Great Migration (African American) - Numbers and Destinations

Numbers and Destinations

James Gregory calculates decade-by-decade migration volumes in his book, The Southern Diaspora. Black migration picked up right from the start of the new century, with 204,000 leaving in the first decade. The pace accelerated with the outbreak of World War I and continued through the 1920s. By 1930, there were 1.3 million former southerners living in other regions.

The Great Depression wiped out job opportunities in the northern industrial belt, especially for African Americans, and caused a sharp reduction in migration, but a second and larger Great Migration began as defense industries geared up for World War II. 1.4 million black southerners moved north or west in the 1940s followed by 1.1 million in the 1950s and another 2.4 million others in the 1960s and 1970s. By the late 1970s, as deindustrialization and the rust belt crisis took hold, the Great Migration came to end. In the 1980s and 1990s more Black Americans were heading South than leaving that region.

Big cities were the principal destinations of southerners throughout the two phases of the Great Migration. In the first phase eight major cities attracted two-thirds of the migrants: New York and Chicago followed in order by Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. The Second Great Migration increased the populations of these cities while adding others. West Coast cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, Portland) now attracted African Americans in large numbers.