1862-1865
When slavery ended about 5% of America's 4 million African Americans lived in the North.

1900
Only about 10% of all African Americans lived in the North.

1900-1930
As a result of economic pressures/problems in southern agriculture, increased racial tensions in the South, and new job opportunities in the North as the region industrialized, southern blacks began to move to the North in increasing numbers -- the so-called Great Migration.
[Library of Congress exhibit "Chicago: Destination for the Great Migration."]

1930-1940
Migration slowed during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
[Photographs of Chicago's African American community from the Great Depression to World War II in the Library of Congress American Memory Project]

1941-1965
Job opportunities in the North during and after WWII, in combination with the development of the mechanical cotton picker (and other machinery), which drastically reduced the demand for black agricultural labor in the South, led to a second huge migratory wave of black southerners into the North -- the so-called Second Great Migration.

1966-1970
Fully 50% of the 24 million African Americans in the US lived outside of the South, mostly in the large cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and California.


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Last revised: August 4, 1999