Under Jim Crow, Black Southerners faced segregation, the loss of the vote, lynching and sharecropping debts. In the early 1900s they answered in two great ways: by organizing, and by leaving.
Key idea
The NAACP (founded 1909) fought segregation and lynching in the courts and in public. From about 1910 to 1970, roughly six million Black Southerners moved to cities of the North and West in the Great Migration, for jobs and to escape Jim Crow.
Why it works
Why move? Push factors: Jim Crow, violence, low pay, and the boll weevil, which wrecked cotton crops in the 1910s. Pull factors: when World War I cut off immigration from Europe and factories needed workers, Northern employers recruited in the South. Newspapers such as the Chicago Defender printed job ads and letters from those who had gone. Migrants found higher wages and the vote, but also crowded housing, segregated neighborhoods and, in 1919, deadly riots in Chicago and other cities.
The NAACP was founded in 1909 by a group of Black and white reformers, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and Mary White Ovington, after a race riot in Springfield, Illinois. Du Bois edited its magazine, The Crisis. Its lawyers won early cases against grandfather clauses (1915) and residential segregation laws (1917), building toward Brown v. Board of Education.
Work it through
Worked example: Reading a cause
Why did the first big wave of the Great Migration start around 1916 rather than 1900?
- Jim Crow existed in 1900 too, so it cannot explain the timing alone.
- In 1914 to 1918 the war cut immigration from Europe while war factories needed workers.
- The new jobs (a pull) added to the old pushes and set off the wave.
Answer: War jobs and the drop in European immigration created a new pull.
Common mistake
Many students think the Great Migration happened all at once. It came in two big waves, around the two World Wars, over six decades: about 1.6 million people from 1910 to 1940, and about five million more from 1940 to 1970.