The Treatment Doesn’t Warrant Staying: Finding The Warmth of Other Suns

“They left as though they were fleeing some curse. They were willing to make almost any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket and they left with the intention of staying.” -Emmett J. Scott, journalist and author, observations on the Great Migration

Beginning about 1910 and continuing for roughly thirty years thereafter, millions of African Americans fled the South and headed north and west, swelling the population of cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, and establishing the first large urban black communities. When the migration began, 90% of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the time it was over, in the 1970s, 47% of all African-Americans were living in the North and West. A rural people had become urban, and a Southern people had spread themselves all over the nation.