The Great Migration

node · earth · United States — the South to the North, Midwest and West

The movement of an estimated six million Black Americans out of the rural South to cities of the North, Midwest and West between about 1916 and 1970, driven by the violence and legal subordination of the Jim Crow South and pulled by industrial labour demand that opened during the First World War. At the start of the twentieth century around nine in ten Black Americans lived in the South; by 1970 close to half lived in Northern cities. It is usually described in two waves, roughly 1916–1930 and 1940–1970. Musically it is the second great involuntary-adjacent relocation in this Journey — not forced in the sense the Middle Passage was, but not freely chosen either, since what people were leaving was terror and peonage. It moved Delta players to Chicago, Texas players to Los Angeles and Carolina players to New York, concentrated audiences with wage income in cities with electricity and record shops, and converted an acoustic rural practice into an amplified urban one within a generation. The geography of American popular music after 1945 is largely the map of where those trains went.