Questions to Ask About the Great Migration

Why ask it

The move of about six million Black Americans out of the South to cities in the North, Midwest and West between roughly 1910 and 1970. The part most summaries skip is that nobody organized it: it was millions of separate family decisions, made without a leader or a plan. If the person you ask starts on the Puritan voyages of the 1630s or the wildebeest herds of East Africa, which share the name, say which migration you mean.

Why ask it

The first wave is usually dated from 1910 or 1916 to 1940 and the second from 1940 to 1970, with the Depression slowing the flow in between. The second was the larger of the two and reached the West Coast, which the first had barely touched. Both 1916 and 1940 fall just before the United States entered a world war, with Northern plants already short of hands, and a student who knows that can explain the two surges.

Why ask it

Textbooks list these as the push factors: Jim Crow law, the threat of lynching, sharecropping debt that never cleared, country schools that shut for planting and picking, and no vote. Ask which of those one family could have named as its own reason, because people left over a particular insult or a particular danger and not over a list.

Why ask it

The pull factors were factory wages far above anything field work paid, schools that ran a full year, a ballot, and a relative already there with a spare bed. The pull grew stronger when the First World War cut off immigration from Europe and Northern employers started recruiting in the South. Have students sort the pulls into promises that held up and promises that did not.

Why ask it

Roughly six million over six decades, a number that means more as a share: about nine in ten Black Americans lived in the South in 1910, and by 1970 it was closer to half. Put those two fractions on the board before anyone talks about music or politics, since the rest follows from that shift. Census tables for a single city, decade by decade, show it better than any national total.

Why ask it

A family farmed someone else's land for a share of the crop, bought seed and food on credit at the landowner's store, and heard at settlement time that it had come out behind again. The landowner kept the books, and disputing them was dangerous. A student who can describe settlement day can explain why some families left after dark.

Why ask it

The weevil wrecked cotton crops across the South in the 1910s and 1920s, and the flood drove hundreds of thousands of people from their homes along the river, so there was less work to stay for. Both are a useful check on an answer that makes the migration purely about wages or purely about racism. For an essay, weigh the two against Jim Crow in one named state.

Why ask it

Through letters from relatives, visitors home in city clothes, labor agents, and the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper that Pullman porters carried south and that was read aloud in barbershops and churches. The Defender printed job notices and urged its readers to come. Letters written by migrants in those years have been published, and reading two or three aloud is one of the better ways to open a class.

Why ask it

Often the young, the single and people with a trade or a little schooling went ahead, then sent for the others once there was a room and a job. That corrects the picture of whole families boarding one train together. Staying was a decision too, made for land, for aging parents, for a church, or out of a refusal to be run off.

Why ask it

Some towns charged labor agents ruinous license fees, police pulled travelers off station platforms and held them for vagrancy, and in places the Defender was confiscated. The effort shows how much the Southern economy rested on the people who were leaving. The follow-up is why so few employers tried better pay and fairer treatment first.

Why ask it

Some historians call it a vote cast with the feet by people who were allowed no other. Others note that most migrants explained themselves in practical terms: a job, a school, a night's sleep without fear. It works as a debate because both sides can quote the migrants' own letters.

Why ask it

Mostly by train, later by bus and car, and a ticket could mean months of saving or the sale of a mule, the tools and the furniture. Many families could raise one fare at a time and went in stages, sometimes with a few years in a Southern city such as Memphis or Birmingham on the way. Asking what would have had to be sold shows how final the decision was.

Why ask it

The railroad lines decided it. The Illinois Central ran from the Delta to Chicago, the lines up the Atlantic coast carried people from Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas to Washington, Philadelphia and New York, and in the 1940s families from Texas and Louisiana followed the rails and highways to California. Have each student trace one line on a map, and who lives where today starts to make sense.

Why ask it

Black passengers were put in a separate car, commonly the one nearest the engine with its smoke and cinders, and could not count on being served in the diner. That is where the shoebox lunch of fried chicken, boiled eggs and pound cake in so many family stories comes from. With a relative, ask what was in the box and who packed it.

Why ask it

On many routes the rule lapsed at a known point, such as the Ohio River or Washington, D.C., and passengers were free to take any seat. Memoirs describe everything from quiet relief to disbelief, and some people stayed put out of habit. It makes a good writing prompt: what would you have done when the train crossed?

Why ask it

A sharecropper said to owe money could be stopped from going, and a man who had crossed a white employer might have a day's head start at best. So families sold nothing, told no one, and bought tickets at a station a few towns down the line. It is the reason some family stories have no farewell in them.

Why ask it

From 1936 the Negro Motorist Green Book listed hotels, restaurants and service stations that would serve Black travelers, and word of mouth covered what it missed. Many families simply drove through the night with their own food and bedding in the car. Libraries have digitized many editions, so a class can look up what was listed for its own town.

Why ask it

Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and St. Louis in the first wave, joined by Los Angeles, Oakland and Seattle in the second. In each, newcomers were steered into a few districts: Harlem, the South Side of Chicago, Black Bottom in Detroit, the Hill in Pittsburgh. Find out what the district in your nearest city was called and what stands there now.

Why ask it

Usually a cousin or someone from the same county, and behind them the churches and the Urban League, whose workers met trains in some cities. People from one Southern town often filled one block or one congregation, and some formed hometown clubs. For a family interview the follow-up is the name of whoever was waiting on the platform.

Why ask it

With help and with embarrassment. Longtime residents ran the churches and aid societies that took people in, and some also feared that country manners would cost them the footing they had won, which is why the Defender and the Urban League printed advice on dress and behavior. The question lets a group talk about class inside a community that outsiders treated as one thing.

Why ask it

Often with resistance at the edges: neighborhood associations, bombs thrown at houses bought across the line, police who looked away. In the summer of 1919 violence broke out in dozens of cities and towns, and in Chicago it began after Eugene Williams, a Black teenager, drifted toward a white beach and drowned when a man threw stones at him. Point out that this was the North, with no segregation statute on the books.

Why ask it

Delivered: a pay envelope, a ballot, a high school, and no more stepping off the sidewalk. Fell short: where a family could live, which jobs it could hold, and how the police dealt with it. Have the group fill two columns, and distrust any answer that fills only one.

Why ask it

Cooking, ways of talking, the habit of sitting out on the front steps of an evening, and a way of worshipping. Migrants who found the big Northern congregations too formal opened storefront churches run the way the church at home had been. Each person in the room can try to name one thing in their own city that came up from the South.

Why ask it

It came later, drew mostly on Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma, and was tied to shipyards and aircraft plants during the Second World War. The Black populations of Oakland, Richmond and Los Angeles multiplied within a few years, and housing ran out even faster than it had in the older destinations. Anyone who answers only about Chicago and Harlem has covered half the map.

Why ask it

Men were hired into stockyards, steel mills, foundries, auto plants and rail yards, as a rule in the hottest, dirtiest and lowest-paid departments, and until the 1940s most women worked in domestic service or laundries. Skilled trades, sales counters and offices were largely shut. Answer it for one industry in one city, since what was true of Detroit was not true of Philadelphia.

Why ask it

The pay looked enormous from a cotton field, and the difference was real. So were Northern rent, coal, carfare and groceries, none of which a farm family had paid for in the same way. Set one wage beside one rent from the same city and year before deciding how much better off a household was.

Why ask it

Many craft unions barred Black members outright, and employers took advantage by hiring Black workers during strikes, which deepened the bitterness on both sides. The picture shifted in the 1930s, when industrial unions began organizing whole plants regardless of race and A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters won a contract from the Pullman Company. A fair answer finds more than one party at fault.

Why ask it

Most worked in other people's kitchens and nurseries, often hired by the day, because factory doors opened to them late and tended to close again when a war ended. Many came alone, ahead of a husband or children, and mailed money home. In a family interview, find out who minded the children while she worked.

Why ask it

Each war produced a labor shortage that opened jobs once reserved for white workers. In 1941, with Randolph threatening to bring a mass march to Washington, President Roosevelt signed an order against discrimination in defense plants. The harder half of the question is what became of those jobs when the soldiers came home.

Why ask it

They were confined to a few districts while the number of people in them kept rising, so a landlord could cut an apartment into one-room kitchenettes and name the price. A family with the money to move still could not rent or buy past the boundary. Once a student sees it as a captive market, the rest of the housing story falls into place.

Why ask it

A covenant was a clause in a deed forbidding sale or rental to Black buyers, and in 1948 the Supreme Court held that courts could not enforce one. Redlining is the name for lenders and federal housing agencies rating Black and mixed neighborhoods as poor risks, which made mortgages there hard to get. Old lending maps and deeds for many cities are public, so look at your own city's before discussing either in the abstract.

Why ask it

Sometimes nothing, and sometimes a crowd on the lawn. In Detroit in 1925 Dr. Ossian Sweet stood trial for murder after shots from his new house killed a man in the mob outside, and Lorraine Hansberry drew on her own family's Chicago court fight for A Raisin in the Sun. Reading the play alongside this question suits a class or a book group.

Why ask it

Many were cut through or cleared in the 1950s and 1960s for expressways and urban renewal, Black Bottom in Detroit and much of Pittsburgh's Hill District among them. Others emptied as the plants that had drawn people closed or moved away. An older resident can often tell you what stood where the interchange is now, and that is worth an afternoon.

Why ask it

Jazz traveled from New Orleans to Chicago and New York, the blues went electric, and gospel, rhythm and blues and Motown all grew up in migrant neighborhoods. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s took place in a district the migration had filled. Have each person bring one song, poem or painting and say where its maker's family came from.

Why ask it

Lawrence, the son of migrants, painted sixty small panels in 1940 and 1941 from library research and from what he had heard growing up in Harlem. The pictures are flat and spare, and the captions carry the facts. Hand each student one panel to describe before reading its caption, then compare the two.

Why ask it

Isabel Wilkerson chose Ida Mae Gladney, who went from Mississippi to Chicago in the 1930s, George Starling, Florida to Harlem in the 1940s, and Robert Foster, Louisiana to Los Angeles in the 1950s, so between them they cover the main routes and three decades. A book group can argue over which of the three got the most of what they left for. People seldom agree, and the disagreement is the discussion.

Why ask it

People who could not vote in Mississippi could vote in Illinois, and in 1928 the South Side of Chicago sent Oscar De Priest to Congress, the first Black member elected from a Northern state. As those voters grew in number, both parties had to bargain for them. That is the thread from a train ticket bought in 1920 to a civil rights bill in the 1960s.

Why ask it

It lost field hands, church members, teachers, customers and, in time, some of its grip on the people who remained. Some planters raised pay, others turned to machines, and from the late 1940s the mechanical cotton picker began removing much of the work that had held families on the land. Historians still argue over whether the machine pushed people out or replaced those already gone, so let a class argue it too.

Why ask it

Northern Black voters, newspapers, congregations and union locals supplied money, lawyers, publicity and pressure on Congress. The two regions stayed tied by family: Emmett Till's mother had been carried north from Mississippi as a small child, and in 1955 she put her son on a train to spend part of the summer with her relatives there. A strong answer connects North and South through kin and not only through leaders.

Why ask it

There is no single answer, which is why it suits a seminar. Migrants generally earned more and gained the vote and longer schooling, while their children and grandchildren met the loss of factory work and neighborhoods starved of investment. Make anyone who answers say which generation and which decade they are talking about.

Why ask it

Alike: relatives sending for relatives, hometown clubs, the worst jobs first, children who lost the old accent. Different: these were citizens moving inside their own country, and they could not fade into the white majority after a generation as European immigrants did. Wilkerson likens them to people seeking political asylum, a comparison a group can test against the reasons migrants gave.

Why ask it

The civil rights laws had taken apart the legal order people had fled, Southern cities were growing, and Northern factory jobs were disappearing. Since the 1970s the net flow of Black Americans has run toward the South. Students can rank the three reasons and say what evidence would change the ranking.

Why ask it

For decades now Black Americans, many of them grandchildren of migrants, have been moving to Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Charlotte and smaller Southern places. The reasons they give include jobs, cheaper houses, family land, retirement and a feeling of home. If someone in your family has made that move, set their reasons beside the reasons their grandparents left.

Why ask it

It had no leader, no single date and no monument, and the people who lived it often said little about what they had left behind. Many children of migrants report learning the story late, or piecing it together from a place name and a recipe. Go around the room and have everyone say where they first heard of it, and whether that was in school.

Why ask it

In a Northern or Western city, look at church cornerstones, the founding year of a Black newspaper or high school, a hometown club, a row of Southern restaurants. In a Southern town look for the opposite: the congregation that shrank, the farm that was sold. Nobody can answer this one from a textbook, so start in the local history room of the public library.

Why ask it

A family recording outlives the project it was made for, so settle at the start who keeps it, and name relatives in two different households. Say whether a teacher or an archive will hear it as well. If one will, ask that institution which consent form it uses before the day, because each has its own.

Why ask it

You are after a name and a rough date, even if the date is only 'before the war' or 'the year the baby came'. With a name and a decade you can look for the person in the census on both sides of the move. When your relative is unsure, the useful follow-up is who else would know.

Why ask it

Get the county as well as the town, and the spelling, since small places share names and some have dropped off the map. Then ask whose land they worked, what was grown and which church they belonged to. Most Southern records are filed by county, so this one answer decides where you search.

Why ask it

Families often keep an official version, such as better work, and a second that surfaced decades later: a threat, a beating, a debt, something done to a relative. Do not push for the second. Leave a pause, then write down exactly what is offered and who it came from.

Why ask it

The answer is nearly always a person: a brother, an aunt, a neighbor from the home church. That person is the link in the chain, and others from the same county very likely came up behind them. Ask what became of them, and whether their descendants are still in touch.

Why ask it

Children were often left with a grandmother for a year or more while the parents got settled, and that separation can still be tender. Put the question to the oldest sibling if you can. The order of arrival also explains gaps that will puzzle you later in school and census records.

Why ask it

Listen for the station, the time of day, what was carried and what was eaten on the way. Someone who was a child then may give you what the adults forgot: the dark outside the window, being told to hush. One small detail, such as a cardboard suitcase tied shut with rope, is what a later reader will hold on to.

Why ask it

Newcomers commonly boarded with kin or rented one room of somebody else's flat, so the first address may be under another surname. Get the street, the nearest cross street and the church they walked to. A city directory or a census page can then show you who the neighbors were.

Why ask it

Ask for the employer's name and the department as well as the trade. How the job was found matters just as much: a foreman from the same county, a deacon, a line at the plant gate before dawn. If it was your relative's own first job, ask what they did with the first pay envelope.

Why ask it

The good surprises tend to be small and physical: any seat on the streetcar, being called Mr. or Mrs., a school with new books. The bad ones are the cold, the crowding and a color line that nobody had bothered to post a sign for. Get one of each so the story comes out as neither all triumph nor all disappointment.

Why ask it

This suits a reluctant talker and is best asked in the kitchen. Write down the dish, who cooked it and what it was called at home. Words and habits a family thinks of as its own often turn out to belong to one county.

Why ask it

Many Northern children spent summers with grandparents and were coached first on how to address white adults and which places to stay away from. That coaching is how a child raised in Chicago or Newark learned what the parents had left. Ask what they loved about those summers as well, because most of them did.

Why ask it

Every family that moved has a branch that did not. Find out who lives there now, who pays the taxes on any land and who is buried in the home churchyard. Where ownership of property is unclear, take it to a lawyer in that state, since family memory will not settle a title.

Why ask it

A family in Georgia or Mississippi holds the other half of the story: the empty pew, the letter with a money order folded inside, the cousins who drove down every August in a new car. Ask whether the ones who left were envied, resented or missed. You will probably hear all three.

Why ask it

In many Black families a funeral program is the fullest written record there is: a birthplace, the parents' names, the year someone came north, a list of survivors. Ask to photograph and never to borrow. Find out who keeps the collection now and who is meant to have it next.

Why ask it

Keep it for the end. People weigh it against particular things: the house their parents were finally able to buy, the cousin who stayed and kept the land, forty winters. Ask what the yes is made of and what the no is made of, then whether their own parents would have answered the same way.