly 1910–1970.

Try an AP-style question

A major push factor for the Great Migration was…

1. free land in the South
2. Jim Crow segregation and violence
3. equal Southern schools
4. plentiful Southern factory jobs