Internal Migration of African Americans

African Americans displayed two distinctive internal migration patterns within the United States during the twentieth century:

• Interregional migration from the U.S. South to northern cities during the first half of the twentieth century.

• Intraregional migration from the inner city to outer city and inner suburban neighborhoods during the second half of the twentieth century.

The spatial distribution of African Americans in the twenty-first century reflects the legacy of these two migration patterns.

Interregional Migration

At the close of the Civil War, most African Americans were concentrated in the rural South. Today, as a result of interregional migration, many African Americans live in cities throughout the Northeast, Midwest, and West as well.

Freed as slaves, most African Americans remained in the rural South during the late nineteenth century, working as sharecroppers. A sharecropper works fields rented from a landowner and pays the rent by turning over to the landowner a share of the crops. To obtain seed, tools, food, and living quarters, a sharecropper gets a line of credit from the landowner and repays the debt with yet more crops. The sharecropper system burdened poor African Americans with high interest rates and heavy debts. Instead of growing food that they could eat, sharecroppers were forced by landowners to plant extensive areas of crops such as cotton that could be sold for cash.

Sharecropping became less common in the twentieth century, as the introduction of farm machinery and a decline in land devoted to cotton reduced demand for labor. At the same time sharecroppers were being pushed off the farms, they were being pulled by the prospect of jobs in the booming industrial cities of the North.

African Americans migrated out of the South along several clearly defined channels. Most traveled by bus and car along the major two-lane long-distance U.S. roads that were paved and signposted in the early decades of the twentieth century and have since been replaced by interstate highways:

• East Coast. From the Carolinas and other South Atlantic states north to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and other northeastern cities, along U.S. Route 1 (parallel to present-day I-95).

• East central. From Alabama and eastern Tennessee north to either Detroit, along U.S. Route 25 (present-day I-75), or Cleveland, along U.S. Route 21 (present-day I-77).

• West central. From Mississippi and western Tennessee north to St. Louis and Chicago (Figure 7-27), along U.S. routes 61 and 66 (present-day 1-55).

• Southwest. From Texas west to California, along U.S. routes 80 and 90 (present-day I-10 and I-20).

Interregional Migration of African Americans

Migration followed four distinct channels along the East Coast, east-central, west-central, and southwestern regions of the country.

Monument To The Great Migration of African Americans

Statue by Alison Saar honors African Americans who migrated to Chicago in the early twentieth century. It stands at the entrance to the Bronzeville neighborhood, the Chicago neighborhood where most African Americans lived then.

Southern African Americans migrated north and west in two main waves, the first in the 1910s and 1920s before and after World War I and the second in the 1940s and 1950s before and after World War II. The world wars stimulated expansion of factories in the 1910s and 1940s to produce war materiel while the demands of the armed forces created shortages of factory workers. After the wars, during the 1920s and 1950s, factories produced steel, motor vehicles, and other goods demanded in civilian society.

Pause & Reflect 7.2.2

What were the push and pull factors that motivated the interregional migration of African Americans in the early decades of the twentieth century?

Intraegional Migration

Migration within cities and metropolitan areas—called intraregional migration—also changed the distribution of African Americans and people of other ethnicities. When they reached the big cities, African American immigrants clustered in the one or two neighborhoods where the small numbers who had arrived in the nineteenth century were already living. These areas became known as ghettos, after the term for neighborhoods in which Jews were forced to live in the Middle Ages (see Chapter 6).

Expansion of African-American Neighborhoods

African Americans moved from highly clustered communities into immediately adjacent neighborhoods during the 1950s and 1960s. Expansion of the predominantly African American areas typically followed major avenues that radiated out from the center of the city.

In Baltimore, for example, most of the city’s quarter-million African Americans in 1950 were clustered in a 3-square-kilometer (1-square-mile) neighborhood northwest of downtown. The remainder were clustered east of downtown or in a large isolated housing project on the south side built for black wartime workers in port industries.

Expansion of African-American Neighborhoods In Baltimore

Densities in the African American neighborhoods were high, with 40,000 inhabitants per square kilometer (100,000 per square mile) common. Contrast that density with the current level found in typical American suburbs of 2,000 inhabitants per square kilometer (5,000 per square mile). Because of the shortage of housing in these communities, families were forced to live in one room. Many dwellings lacked bathrooms, kitchens, hot water, and heat.

Baltimore’s west side African American area expanded from 3 square kilometers (1 square mile) in 1950 to 25 square kilometers (10 square miles) in 1970, and a 5-square-kilometer (2-square-mile) area on the east side became mainly populated by African Americans. Expansion of the African American neighborhoods continued to follow major avenues to the northwest and northeast in subsequent decades.

“White flight.”

The expansion of predominantly African American areas in American cities was made possible by “white flight,” the emigration of whites from an area in anticipation of blacks immigrating into the area. Rather than integrate, whites fled.

Ethnic Population Change In Detroit

Between 1950 and 2017, the white population of Detroit declined from 1.7 million to 90,000, whereas the African American population increased from 300,000 to 600,000.

White flight was encouraged by unscrupulous real estate practices, especially blockbusting and redlining. Under blockbusting, real estate agents convinced white homeowners living near a black area to sell their houses at low prices, preying on their fears that black families would soon move into the neighborhood and cause property values to decline. The agents then sold the houses at much higher prices to black families desperate to escape overcrowded areas.

Redlining is a process by which financial institutions draw red-colored lines on a map and refuse to lend money for people to purchase or improve property within the lines. Through redlining, African Americans were prevented from getting mortgages to buy houses in the neighborhoods to which whites fled. Through blockbusting and redlining, a neighborhood could change from all-white to all-black in a matter of months, and real estate agents could start the process all over again in the next white area.