50 Fun Facts About The Great Migration

Which Black newspaper urged southern readers to head north, printing job listings and train schedules to help?

The Chicago Defender even named a departure day: it advertised May 15, 1917 as the Great Northern Drive, a date for readers to leave together.

Which Olympic champion's family left Alabama for Cleveland when he was nine, part of the Great Migration north?

Jesse Owens got his famous name there: a Cleveland teacher misheard his Southern accent when he said J.C., his initials, and the name stuck.

Which cotton-eating insect spread from Mexico across the South, wrecking harvests and pushing farm families north?

The boll weevil did such damage that Enterprise, Alabama, raised a monument to it in 1919 for forcing the town to stop relying on cotton.

Which record label did Berry Gordy found in Detroit, where his parents had moved from Georgia in the Great Migration?

Motown began with a migrant family's savings: Berry Gordy borrowed $800 from a cooperative fund his relatives paid into.

Which New Orleans trumpeter went north to Chicago in 1922 to join his mentor King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band?

Louis Armstrong made enough playing second cornet at the Lincoln Gardens on the South Side to quit his day jobs.

Which Chicago teenager, the son of a Mississippi migrant, was murdered in 1955 while visiting relatives in the Delta?

Emmett Till's mother had left Mississippi at two for Argo, a town near Chicago so full of southern migrants that it was nicknamed Little Mississippi.

Which 1920s flowering of Black writing, music and art was fueled by Great Migration newcomers and Caribbean immigrants?

The Harlem Renaissance was known in its own day as the New Negro Movement, after a 1925 anthology edited by the philosopher Alain Locke.

Which Delta bluesman left a Mississippi plantation for Chicago in 1943 and went electric to be heard in noisy clubs?

Muddy Waters is often called the father of modern Chicago blues, and the Rolling Stones took their name from one of his 1950 hits.

Which future heavyweight champion's family fled Alabama for Detroit in 1926 after a run-in with the Ku Klux Klan?

Joe Louis took a classic migrant's job along the way: like his brother he worked for Ford, spending a time at the River Rouge Plant.

Which name is given to the southern segregation laws, enforced into the 1960s, that Great Migration families fled?

Jim Crow probably took its name from an old minstrel-show song and dance, a label that long outlived the act it came from.

Which farming system kept many Black southern families in debt to landowners until farm machines displaced it?

Sharecropping left a family owing a merchant for seed and supplies, so a poor harvest meant starting the next year already in debt.

Which conflict cut off the flow of European immigrant labor and opened northern factory jobs to Black southern workers?

World War I cut arrivals from Europe from about 1.2 million in 1914 to 300,000 the next year, just as factories were losing men to the army.

Which Pulitzer-winning journalist interviewed more than a thousand migrants for a 2010 history of the Great Migration?

Isabel Wilkerson spent fifteen years on The Warmth of Other Suns, telling the story through three people who fled the South eight years apart.

Which railroad workers secretly carried a northern Black newspaper to southern readers, sometimes defying state laws?

Pullman porters were almost all Black until the 1960s, and their steady wages are widely credited with helping build a Black middle class.

Which name did writer James Weldon Johnson coin for the anti-Black mob violence that swept American cities in 1919?

Red Summer brought white mob attacks to more than three dozen cities and one rural Arkansas county in the months after the troops came home.

Which painter, aged 23, told the Great Migration story in sixty small captioned panels now split between two museums?

Jacob Lawrence knew the story from home: his mother was born in Virginia and his father in South Carolina before the family settled in the North.

Which southern metro area's Black population passed two million by 2020 as families reversed the Great Migration?

Atlanta's Black population more than doubled between 1990 and 2020, part of a return movement to the South known as the New Great Migration.

Which Mississippi-born novelist moved to Chicago in 1927 and wrote the lines that titled The Warmth of Other Suns?

Richard Wright found work in Chicago as a postal clerk, a job he later mined for autobiographical scenes in his first novel.

Which lending practice labelled Black neighborhoods too risky for home loans, hemming Great Migration families in?

Redlining got its name in 1960s Chicago, where sociologist John McKnight used it for banks that classed whole neighborhoods as hazardous.

Which Chicago industry, exposed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, hired Black southern workers in the Great Migration?

Meatpacking and the railroads both went looking for Black workers, and most of Chicago's migrants came up from Mississippi and Louisiana to take the jobs.

Which South Side neighborhood, nicknamed the Black Metropolis, became the historic center of Chicago's Black culture?

Bronzeville took its name from the brown skin of the Black Chicagoans who lived there, a label suggested by a local theater editor.

Which velvet-voiced singer moved from Montgomery, Alabama, to Chicago at four, where his father was a Baptist minister?

Nat King Cole learned the organ from his mother, the church organist, and as a boy played in a Chicago newspaper's band for its delivery boys.

Which Texas-born manicurist moved to Chicago in 1915, then sailed to France to earn her pilot's license?

Bessie Coleman went abroad because no American flying school would train a Black woman, and a Chicago newspaper publisher urged her to try France.

Which church music did Georgia-born blues pianist Thomas A. Dorsey popularize after moving north to Chicago?

Gospel took its swing from his blues past: at Chicago's Pilgrim Baptist Church he encouraged clapping, stomping and shouting that many churches then condemned.

At which kind of place did a Black teenager who strayed across an unmarked color line spark Chicago's 1919 race riot?

A beach on Lake Michigan was informally split by race, and 17-year-old Eugene Williams drowned after a white man threw stones at his drifting raft.

Which biblical phrase did a Black weekly use for the North, later the title of Nicholas Lemann's migration history?

The Promised Land suited migrants who often spoke of the journey in biblical terms, and who formed clubs to pool money for group tickets north.

Which western city's Central Avenue became a jazz hub as Black migrants arrived from Texas and Louisiana in the 1940s?

Los Angeles drew tens of thousands of wartime migrants to its factories, and Central Avenue remained the heart of Black life there until about 1955.

Which playwright wrote The Piano Lesson, in which a brother comes up from Mississippi to Pittsburgh to sell an heirloom?

August Wilson traced his own roots to the migration: by family lore his grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life.

Which event briefly cut the northward flow of Black southerners by wiping out factory jobs across the industrial belt?

The Great Depression hit Black industrial workers especially hard, and the exodus only revived with the defense buildup of the 1940s.

Which labor leader's threat of a march on the capital in 1941 pushed Roosevelt to open defense jobs to Black workers?

A. Philip Randolph had threatened to bring 50,000 marchers, and Executive Order 8802 banned discrimination in the defense industries instead.

Which Georgia-born publisher started a Black weekly in 1905 on 25 cents and became one of the first Black millionaires?

Robert S. Abbott had trained as a printer and earned a law degree before turning to news, and his business grew as Black southerners moved to the cities.

Which name was given to the Black southerners who headed for Kansas in 1879, decades before the Great Migration?

Exodusters numbered as many as 40,000 settlers in Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado, and the U.S. Senate ordered an investigation into why they had left.

Which civil rights group, founded in 1909, led a silent march down Fifth Avenue in 1917 to protest anti-Black riots?

The NAACP put several hundred children at the head of the march, followed by thousands of women dressed in white, then the men.

Which Chicago label, run by two Polish-born brothers, recorded Mississippi migrants like Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon?

Chess Records worked from 2120 South Michigan Avenue, a studio the Rolling Stones recorded in during their first American tour in 1964.

Which poet, brought from Kansas to Chicago at six weeks old, became the first Black American to win a Pulitzer Prize?

Gwendolyn Brooks won in 1950 for Annie Allen, a book of poems about a Black girl growing into womanhood on Chicago's South Side.

Which musician's 1973 hit Living for the City follows a young man from Mississippi to arrest and prison in New York?

Stevie Wonder staged the bus ride north in the middle of the song as a spoken scene, with street sounds and dialogue in place of music.

Which term names the move of longtime city residents to the suburbs as Black southern migrants arrived in the 1950s?

White flight drew middle-class families out of Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City and Oakland, and the phrase itself caught on in the 1950s and 1960s.

Which farm machine, used to harvest a whole Mississippi plantation crop in 1944, could replace dozens of field hands?

The cotton picker took over the hand labor that had kept tenant families on the land, and many landless Black farmers were forced off it.

Which 1948 Supreme Court ruling stopped courts enforcing deed clauses that kept Black buyers out of white neighborhoods?

Shelley v. Kraemer began in Missouri, where a Black family bought a home unaware that a racial covenant had been attached to the property since 1911.

Which nickname describes the parallel exodus of poor white Appalachians to northern factory cities from the 1940s?

Hillbilly Highway migrants settled in tight enclaves of their own, and Chicago's Uptown was nicknamed Hillbilly Heaven in the 1960s.

Which railroad, sung about in the folk song City of New Orleans, carried Mississippi migrants north to the Great Lakes?

The Illinois Central crisscrossed Mississippi on its main line from New Orleans to Chicago, giving the state's migrants a direct ride north.

Which magazine did John H. Johnson launch in Chicago in 1945, after his family left Arkansas in the Great Migration?

Ebony's founder had arrived from Arkansas City in the early 1930s, and his publishing company later added a sister title, Jet.

Which Alabama-born Chicago alderman became, in 1928, the first Black congressman ever elected from outside the South?

Oscar De Priest's own family had left Alabama for Kansas in 1878, and during his three terms he was the only Black member of Congress.

Which name was given to the cramped apartments landlords carved from larger homes in Chicago's Black neighborhoods?

Kitchenettes let a landlord split one family home or large apartment into many small units, each rented to a separate family.

Which term describes newcomers following relatives and neighbors who had already settled in the same northern city?

Chain migration shows up in the numbers: one study found each Black southerner who moved from a town drew about 1.9 more people to the same destination.

Which industrialist's wartime shipyards drew thousands of Black workers to Vanport, once Oregon's second-largest city?

Henry J. Kaiser's workers filled Vanport with 40,000 people at its wartime peak, about 6,000 of them Black, until a flood destroyed the town in 1948.

About how many Black Americans left the South in the Great Migration, cutting its share of them from 90% to about half?

Some 6,000,000 people left in all, and historians split the movement into a first wave before 1940 and a much larger second wave that began with the 1940s defense boom.

Which name, coined in the 1960s, covers the southern cooking that Great Migration families carried to northern cities?

Soul food reminded migrants of the home and family they had left behind, even as some established northerners looked down on it as low-class.

Which 1959 play follows the Youngers, a Black Chicago family who buy a home in a white area with insurance money?

A Raisin in the Sun echoes its author's childhood: her father bought a house in a white part of Chicago's South Side and was taken to court over it.

Which future baseball star was born to Georgia farmhands and taken west to Pasadena, California, as a baby in 1920?

Jackie Robinson grew up in Pasadena and became a four-sport athlete at UCLA, where he was better known for football than for baseball.