History of the Great Migration.
Academic Research and Scholarship
Racial Gaps in Career Mobility During the Great Migration
| Dirk Witteveen | Socius | 2025
This article studies whether migration reduced racial gaps in career advancement and how labor markets shaped Black economic mobility.
The Great Migration in Context: The Chicago Experience
| Christopher Robert Reed | Oxford Academic | 2024
This chapter places Chicago’s Great Migration experience in context, emphasizing jobs, politics, housing, recreation, and the creation of a Black industrial working class.
The Causes, Effects and Legacies of the Great Migration in the United States
| Shuqing Chen | Atlantis Press | 2024
This literature review examines the economic, social, and political causes of the Great Migration and connects its legacy to modern racial inequality, urban poverty, and community development.
The Great Migration and Educational Opportunity
| Cavit Baran, Eric Chyn and Bryan Stuart | IZA Institute of Labor Economics | February 2023
This working paper studies how the First Great Migration affected Black children’s schooling, showing that migration could increase educational opportunity depending on destination conditions.
The Great Migration and Healthcare to Black America
| SAGE Journals | The American Surgeon | 2023
This article connects Black migration, health inequities, hospital segregation, and the civil-rights struggle to integrate American medicine.
The Impact of Economic Opportunities on African American Migration Patterns in Oakland
| Fernando Cheung | University of California, Berkeley | April 29, 2022
This thesis examines Black migration to Oakland, including wartime economic opportunity and the city’s role as a West Coast Great Migration destination.
Racial Diversity and Racial Policy Preferences: The Great Migration and Civil Rights
| Anna Maria Mayda, Giovanni Peri and Walter Steingress | CEPR / VoxEU | July 20, 2021
This article summarizes research arguing that Black in-migration to Northern and Western counties increased civil-rights activism and demand for racial equality.
The Great Migration and Civil Rights
| Alvaro Calderon, Vasiliki Fouka and Marco Tabellini | National Bureau of Economic Research | 2021
This paper studies the relationship between the Great Migration and civil-rights politics in Northern and Western communities.
Residential Segregation at the Dawn of the Great Migration
| Hyun Hye Bae | Social Science History | 2021
This article studies the early formation of Black urban ghettos during the first decade of the Great Migration.
The Great Migration of Black Americans from the U.S. South
| William J. Collins | National Bureau of Economic Research | June 2020
This paper reviews the economic history literature on the Great Migration, including migrant selection, timing, labor-market outcomes, and links to civil rights.
Segregated Housing Markets and the Erosion of Black Wealth
| Randall Walsh | CEPR / VoxEU | 2020
This article explains how segregated housing markets in Northern cities reduced the economic gains Black migrants hoped to achieve.
African American Religion and the Great Migration
| Judith Weisenfeld | JSTOR / NYU Press | 2017
This book resource examines how migration transformed Black religious institutions, churches, theology, and community organization in Northern cities.
The Great Migration in Black and White
| William J. Collins and Marianne H. Wanamaker | Journal of Economic History | 2015
This article examines who migrated from the South, comparing Black and white migrants and studying destination choices during the early Great Migration.
Selection and Economic Gains in the Great Migration of African Americans
| William J. Collins and Marianne H. Wanamaker | National Bureau of Economic Research | June 2013
This paper uses linked census data to study the earnings gains of Black men who migrated during the early decades of the Great Migration.
The New Great Migration: Reinventing Race Relations in the Urban South
| Michael S. Leshin | Wesleyan University | 2010
This thesis studies newer Black migration patterns to the South and places them in relation to the earlier Great Migration.
The Politics of Migration in Black Chicago, 1935–1965
| Jeffrey Helgeson | Boston University | 2008
This paper examines the Second Great Migration to Chicago and its effects on housing, politics, segregation, and working-class Black life.
Health, Human Capital, and African American Migration Before 1910
| Trevon D. Logan | National Bureau of Economic Research | 2008
This paper provides background on Black migration before the Great Migration, examining education, health, and the characteristics of early movers.
The Role of the Chicago Defender in the Great Migration
This scholarly article examines how the Chicago Defender encouraged Black Southerners to leave the South and promoted Chicago as a destination.
Urbanization
| Encyclopedia.com | Encyclopedia.com | No date
This article places the Great Migration within urbanization history, showing how Black migration reshaped cities and labor markets.
Migration, Industrialization, and the City
| Encyclopedia.com | Encyclopedia.com | No date
This article explains how the First Great Migration expanded Black neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago and Harlem.
Primary Sources, Archives, and Teaching Resources
Selected Collections: Great Migration, Finding Pictures
| Library of Congress | Library of Congress Research Guides | June 12, 2025
This guide lists major image collections useful for researching the Great Migration and its visual record.
Searching for Images: Great Migration, Finding Pictures
| Library of Congress | Library of Congress Research Guides | June 12, 2025
This guide provides strategies for locating Great Migration images by place, date, event, collection, and subject keywords.
Major Reference Works: Great Migration, Finding Pictures
| Library of Congress | Library of Congress Research Guides | June 12, 2025
This guide points researchers toward reference works, audio documentaries, and background materials on the Great Migration.
Introduction: Great Migration, Finding Pictures
| Library of Congress | Library of Congress Research Guides | June 12, 2025
This research guide helps readers find photographs related to the Great Migration, including images of families, communities, work, travel, and urban life.
The Great Migration in Historical Perspective
| Newberry Library | Digital Collections for the Classroom | July 25, 2024
This essay explains the causes, experiences, city destinations, and long-term consequences of the Great Migration, including both the First and Second Great Migration.
How WWI Changed America: African Americans in WWI
| Facing History & Ourselves | Facing History & Ourselves | January 6, 2022
This article connects World War I, wartime labor shortages, Black military service, and the acceleration of the Great Migration.
The Great Migration and the Power of a Single Decision
| Facing History & Ourselves | Facing History & Ourselves | November 23, 2021
This lesson-style article frames migration as millions of individual family decisions shaped by Jim Crow, labor needs, racial violence, and hope for a different future.
Portal Spotlight: Migrations and the Black Experience
| Netisha Currie | National Archives | June 30, 2021
This National Archives post introduces migration as a central part of Black history and points readers to records about the Great Migration and related movements.
World War I
| National Archives | National Archives | June 28, 2021
This resource places the Great Migration within World War I history, showing how wartime industry, military service, and Black activism reshaped African American life.
The Great Migration 1910–1970
| National Archives | National Archives | June 28, 2021
This overview describes the movement of approximately six million Black people from the South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states between the 1910s and 1970s.
The First Great Migration 1910–1940
| National Archives | National Archives | June 28, 2021
This article focuses on the first wave of the Great Migration, emphasizing World War I labor shortages, industrial recruitment, Jim Crow, lynching, and Northern opportunity.
Racial Violence and the Red Summer
| National Archives | National Archives | June 28, 2021
This article explains the racial violence surrounding the World War I era and shows how migration, labor competition, and white backlash contributed to urban conflict.
Migrations and the Black Experience
| National Archives | National Archives | June 28, 2021
This portal explains how migration shaped Black history, including the Great Migration, the Exodusters, and movements toward jobs, education, safety, and freedom.
Exodusters and Western Expansion
| National Archives | National Archives | June 28, 2021
This article explains the Exoduster migration to Kansas and the Midwest, an earlier Black freedom movement that helps contextualize the Great Migration.
Red Summer 1919: Remembrance, Education, Action
| Facing History & Ourselves | Facing History & Ourselves | August 5, 2019
This article connects racial violence during Red Summer to the Great Migration, showing why many Black Southerners fled racial terror and how Northern cities also produced backlash.
Why MLK Encouraged 225,000 Chicago Kids to Cut Class in 1963
| Facing History & Ourselves | Facing History & Ourselves | February 12, 2019
This article shows how the Great Migration expanded Chicago’s Black population and set the stage for later struggles over segregated schools.
10 Questions for the Past: The 1963 Chicago Public Schools Boycott
| Facing History & Ourselves | Facing History & Ourselves | February 1, 2019
This teaching resource connects Great Migration-era housing discrimination to school segregation and civil rights activism in Chicago.
The Forgotten Girls Who Left the South and Changed History
| Marcia Chatelain | Time | May 2015
This article highlights girls and young women in the Great Migration, using letters and family stories to show how migration reshaped childhood and gender roles.
Isabel Wilkerson: The Warmth of Other Suns and America’s Great Migration
| Facing History & Ourselves | Facing History & Ourselves | February 27, 2014
This resource introduces Isabel Wilkerson’s account of the Great Migration and emphasizes personal stories of courage, loss, and reinvention.
Goin’ to Chicago
| Facing History & Ourselves | Facing History & Ourselves | February 11, 2014
This resource features migrants discussing why they left the South and what they found in Chicago, giving personal testimony about the Great Migration.
The Great Migration in Library of Congress Primary Sources
| Library of Congress | Teaching with the Library | February 12, 2013
This article introduces primary sources for teaching the Great Migration, including photographs, maps, newspapers, and firsthand evidence.
Exodus to Kansas
| National Archives | Prologue Magazine | Summer 2008
This article examines the Kansas Exodus as a major precedent for later Black migration out of the South.
African Americans and the American Labor Movement
| James Gilbert Cassedy | Prologue Magazine / National Archives | Summer 1997
This article provides labor-history context for the Great Migration, including industrial jobs, wartime labor shortages, and federal attention to Black workers.
The Great Migration: A Changing America
| Library of Congress | World War I: American Experiences | No date
This exhibition section explains how World War I accelerated Black migration and how migrants encountered both opportunity and discrimination in Northern cities.
The Great Migration
| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | No date
This classroom resource gives a concise overview of the Great Migration, including causes, routes, cities, newspapers, and the transformation of American life.
The Digital Library: The Great Migration Letters
| University of Chicago | Digital Library | No date
This collection presents letters from African Americans in the South considering migration, giving firsthand evidence of hopes, fears, and practical concerns.
Moving North, Heading West
| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | No date
This Library of Congress article explains how African Americans moved North and West after Reconstruction, setting the stage for the Great Migration.
Migrations
| Library of Congress | The African-American Mosaic | No date
This exhibition page explains the causes of Black migration out of the South, including sharecropping, lynching, wages, housing, and political rights.
Letters of Black Migrants to the Chicago Defender
| New Jersey State Library | New Jersey State Library | No date
This primary-source page presents migrant letters to the Chicago Defender, showing how Black Southerners sought jobs, advice, and help moving North.
Great Migration Letters, 1918
| Hanover College | Hanover Historical Texts Project | No date
This primary-source collection features letters from prospective migrants, revealing personal motivations such as employment, safety, family, and education.
Great Migration Letters
| History Matters | George Mason University | No date
This primary-source page presents letters that reveal why Black Southerners considered leaving and what they hoped Northern cities would offer.
Chicago: Destination for the Great Migration
| Library of Congress | The African-American Mosaic | No date
This page focuses on Chicago as a major destination for Black migrants, using photographs, maps, manuscripts, and historical context.
Cities, Destinations, and Neighborhoods
Q&A: Pittsburgh's Little-Known Role in the Great Migration
| Ervin Dyer | Pittwire | February 26, 2026
This article highlights Pittsburgh as a major but often overlooked destination for Black Southerners during the Great Migration, especially because steel, rail, and industrial jobs drew migrants seeking better wages and escape from Jim Crow.
The Chicago Defender
| Wikipedia contributors | Wikipedia | Updated 2026
This article provides background on the Chicago Defender, one of the most important newspapers encouraging and documenting the Great Migration.
Second Great Migration
| Wikipedia contributors | Wikipedia | Updated 2026
This article focuses on the 1940–1970 phase of Black migration, including movement to West Coast cities and defense-industry centers.
Great Migration: African American
| Wikipedia contributors | Wikipedia | Updated 2026
This encyclopedia article provides a broad overview of the Great Migration, including phases, destinations, causes, cultural effects, and historical interpretations.
Bronzeville
| Wikipedia contributors | Wikipedia | Updated 2026
This article explains Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, one of the most important Black urban communities formed during the Great Migration.
Black Bottom, Detroit
| Wikipedia contributors | Wikipedia | Updated 2026
This article provides historical context on a Detroit neighborhood shaped by Black migration, segregation, and later urban renewal.
The Story of the Great Migration Often Overlooks Black Businesses That Built Detroit
| Chicago Defender | Chicago Defender | March 22, 2025
This article focuses on Black entrepreneurship in Detroit and argues that migrant-built businesses were central to the city’s Great Migration story.
How Chicago Became a Cultural Beacon of the Great Migration
| WFMT | WFMT | February 7, 2025
This article explores why Chicago became one of the most important destinations of the Great Migration, focusing on music, newspapers, jobs, neighborhoods, and Black cultural life.
Great Migrations: A People on the Move
This PBS series page introduces a documentary about Black migration and its influence on American culture, politics, cities, and identity.
Documentary Sheds Light on Detroit’s Role in Great Migration
This article discusses Detroit’s role in the Great Migration and highlights how auto-industry jobs drew Black Southerners to the city.
Great Migrations: The North
| Rise Up Detroit | Rise Up Detroit | 2024
This article explains Detroit’s rapid Black population growth during the Great Migration and the industrial labor opportunities that drew migrants.
Migration Has Been a Thorn in the Historical Story of Detroit’s Black Population
| Detroit Is It | Detroit Is It | February 18, 2021
This article traces Black migration to Detroit and explains how the auto industry, housing restrictions, and community growth shaped the city.
The People and Places of Black Bottom, Detroit
| National Endowment for the Humanities | NEH | 2021
This article examines Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood, showing how migration transformed Detroit’s Black population and community life before urban renewal displaced many residents.
How Saidiya Hartman Retells the History of Black Life
| Alexis Okeowo | The New Yorker | October 19, 2020
This profile discusses Hartman’s work on young Black women in early twentieth-century Northern cities during the Great Migration era.
A Century of Black Designers Receive Belated Recognition in Chicago
| Architectural Digest | Architectural Digest | 2018
This article discusses Black design and visual culture in Chicago, connecting creative production to communities shaped by the Great Migration.
Black Detroit and the Great Migration, 1910–1930
| University of Michigan | Department of Afroamerican and African Studies | April 28, 2017
This exhibit page focuses on Detroit’s Black migrants, especially their struggles for housing, employment, and support from community organizations.
The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration
| Isabel Wilkerson | Smithsonian Magazine | September 2016
This article explains how the Great Migration remade American cities, politics, culture, music, literature, and family history.
A Young Black Girl’s View of Harlem at the Height of the Great Migration
| The New Yorker | The New Yorker | 2016
This article uses photographs from a Harlem family to show everyday Black life shaped by the Great Migration.
A Thousand Midnights: Chicago and the Legacy of the Great Migration
| The New Yorker | The New Yorker | 2015
This article explores a photo and film project about Chicago, family memory, and the continuing legacy of the Great Migration.
Migration and Renaissance
| National Endowment for the Humanities | NEH | February 21, 2014
This article connects the Great Migration to the Harlem Renaissance, explaining how Black movement into Northern cities helped fuel literary and cultural transformation.
Celebrating Black History Month Part III: Documenting the African American Experience
| National Endowment for the Humanities | NEH | February 25, 2013
This article discusses photographic collections that document segregation, migration, work, and Black community life in Pittsburgh.
Great Migration: Definition, Causes and Impact
| History.com Editors | History.com | March 4, 2010
This article gives a popular overview of the Great Migration’s causes, timeline, destinations, and national impact.
The Great Migration 1915–1960
| Quintard Taylor | BlackPast | December 6, 2007
This article provides a concise history of the Great Migration, including its scale, destinations, causes, and consequences for Black urban life.
The Great Migration: From Mississippi to Chicago
| PBS American Experience | PBS | January 20, 2003
This video page summarizes the movement of Black Mississippians to Chicago and the mix of segregation and new freedom they encountered there.
The Great Migration
| Encyclopedia of Chicago | Chicago Historical Society | No date
This article explains how the Great Migration transformed Chicago, including labor, housing, community formation, racial tension, and politics.
The Great Migration
| Chicago Public Library | Chicago Public Library | No date
This article gives a Chicago-centered overview of the Great Migration, including the rapid growth of the city’s Black population and major reading suggestions.
The Chicago Defender
| PBS | The Black Press | No date
This article explains how the Chicago Defender encouraged migration by publishing job information, train schedules, and arguments for leaving the segregated South.
The Art of African Americans
| Encyclopedia.com | Encyclopedia.com | No date
This article connects the Great Migration to the New Negro Movement and the rise of African American art in Northern cities.
Remembering the Chicago Defender, Print Edition 1905–2019
| National Museum of African American History and Culture | Smithsonian | No date
This article explains how the Chicago Defender promoted migration, shaped Black urban life, and became a key voice of the Great Migration.
Immigration from Europe and the Great Migration
| Khan Academy | Khan Academy | No date
This article places the Great Migration in the World War I home-front economy, showing how labor demand reshaped cities and opportunity.
Early Chicago: The Great Migration
| WTTW | DuSable to Obama | No date
This article explains the Chicago Defender’s role in promoting migration and how migrants adjusted to work, housing, and racial boundaries in Chicago.
African American History in the American West Timeline
| BlackPast | BlackPast | No date
This timeline helps place western Black migration, including earlier movements and later Great Migration destinations, within a broader history.
A Harlem Street Scene by Jacob Lawrence, Ambulance Call
| Khan Academy | Khan Academy | No date
This article connects Jacob Lawrence’s Harlem art to the Great Migration and the growth of Black urban communities after World War I.
Culture, Art, Literature, Newspapers, and Media
The Warmth of Other Suns
| Wikipedia contributors | Wikipedia | Updated 2026
This article summarizes Isabel Wilkerson’s influential book about three migrants whose lives illuminate the broader Great Migration.
Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series
| Wikipedia contributors | Wikipedia | Updated 2026
This article explains the history, themes, and museum ownership of Jacob Lawrence’s famous painted narrative of the Great Migration.
Harlem Renaissance
| Wikipedia contributors | Wikipedia | Updated 2026
This article explains the cultural movement that grew partly from Great Migration-era population shifts into Harlem and other Black urban centers.
A New Four-Hour Docuseries “Great Migrations: A People on the Move”
This announcement describes Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s documentary series on Black migration, connecting the Great Migration to later movements back South and to immigration from Africa and the Caribbean.
Modern Black Migration: Why the South Is Drawing Communities Back
| Architectural Digest | Architectural Digest | February 2024
This article discusses the Reverse Great Migration, explaining why many Black Americans have moved back to the South for affordability, family ties, cultural connection, and opportunity.
West Indian Immigration to the United States 1900–
| BlackPast | BlackPast | January 27, 2022
This article provides useful context by comparing Caribbean immigration with the Great Migration and showing how Black urban communities were shaped by multiple migrations.
South Carolina’s Black Majority 1708–1920
| BlackPast | BlackPast | January 24, 2022
This article helps explain Southern demographic change and why many Black South Carolinians eventually left during the Great Migration.
The Reverse Great Migration
| National Museum of African American History and Culture | Smithsonian | 2022
This article explains the post-1970s movement of Black Americans back to the South and links it to economic opportunity, family history, and cultural reconnection.
Artists Reinterpret the Great Migration
| National Endowment for the Humanities | NEH | 2022
This article discusses contemporary artists who reinterpret the legacy of the Great Migration through family history, memory, movement, and cultural inheritance.
American Icons: The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence
| National Endowment for the Humanities | NEH | February 26, 2020
This article explains Jacob Lawrence’s famous Migration Series and how its sixty panels visualized the hopes, dangers, movement, and disappointments of Black migration.
Isabel Wilkerson
| Steve Moyer | Humanities Magazine / NEH | Fall 2016
This profile discusses Isabel Wilkerson’s work on the Great Migration and frames the movement as an act of agency by people seeking freedom from Jim Crow.
The Uprooted
| Jill Lepore | The New Yorker | September 6, 2010
This review essay discusses Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns and the human stories behind the Great Migration.
U.S. Migration / Population
| Encyclopedia.com | Encyclopedia.com | No date
This article places the Great Migration within larger U.S. population shifts and explains how it transformed African Americans from a largely rural to urban people.
The Harlem Renaissance
| Khan Academy | Khan Academy | No date
This article explains how the Great Migration helped create the population concentration and cultural networks that made the Harlem Renaissance possible.
The Great Migration: New Opportunities, New Tensions
| PBS | This Far by Faith | No date
This article examines the Great Migration’s effects on Black religion, churches, class tensions, and urban community life.
The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance
| Bay Path University | HIS115 Open Textbook | No date
This textbook chapter explains how migration from the rural South helped build Harlem and fueled the cultural flowering of the Harlem Renaissance.
The Great Migration Home Movie Project
| National Museum of African American History and Culture | Smithsonian | No date
This project preserves African American home movies, showing how family films can document the personal and cultural legacy of the Great Migration.
The Great Migration African American
| James Gregory | University of Washington | No date
This article provides maps, charts, and interpretation of Black migration out of the South, emphasizing its scale and political consequences.
The African American Migration Story
| PBS | African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross | No date
This article explains multiple waves of African American migration, including the Great Migration out of the rural South and into urban America.
Strange Worlds: Immigration in the Early 20th Century
| Khan Academy | Khan Academy | No date
This resource places African American migration alongside broader early twentieth-century migration and urban change.
NAACP Protests After Pennsylvania Mayor’s Threats Force Black and Mexican Families to Flee
| Equal Justice Initiative | EJI Calendar | No date
This article shows how Northern and border-state backlash against Black and nonwhite residents intensified as migration changed local demographics.
Millions Move North
| National Museum of African American History and Culture | Smithsonian | No date
This article explains how millions of Black Southerners moved North and how newspapers, churches, businesses, and community networks helped migrants settle.
Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series Long Version
| Khan Academy | Khan Academy | No date
This longer resource explores Lawrence’s full visual narrative of the Great Migration, including danger, hope, work, housing, and racism.
Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series
| Khan Academy | Khan Academy | No date
This resource introduces Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series as an artistic record of Black movement from the South to the North.
Guide to the Great Migration Home Movie Study Collection
| Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives | Smithsonian | No date
This archival guide describes a study collection of digitized African American home movies connected to the Great Migration and family memory.
Exodusters and the Promise of Freedom
| National Museum of African American History and Culture | Smithsonian | No date
This article provides historical context for earlier Black migration westward, showing how the Exoduster movement anticipated later searches for land, safety, and freedom.
Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom
| National Museum of African American History and Culture | Smithsonian | No date
This exhibition page includes the Great Migration as part of the larger struggle over freedom, citizenship, segregation, and African American rights.
African American Newspapers and Periodicals
| Encyclopedia.com | Encyclopedia.com | No date
This article provides context on Black newspapers, including their role in guiding migrants and shaping urban Black public life.
A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance
| National Museum of African American History and Culture | Smithsonian | No date
This article explains how the Great Migration brought artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals to Harlem and other cities, helping produce the Harlem Renaissance.
Labor, War, Education, and Economic Mobility
The Great Migration
| Harvard University | Harvard University | February 2023
This Harvard feature gathers scholarship on the Great Migration’s economic, cultural, and political effects, including earnings, literature, and urban life.
The Great Migration’s Impact on the Educational Achievement of Black Children
| Philadelphia Fed | Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia | May 16, 2022
This article summarizes research showing that the First Great Migration helped reduce some racial educational disparities by moving children to places with stronger schools and labor markets.
The Second Great Migration
| Smithsonian American Experience | Smithsonian | 2015
This PDF introduces the Second Great Migration and places Black wartime movement in the context of New Deal and World War II labor changes.
World War II: Fighting Abroad and at Home
| National Endowment for the Humanities | NEH | February 25, 2014
This article explains how World War II accelerated Black migration through defense-industry jobs and federal pressure against discrimination in war industries.
The Great Migration
| Smithsonian American Experience | Smithsonian | 2014
This PDF explains how World War I industries recruited Black workers and how migration offered escape from Jim Crow while creating new challenges in the North.
George Edmund Haynes 1880–1960
| BlackPast | BlackPast | June 30, 2008
This biography connects social work, urban Black communities, and the early Great Migration through the career of George Edmund Haynes.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
| Pulitzer Prize Board | Pulitzer Prize | 1994 / Book context
This page provides context for Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer-winning journalism career and her later major work on the Great Migration.
World War I: Homefront
| Khan Academy | Khan Academy | No date
This video resource explains how wartime industrial labor needs created new openings for African Americans and accelerated the Great Migration.
Regional Migration, World War I and World War II
| Encyclopedia.com | Encyclopedia.com | No date
This article explains wartime migration, including the Great Migration as a result of labor demand, crop failures, and racial oppression.
Great Migration, 1910–1920
| Encyclopedia.com | Encyclopedia.com | No date
This article explains how World War I, boll weevil crop damage, labor recruitment, and Jim Crow accelerated Black migration out of the rural South.
Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration, 1915–1940
| Smithsonian Institution | Smithsonian | No date
This exhibition page describes the Great Migration from rural fields to industrial factories and its complex effects on African American life.
African-American Children and Youth
| Encyclopedia.com | Encyclopedia.com | No date
This article includes the experiences of children during the Great Migration, including family separation, schooling, and movement between North and South.
African American Labor History
| Encyclopedia.com | Encyclopedia.com | No date
This article connects the Great Migration to labor shortages, wartime industry, agricultural crisis, and Black workers’ search for better wages.
Housing, Segregation, Racial Violence, and Health
What Was the Great Migration?
| PBS | PBS | February 24, 2025
This overview explains the Great Migration as a historic movement of Black Americans from the South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities in response to racial violence, segregation, and economic exclusion.
Haunted Countries Deserve Haunted Stories
| Cady Lang | Time | April 2021
This article explains how Great Migration-era housing discrimination, restrictive covenants, and racial terror inspired the historical setting of the series THEM.
What Is Redlining? How Residential Segregation Shaped U.S. Cities
| Teen Vogue | Teen Vogue | February 19, 2021
This article explains redlining and residential segregation, key forces that shaped the neighborhoods Black migrants entered in Northern and Western cities.
The Great Migration and Residential Segregation in American Cities During the Twentieth Century
This study examines how the Great Migration and Northern housing discrimination helped shape twentieth-century racial residential segregation.
Sharecropper Migration
| PBS American Experience | PBS | 2018
This article explains sharecropping, debt, poverty, mechanization, racial violence, and weak schools as push factors behind migration from the Mississippi Delta.
Trump’s Obsession With Chicago, Explained
| Lincoln Anthony Blades | Teen Vogue | January 2017
This article provides historical context on Chicago’s segregation, restrictive covenants, and racialized politics rooted partly in the city’s Great Migration history.
Ten Historical African American South Carolina Newspapers
| National Endowment for the Humanities | NEH | February 17, 2016
This article explains how Black newspapers documented lynching, segregation, and activism in the South, providing context for the forces that drove migration.
The Impact of the Great Migration on Mortality of African Americans
This research article studies the health consequences of migration from the South, showing how new urban environments affected mortality among Black migrants.
Black Bodies in Motion and in Pain
| The New Yorker | The New Yorker | 2015
This article reflects on Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and connects the Great Migration to continuing histories of racial violence and displacement.
The Great Migration
| Equal Justice Initiative | EJI | January 7, 2013
This article frames the Great Migration as a response to racial terror, Jim Crow, and the search for safety and freedom.
White Mobs Terrorize Black Community on Chicago’s South Side
| Equal Justice Initiative | EJI Calendar | No date
This article explains Chicago’s racial violence during the Great Migration, including attacks on Black residents seeking housing outside restrictive boundaries.
White Mobs Riot Against Racial Integration in Detroit
| Equal Justice Initiative | EJI Calendar | No date
This article documents white backlash to Black migration in Detroit and shows how racial violence followed migrants into Northern cities.
The Great Migration
| PBS | Slavery by Another Name | No date
This theme page connects the Great Migration to racial terror, forced labor, and the long afterlife of slavery in the South.
Stories From Exodus to Return
| National Museum of African American History and Culture | Smithsonian | No date
This story series traces Black movement from the Great Migration through later return migration, emphasizing mobility as a defining feature of African American history.
Michigan: Lynching in America Map
| Equal Justice Initiative | Lynching in America | No date
This map page provides context for Michigan as both a destination and a place where racial hostility affected Black migrants.
Maryland: Lynching in America Map
| Equal Justice Initiative | Lynching in America | No date
This map page offers context on racial terror and migration patterns in a border-state region connected to Black movement and settlement.
Great Migration Map
| Equal Justice Initiative | Lynching in America | No date
This interactive map connects racial terror lynchings to Black flight from the South and shows how migration changed city populations.
Georgia: Lynching in America Map
| Equal Justice Initiative | Lynching in America | No date
This map page helps connect racial violence in Georgia to the broader Great Migration of Black Southerners seeking safety elsewhere.
