What was most affected by the Great Migration?

Throughout American history, wartime necessity has often opened new political and social avenues for marginalized groups. This was certainly the case after the United States intervened in the First World War in April 1917. By participating in the war effort, women suffrage activists made a compelling, and ultimately successful, case for voting rights: After all, how could America protect democracy abroad without extending it to half the population at home? Likewise, African Americans furthered their claim for racial equality at home by their contributions on European battlefields and on the home front filling industrial jobs.

Congress passed the Selective Service Act on May 10, 1917, which required all able-bodied men ages 21 to 31 to register for military duty.113 On registration day, July 5, 1917, more than 700,000 black men enrolled. By war’s end, nearly 2.3 million had answered the call. In less than two years, more than 4 million draftees swelled the ranks of the U.S. military. Of these, 367,000 were African Americans who were drafted principally into the U.S. Army. On the battlefield, many infantry units in the all-black 92nd U.S. Army Division distinguished themselves.114 But the segregation they experienced in military service reflected the segregation in civilian life. African Americans were barred from the Marine Corps and the Army Air Corps, and in the U.S. Navy, they were assigned only menial jobs. African Americans had to fight to establish a black officer training program.115

Emigration from the South gained more traction with the advent of several important and largely economic developments beginning in the second decade of the 20th century.117 In the South the depressed cotton market and a series of natural disasters reduced even the rare independent black landowner to sharecropping or tenant farming, trapping more and more people in a cycle of indebtedness. Military conscription and the slackening of European immigration caused massive labor shortages in the North, just as war production created an insatiable demand for industrial goods. Those labor shortages provided black Southerners with jobs in the steel, shipbuilding, and automotive industries as well as in ammunition and meat packing factories.

Many found the promise of economic opportunity irresistible, though this was not the only element pulling people northward. Contemplating departure from the South, Representative George White said to the Chicago Daily Tribune, “I cannot live in North Carolina and be a man and be treated as a man.” In an interview with the New York Times, he encouraged southern black families to migrate west, “los[ing] themselves among the people of the country.”118 Historian Steven Hahn has suggested that a “pronounced self-consciousness” encompassed both social and political motivations for emigrating, “searches for new circumstances in life and labor, new sites of family and community building, new opportunities to escape economic dependence.” Hahn explained that the movement not only created new political vistas but “also served as a large and powerful political transmission belt that moved and redeployed the experiences, expectations, institutions, and networks” forged in the black community during slavery and Reconstruction, which would fundamentally shape emerging centers of African-American culture and thought in the North.119

This massive demographic shift dramatically altered African-American society, history, culture, and politics. During the 1920s it produced a revolutionary period of black artistic expression in literature, music, and thought known as the Harlem Renaissance. Among those who participated in this cultural moment in northern Manhattan, which raised black consciousness nationally, were poet Langston Hughes, writer Zora Neale Hurston, and scholar and intellectual W. E. B. DuBois. A new sense of African-American culture emerged, stoked by such leaders as Marcus Garvey, an advocate for black separatism and repatriation to Africa. Garvey had emigrated from Jamaica to New York City in 1916 and, within a few years, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), enlisting thousands of members.120 UNIA found much support in the recently transplanted community of southern blacks, who helped establish many UNIA chapters in the South by sharing the organization’s literature with their relatives back home.121 No longer subject to ubiquitous voter suppression like they were in the South, skyrocketing black populations in northern cities created new opportunities for political activism. Slowly, African Americans won election to important political offices, including Oscar De Priest, a native Alabamian and future Member of Congress, who became a member of the Chicago city council in 1915.

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The move North for millions of African-Americans during the Great Migration brought greater economic and educational opportunities — but also new stresses and big city vices that actually shortened their lives, according to a new study.

Published this month in the American Economic Review, the study found that mortality rates increased at 40 percent for black men and 50 percent for black women who fled the dangers and discrimination of the Jim Crow South in search of better lives. Common causes of death for the migrants included cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, and cirrhosis — all linked to bad habits like smoking and drinking.

The study’s findings contradict a common assumption among economists that more education and wealth automatically benefit one’s health, said Duke University economist and demographer Seth Sanders.

“We thought what we would find was that migration north extended life and made the African-American population healthier,” said Sanders one of the study’s co-authors. “We actually found exactly the opposite. Urban life is stressful. Being away from your roots is probably stressful.”

Roughly six million African-Americans left the Deep South from approximately 1910's to 1970's — about half of black America at that time. They left traditional farm economies in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, boarding trains for destinations like New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago — industrial centers very different from the places they left behind.

The study found that if an African-American man lived to age 65 the chances that he would make it to age 70 if he remained in the South were 82.5 percent; if he migrated to the North the chance of surviving to age 70 dropped to 75 percent.

For an African-American woman who lived to age 65, the chances that she would make it to age 70 if she remained in the South were 90 percent; if she migrated to the North, the chance of surviving to age 70 dropped to 85 percent.

With better paying jobs came more disposable income and the habits that accompanied having more money. Drinking and smoking were aspirational activities for all Americans then — and whites migrating to cities from the Great Plains during the same time period also smoke and drank more.

But added to the difficulties already present in adjusting to city living, blacks faced unique challenges that added to their stress — the racism of the North, which included being forced to live in overcrowded neighborhoods, being allowed to join unions, and being underpaid for the work they were doing. Such circumstances only gave them another reason to find ways to cope, said Isabel Wilkerson, author of “THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”

“They were fleeing the violence of the caste system in the South, only to be met with challenges and obstacles in the North,” Wilkerson explained. “They were searching for ways to manage in a world that had not welcomed them… where they were met with hostility upon their arrival. I would not find it surprising that their health would suffer as a result.”

And rather than simply being exposed to these environments, African-Americans were relegated to them. Discrimination and violence prevented many from moving away from the slums that operated as vice districts that would’ve been in conflict with a Southern upbringing often heavily rooted in faith and morality.

“There was a general moral concern having to do with the lack of godliness in their experiences in the big city,” Wilkerson explained. “There was a fear of what was going to happen to people … without their family or community connections that were the moderating force in their lives. (The vice districts) were the only place they were permitted to live… all of the things that would not have been permissible in other neighborhoods were allowed. And when they sought to leave, they were met with resistance.”

Still, Wilkerson said, the trade-off would have been worth it for people whose daily survival far outweighed the notion of making it to old age.

“This is the price that they paid for the freedom that they sought,” Wilkerson said. “They were moving to an unknown land with challenges they could not have imagined. Yet, in spite of the risks they had to take, for them, at that time, their actions showed that it was worth the risk in order to live freer than they were at home.”

Sanders points out that the study’s findings are not just lessons about the Great Migration, but are a microcosm of what happens to any group of people moving from rural poverty into the city, from low-skilled to higher-skilled, industrial, diverse economies.

“To understand the Great Migration will help you understand what’s going on in the world today,” said Sanders, who cited present-day migrations in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. “Nothing is universally true. You can’t say migration was good or bad. To ask, ‘Was it worth it or not?’ is kind of an impossible task.”