page_title: Great Migration (African American)
section_title: Demographic changes
hierarchical_section_title: Great Migration (African American) / Effects / Demographic changes
context_page_description: The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970. It was caused primarily by the poor economic conditions as well as the prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld.
  In every U.S. Census prior to 1910, more than 90% of the African-American population lived in the American South. In 1900, only one-fifth of African Americans living in the South were living in urban areas. By the end of the Great Migration, just over 50% of the African-American population remained in the South, while a little less than 50% lived in the North and West, and the African-American population had become highly urbanized. By 1960, of those African Americans still living in the South, half now lived in urban areas, and by 1970, more than 80% of African Americans nationwide lived in cities. In 1991, Nicholas Lemann wrote that:
context_section_description: The Great Migration drained off much of the rural black population of the South, and for a time, froze or reduced African-American population growth in parts of the region. In a number of states, there were decades of black population decline, especially across the Deep South "black belt" where cotton had been king. The migration changed the demographics of the South. In 1910, African Americans constituted the majority of the population of South Carolina and Mississippi, and more than 40 percent in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas; by 1970, only in Mississippi did the African-American population constitute more than 30 percent of the state's total. "The disappearance of the 'black belt' was one of the striking effects" of the Great Migration, James Gregory wrote.
  In Mississippi, blacks decreased from about 56% of the population in 1910 to about 37% by 1970, remaining the majority only in some Delta counties. In Georgia, blacks decreased from about 45% of the population in 1910 to about 26% by 1970. In South Carolina, blacks decreased from about 55% of the population in 1910 to about 30% by 1970.
  The growing black presence outside the South changed the dynamics and demographics of numerous cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. In 1900, only 740,000 African Americans lived outside the South, just 8 percent of the nation's total black population. By 1970, more than 10.6 million African Americans lived outside the South, 47 percent of the nation's total.
  Because the migrants concentrated in the big cities of the north and west, their influence was magnified in those places. Cities that had been virtually all white at the start of the century became centers of black culture and politics by mid-century. Residential segregation and redlining led to concentrations of blacks in certain areas. The northern "Black metropolises" developed an important infrastructure of newspapers, businesses, jazz clubs, churches, and political organizations that provided the staging ground for new forms of racial politics and new forms of black culture.
  As a result of the Great Migration, the first large urban black communities developed in northern cities beyond New York, Boston, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, which had black communities even before the Civil War, and attracted migrants after the war. It is conservatively estimated that 400,000 African Americans left the South in 1916 through 1918 to take advantage of a labor shortage in industrial cities during the First World War.
  In 1910, the African-American population of Detroit was 6,000. The Great Migration, along with immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as their descendants, rapidly turned the city into the country's fourth-largest. By the start of the Great Depression in 1929, the city's African-American population had increased to 120,000.
  In 1900–01, Chicago had a total population of 1,754,473. By 1920, the city had added more than 1 million residents. During the second wave of the Great Migration (1940–60), the African-American population in the city grew from 278,000 to 813,000.
  The flow of African Americans to Ohio, particularly to Cleveland, changed the demographics of the state and its primary industrial city. Before the Great Migration, an estimated 1.1% to 1.6% of Cleveland's population was African American. By 1920, 4.3% of Cleveland's population was African American. The number of African Americans in Cleveland continued to rise over the next 20 years of the Great Migration.
  Other northeastern and midwestern industrial cities, such as Philadelphia, New York City, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Omaha, also had dramatic increases in their African-American populations. By the 1920s, New York's Harlem became a center of black cultural life, influenced by the American migrants as well as new immigrants from the Caribbean area.
  Second-tier industrial cities that were destinations for numerous black migrants were Buffalo, Rochester, Boston, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Columbus, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids and Indianapolis, and sma
caption: African-American youths play basketball in Chicago's Stateway Gardens high-rise housing project in 1973.
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