The Great Migration

Immigration and Migration

Did immigration and migration patterns create new opportunities or enforce racism and xenophobia?

The Great Migration saw 6 million African Americans move out of the rural South to escape Jim Crow segregation in search of greater economic opportunities up North. The migration began during World War I, which created jobs in northern factories and railroads. At the beginning of the 20th century, 90 percent of African Americans lived in the South. By the 1970s, less than half did. The Great Migration transformed urban areas and workforces and led to the rise of Black-owned businesses and hospitals as well as major cultural developments, such as the Harlem Renaissance, which took place in Harlem in New York City.

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Video Transcript

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: In 1910, Harlem was an upper middle class white community, but by 1925 it was known as the mecca of the new negro.

African Americans came to New York just as they did to many of the great cities of the north seeking opportunity. During the First World War, their numbers swelled when labor shortages made better paying jobs available for migrants.

Those who came to Harlem found a place where they were free for the first time to express themselves in ways that seemed inconceivable before.

ISABEL WILKERSON, Author: Many of these people have not been able to pursue their art, had not been able to pursue the opportunity to become a novelist, to become a jazz musician. It simply was not available and possible for them in the restricted caste system that they were consigned to in the south. Suddenly here in New York, finally, finally, finally, we can be the people that we imagine ourselves to be.

GATES: It would explode into one of the most artistically fertile periods in African American history.

BRENT HAYES EDWARDS, Historian: The Harlem Renaissance represents above all black people really for the first time making a claim on being modern as a people to say that we are here and this is our contribution.

GATES: Here on 136th street, in the heart of Harlem, some of the most talented newcomers found a temporary home in a rooming house, which its residents humorously nicknamed "Niggerati" Manor.

MAN: Some of the people that live there included Eric Walrond, the Caribbean novelist and short story writer, uh Zora Neale Hurston passed through there. Langston Hughes spent time there. They all ended up putting together a kind of salon. It was right here.

GATES: Who invented this crazy term "Niggerati?"

MAN: Zora Neale Hurston playing with the term "Niggerati" and saying if they're the literati downtown, we must be the "Niggerati" uptown.

GATES: Out of "Niggerati" Manor came one of the most provocative publications of the Renaissance, a literary journal called "Fire."

MAN: In that single issue of "Fire," the first story in there is Wallace Thurman's "Cordelia the Crude" is about a prostitute. Richard Bruce Nugent's sexually exploratory vignettes, smoke, lilies, and jade. In terms of exploring a kind of queer eroticism, it's one of the stories in the Renaissance, one of the few that does that, that goes there.

Harlem came to represent a kind of oasis of permissibility. There were things that could go on in Harlem that could not go on elsewhere.

GATES: Harlem's reputation spread throughout the country. Outsiders were drawn to its clubs and cabarets. Races could mingle here in ways that were illegal in much of the rest of the country.