The Great Migration: The Journey of Black Americans

Map adapted from the Pathstone Antiracist Curriculum Project by mapmaker, Blair Tinker

Growing up, I always had questions.

“Mommom, how did you end up in New Jersey?”

I often asked my grandmother why she left Little Rock, and why she chose New Jersey of all places. Each time she gave me a different answer. Sometimes she would say, “I came to be a model in New York City,” and other times, “I followed my oldest sister.” And somehow, those answers were always enough to satisfy my curiosity. Until I got older, I never questioned why her oldest sister moved the 1,145 miles in the mid 1940s. At the time, it simply felt like a family story.

But the truth is, stories like my grandmother’s were not unusual.

In fact, they were part of one of the largest movements of people in American history.

Between 1916 and 1970, more than six million Black Americans left the rural South and moved to cities across the North, Midwest, and West in what became known as the Great Migration.

The Great Migration was one of the most significant population movements in United States

From left to right, as originally identified on the front page of the Chicago Defender on September 4, 1920: Cora D. Arthur, Andrew Arthur, Scott Arthur, Millie Arthur, Earlie Lee Hill (grandson), Mrs. Violet Arthur, Eulah Arthur, and Mary Arthur.

history. Between approximately 1916 and 1970, more than six million Black Americans left the rural South and relocated to cities across the North, Midwest, and West. This migration reshaped American cities, culture, politics, and community life.

Following the Civil War, many Black families remained in the South under systems that continued to limit their freedom and economic opportunity. Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation, and racial violence, including lynching, was widespread throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many Black Southerners worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers, systems that often trapped families in cycles of debt, poverty, and legalized enslavement.

By the early twentieth century, several factors began to push and pull Black families northward. Southern conditions created powerful pressures to leave, while northern cities offered industrial jobs, particularly during World War I, when factories faced labor shortages. Recruiters from northern industries often traveled south to recruit Black workers for jobs in steel mills, railroads, and factories. Cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, Cleveland, and Philadelphia became major destinations. Philadelphia in particular attracted many migrants from Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, forming new neighborhoods and communities shaped by southern cultural traditions.

The Great Migration was not simply a movement of labor. It was also a movement of culture.

Families carried with them traditions that had been preserved through generations of storytelling, spiritual practices, music, and folklore. These traditions helped shape the cultural landscape of the cities where migrants settled. Blues music, for example, evolved as southern musicians moved north, influencing the development of jazz, rhythm and blues, and other musical forms. The migration also helped fuel major cultural movements, including the Harlem Renaissance, which brought Black literature, art, and intellectual thought into national prominence during the 1920s. Writers, artists, and scholars used their work to explore identity, migration, and the changing experiences of Black life in America.

Despite these cultural achievements, Black transplants still faced significant challenges in northern cities. Housing discrimination (red lining), employment barriers, and segregated neighborhoods limited many opportunities. Yet communities continued to build churches, civic organizations, businesses, and cultural institutions that strengthened Black urban life.

By the time the Great Migration slowed in the 1970s, the movement had permanently transformed the United States. Cities that once had small Black populations became centers of Black culture, political activism, and artistic expression.

Today, the legacy of the Great Migration can still be seen in the traditions, stories, and cultural practices carried by families across generations. Many of these traditions were preserved not in books, but in memory. They were passed through conversations, music, spiritual practices, and folklore that traveled with migrants as they moved north.

Understanding the Great Migration helps explain why southern traditions and cultural knowledge can still be found in northern cities such as Philadelphia and Camden today. Migration spread communities across the country, but it also carried history forward through the people who remembered it.

Projects like Hause of Xroads continue this work of remembering. By documenting stories, folklore, artwork, and cultural memory, they help preserve traditions that might otherwise fade with time.

The migration stretched cultural roots across the country, but the stories remain connected.

And at the crossroads of those journeys, the work of remembering continues.

Sources

Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/african-american-odyssey/great-migration/

National Museum of African American History and Culture https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/great-migration

National Archives https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/migrations/great-migration

Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/great-migration/