The Great Migration: Crash Course Black American History #24

Summary

The Great Migration occurred in two broad waves, from about 1910–1940 and 1940–1970. Black Americans left the Jim Crow South for Northern and Western cities, as well as urban areas elsewhere in the South, seeking better jobs, greater economic opportunity, and safety from racial violence.

The movement was substantial. In 1910, about 90% of Black Americans lived in the South. By 1940, roughly 1.5 million had left, and the Southern share had fallen to 77%. By 1970, it was 52%. Major destinations included Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, New York City, and Los Angeles.

Causes of the migration

The migration was driven by forces that pushed people out of the South and pulled them toward other regions:

• Sharecropping and debt: After slavery, many Black people and poor white people worked land owned by others under sharecropping arrangements. Landowners supplied land, housing, seeds, animals, and tools on credit, then took a portion of the harvest. High interest, unreliable harvests, and unfair agreements often trapped workers in debt. Some laws prevented indebted sharecroppers from leaving, and landowners could have them jailed for debt. Even Black farmers who owned land faced declining profitability from factors such as bad weather and boll-weevil infestations.
• Jobs elsewhere: Stories circulated about better-paying work in industries such as automobiles, meatpacking, steel, and iron. The video contrasts Southern wages of about 75 cents a day with the possibility of earning up to five dollars a day in the North.
• Racism and violence: Jim Crow laws enforced segregation and restricted access to public resources. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and property requirements undermined Black voting rights. White-supremacist groups and other white people used harassment, beatings, and lynching. Black communities were also attacked, including in the Wilmington and Atlanta riots.

Information networks and life after leaving

Information networks helped people decide to leave. Newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, along with church groups, benevolent societies, and Black Pullman porters, shared accounts of life and opportunity in other cities.

Leaving did not guarantee an easy life. Migrants still faced poverty, segregation, and racism in Northern and Western cities. Black churches and other organizations formed benevolent societies to help newcomers and their families adjust.

Many white Southerners depended on Black labor and resisted the exodus. Some raised wages, while others tried to discourage migration by promoting negative stories about Northern life, blocking trains and buses, or intimidating and beating people who tried to leave.

Legacy and interpretation

The video presents the Great Migration as a complicated story of both hardship and agency. Although migrants left painful homes and did not find a racism-free life elsewhere, many gained opportunities and helped create major centers of Black urban culture. The migration is framed not only as a response to oppression, but also as Black Americans asserting control over their lives and shaping their own futures.

Quoting Isabel Wilkerson, the episode emphasizes that the central question may be how migrants found the courage to leave and persevere—not simply whether they improved the cities they moved to. Wilkerson describes them as making the American dream real on their own terms.

Speakers and sources featured

• Clint Smith — host and narrator.
• Thought Bubble — animated explainer segment describing how sharecropping worked.
• Isabel Wilkerson — quoted from The Warmth of Other Suns.