Black Migration from the South in Historical Context

In an historical note to the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Fences, August Wilson describes Pittsburgh in the early twentieth century as an industrial machine powered by the sweat of European immigrants. Pittsburgh, a city of a "thousand furnaces and sewing machines, [a] thousand butcher shops and bakers' ovens," was home to "the destitute of Europe," he writes, but "the descendants of African slaves were offered no such welcome" (1991, 103). Indeed, in 1910, the workforce in northern cities was nearly 40 percent foreign born and only 3 percent black. At the time, nearly fifty years after emancipation, 86 percent of African Americans still lived in the South.

The mobility of black southerners began increasing in the birth cohorts born immediately after the Civil War. Many of these moves took place within the South. Despite plentiful industrial jobs in the "thousand furnaces" of nothern cities at the turn of the twentieth century, the potential wage benefits of settling in the North was dampened by the absence of a migrant network that southern blacks could use to secure employment upon arrival. Large flows of northward migration awaited a period of abnormally high economic returns, which arose during World War I. Circa 1915, northern factories supplying the war effort experienced a surge in labor demand, coupled with a temporary freeze in European immigration, which encouraged northern employers to turn to other sources of labor.

Once black migration from the South got underway, the first pioneers facilitated later moves of friends and family. Furthermore, northern employers gained experience with and became more open to hiring black workers. With these conditions in place, black migration to the North accelerated rapidly, doubling from the 1900s to the 1910s and then doubling again by the 1920s. Migration peaked in the 1940s and 1950s; during these two decades alone, 28 percent of the southern black population left the region. By 1970, for the first time in American history, a majority of the country's black residents lived outside the South, with 45 percent living in the Northeast and Midwest and 8 percent in the West.

Black departures from the South were greatest from counties that specialized in cotton agriculture and that were characterized by particularly strong segregationist sentiment (as proxied by support for Strom Thurmond in the 1948 presidential election). Settlement in the North and West was concentrated in the top five destinations: New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Outside of these gateway cities, black migrants were widely distributed throughout northern and western metropolitan areas, underscoring the broad social and economic consequences of black migration throughout the region.

A Long View of Southern Black Mobility: The Birth Cohorts of 1810–1970

The Great Black Migration is usually dated to 1915, the first year of substantial black in-migration to the North. However, the rate of interstate mobility among southern blacks rose steadily, starting with the birth cohort of 1860. Initially, the majority of these moves took place in the South, with some rural blacks moving to urban areas and others seeking agricultural opportunities further west (Gottlieb 1987, 118; Cohen 1991, 248–73; Cobb, 1992, 47–68). In this long-term perspective, the Great Black Migration appears to be a continuation of previous mobility trends, marked by acceleration (rather than a discontinuous jump) in the rate of interstate migration and a gradual shift toward northern destinations. This long-term trend is not consistent with the view that black southerners were uniquely stuck in place through binding credit relationships with landlords and local merchants (Ransom and Sutch 1977, 194; Berlin 2010, 142).

Using multiple waves of Census data, I define migration as living outside of one's state of birth or, alternatively, as living outside of the South altogether. I mostly follow the Census definition of the South, which includes the eleven states of the former Confederacy, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, but I exclude the District of Columbia and the border states of Maryland and Delaware, which experienced net black in-migration in the twentieth century. For brevity, I often refer to the non-South as the "North," even though this region also includes the western states. Migration figures are calculated for blacks and non-blacks. In this southern context, "non-black" is nearly synonymous with "white," and I use these two terms interchangeably. For the year 2000, when the Census introduced the option to select multiple races, I group all individuals who report being black and some other race into the category "black."

Arranging Census data by birth cohort reveals substantial swings in black (and white) mobility during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Figure 1.1a graphs predicted migration for each birth cohort by age thirty, and Figure 1.1b reports the share of these moves occurring within the South. The underlying estimation procedure is described in Appendix Equation 1. Most cohorts are observed at multiple ages, thereby allowing separate identification of the effects of both age and birth cohort on migration. Although migration can occur at any time in the life cycle, individuals are most likely to move in their twenties (Johnson et al. 2005). I therefore interpret the estimated migration activity as taking place around twenty-five years after the cohort's year of birth.

Migration rates were particularly high in the early nineteenth century among southerners of both races. Fifty percent of whites and nearly 40 percent of blacks in the birth cohort of 1810 left their birth state by age thirty. For blacks, most of whom were in slavery, nearly 90 percent of these moves took place within the South. High mobility occurred in the context of rising demand for cotton, as planters pushed westward from the older cotton region of the South Atlantic into the fertile land in the Mississippi Delta and Texas. Fogel (1994, 65) reports that 835,000 slaves, nearly one in four, were moved west by their owner or a slave trader from 1820 to 1860.

As the new cotton frontier became settled, the mobility of both white and black southerners declined. By the birth cohorts of the mid-nineteenth century, the share of black southerners living outside of their state of birth had fallen from 40 percent to 25 percent. The low point in black mobility was reached in the birth cohort of 1857, who were "of age" to migrate in the early 1880s. This decline in black mobility followed a wider national trend rather than indicating race-specific barriers to mobility after emancipation. The share of whites, both southern and non-southern born, living...