Entry · catalog no. 1234
the Great Migration
/ /ðə ˌɡreɪt maɪˈɡreɪʃən/ /thuh GRAYT my-GRAY-shun
phrase · No single city — out of the rural South into Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Oakland · 1910s
✓ Verified
1.
The decades-long departure of Black Southerners from the Jim Crow South for industrial cities, undertaken family by family in search of wages, schools, the vote, and safety.
“Her mother came up from Mississippi in forty-three. Great Migration, Illinois Central, one suitcase.”
2.
By extension, the transformation that movement produced: the making of Black urban America, and with it the blues and gospel recording industries, the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago and Detroit Black political power, and the Northern base of the civil rights movement.
“You cannot explain Motown or the Defender without the Great Migration.”
Origin & Attribution
This was a Black-authored event before it was a historian's phrase. Beginning around 1916, as the First World War cut off European immigration and opened Northern factory jobs, Black Southerners left the cotton belt in numbers that alarmed Southern planters and delighted Northern Black newspapers. Robert S. Abbott's Chicago Defender actively recruited them, printing train schedules, job listings, and lynching coverage, and naming 15 May 1917 the date of a Great Northern Drive. A first wave ran roughly 1916 to 1940; a second and larger wave ran from the Second World War to about 1970 and reached California and the Pacific Northwest. It is commonly framed as economic opportunity pulling people north. Participants and contemporaneous Black observers described it at least as much as flight — from lynching, debt peonage, and the boll weevil.
1917
The Chicago Defender promotes the Great Northern Drive, setting 15 May as a departure date and drawing thousands north
1941
Jacob Lawrence completes his sixty-panel Migration of the Negro; twenty-six panels run in Fortune that November
2010
Isabel Wilkerson publishes The Warmth of Other Suns, retelling the migration through the migrants own accounts
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
No single city — out of the rural South into Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Oakland · 1910s
Spoken by
Black Southerners and their descendants in Northern and Western cities; Black newspapers, historians, novelists, and painters
$THEGREThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical110 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
79/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1916
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, New York: Random House, 2010
book
■
Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War, New York: Oxford University Press for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1920
book
■
Jacob Lawrence, The Migration of the Negro, sixty panels completed 1941; twenty-six panels published in Fortune, November 1941
painting series
■
+ Cite a sourceThe Chicago Defender, founded by Robert S. Abbott, Great Northern Drive migration campaign, May 1917
newspaper
See also