The Great Migration
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50 free The Great Migration trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Between 1910 and 1970, Black families left the rural South in numbers that redrew the map of the United States. They went by train to the factory cities of the Northeast and Midwest, and later to the shipyards of the West Coast, trading tenant farms and segregation for wages, votes and an uncertain welcome. This quiz follows that journey from start to finish: what pushed people out and what pulled them north, the recruiters, railroads and editors who helped them go, the neighborhoods they built, the riots and housing barriers they met, and the blues, jazz, painting and literature that grew out of the move. It also covers the later return south. It is written for students revising American history, teachers who want a ready-made classroom round, and anyone whose own family story runs through the migration. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Black newspaper urged southern readers to head north, printing job listings and train schedules to help?
The Chicago Defender
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.
Q 02Which Olympic champion's family left Alabama for Cleveland when he was nine, part of the Great Migration north?
Jesse Owens
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.
Q 03Which cotton-eating insect spread from Mexico across the South, wrecking harvests and pushing farm families north?
The boll weevil
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.
Q 04Which record label did Berry Gordy found in Detroit, where his parents had moved from Georgia in the Great Migration?
Motown
Motown began with a migrant family's savings: Berry Gordy borrowed $800 from a cooperative fund his relatives paid into.
Q 05Which New Orleans trumpeter went north to Chicago in 1922 to join his mentor King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band?
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong made enough playing second cornet at the Lincoln Gardens on the South Side to quit his day jobs.
Q 06Which Chicago teenager, the son of a Mississippi migrant, was murdered in 1955 while visiting relatives in the Delta?
Emmett Till
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.
Q 07Which 1920s flowering of Black writing, music and art was fueled by Great Migration newcomers and Caribbean immigrants?
The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was known in its own day as the New Negro Movement, after a 1925 anthology edited by the philosopher Alain Locke.
Q 08Which Delta bluesman left a Mississippi plantation for Chicago in 1943 and went electric to be heard in noisy clubs?
Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters is often called the father of modern Chicago blues, and the Rolling Stones took their name from one of his 1950 hits.
Q 09Which future heavyweight champion's family fled Alabama for Detroit in 1926 after a run-in with the Ku Klux Klan?
Joe Louis
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.
Q 10Which name is given to the southern segregation laws, enforced into the 1960s, that Great Migration families fled?
Jim Crow
Jim Crow probably took its name from an old minstrel-show song and dance, a label that long outlived the act it came from.
Q 11Which farming system kept many Black southern families in debt to landowners until farm machines displaced it?
Sharecropping
Sharecropping left a family owing a merchant for seed and supplies, so a poor harvest meant starting the next year already in debt.
Q 12Which conflict cut off the flow of European immigrant labor and opened northern factory jobs to Black southern workers?
World War I
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.
Q 13Which Pulitzer-winning journalist interviewed more than a thousand migrants for a 2010 history of the Great Migration?
Isabel Wilkerson
Q 21Which South Side neighborhood, nicknamed the Black Metropolis, became the historic center of Chicago's Black culture?
Bronzeville
Bronzeville took its name from the brown skin of the Black Chicagoans who lived there, a label suggested by a local theater editor.
Q 22Which velvet-voiced singer moved from Montgomery, Alabama, to Chicago at four, where his father was a Baptist minister?
Nat King Cole
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.
Q 23Which Texas-born manicurist moved to Chicago in 1915, then sailed to France to earn her pilot's license?
Bessie Coleman
Isabel Wilkerson spent fifteen years on The Warmth of Other Suns, telling the story through three people who fled the South eight years apart.
Q 14Which railroad workers secretly carried a northern Black newspaper to southern readers, sometimes defying state laws?
Pullman porters
Pullman porters were almost all Black until the 1960s, and their steady wages are widely credited with helping build a Black middle class.
Q 15Which name did writer James Weldon Johnson coin for the anti-Black mob violence that swept American cities in 1919?
Red Summer
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.
Q 16Which painter, aged 23, told the Great Migration story in sixty small captioned panels now split between two museums?
Jacob Lawrence
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.
Q 17Which southern metro area's Black population passed two million by 2020 as families reversed the Great Migration?
Atlanta
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.
Q 18Which Mississippi-born novelist moved to Chicago in 1927 and wrote the lines that titled The Warmth of Other Suns?
Richard Wright
Richard Wright found work in Chicago as a postal clerk, a job he later mined for autobiographical scenes in his first novel.
Q 19Which lending practice labelled Black neighborhoods too risky for home loans, hemming Great Migration families in?
Redlining
Redlining got its name in 1960s Chicago, where sociologist John McKnight used it for banks that classed whole neighborhoods as hazardous.
Q 20Which Chicago industry, exposed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, hired Black southern workers in the Great Migration?
Meatpacking
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.
Bessie Coleman went abroad because no American flying school would train a Black woman, and a Chicago newspaper publisher urged her to try France.
Q 24Which church music did Georgia-born blues pianist Thomas A. Dorsey popularize after moving north to Chicago?
Gospel
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.
Q 25At which kind of place did a Black teenager who strayed across an unmarked color line spark Chicago's 1919 race riot?
A beach
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.
Q 26Which biblical phrase did a Black weekly use for the North, later the title of Nicholas Lemann's migration history?
The Promised Land
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.
Q 27Which western city's Central Avenue became a jazz hub as Black migrants arrived from Texas and Louisiana in the 1940s?
Los Angeles
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.
Q 28Which playwright wrote The Piano Lesson, in which a brother comes up from Mississippi to Pittsburgh to sell an heirloom?
August Wilson
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.
Q 29Which event briefly cut the northward flow of Black southerners by wiping out factory jobs across the industrial belt?
The Great Depression
The Great Depression hit Black industrial workers especially hard, and the exodus only revived with the defense buildup of the 1940s.
Q 30Which labor leader's threat of a march on the capital in 1941 pushed Roosevelt to open defense jobs to Black workers?
A. Philip Randolph
A. Philip Randolph had threatened to bring 50,000 marchers, and Executive Order 8802 banned discrimination in the defense industries instead.