Imagine, if you will, looking at a demographic
map of the United States. And we're looking at
the year 1910. OK, 1910. Right. But I don't want
you to think of it just as like a flat piece
of paper. Think of it more like a snow globe.
Oh, I like that. A snow globe. Yeah, because
for decades leading up to this exact moment,
the snow inside this globe has been completely
settled. The distribution of the population,
specifically the African -American population,
is heavily, I mean, overwhelmingly concentrated
in one specific region. Right, the American Sound.
Exactly. It's static. It's this localized demographic
reality that has held relatively steady since
literally the founding of the country. And then...
History essentially picks up that snow globe
and just gives it the most violent, sustained,
and transformative shake imaginable. That is
a remarkably apt visual to start us off. Because
when we talk about the movement of people within
the borders of this country, the sheer scale
of what happened next is, well, It's actually
quite difficult to wrap your mind around. It
really is. We are just talking about a trickle
of relocation, you know, or some slow generational
drift. We are talking about a fundamental seismic
rewiring of the nation's entire human geography.
So welcome to today's Deep Dive. Our mission
today is to explore one of the most massive rapid
internal movements in recorded history. The Great
Migration. Yes, the Great Migration. We are going
to unpack the period from roughly 1910 to 19...
That's a 60 year window where six million African
Americans relocated from the rural south to the
urban north and west. Six million people. It's
staggering. It's massive. And for you listening,
whether you are someone who, you know, geeks
out over labor economics or you're fascinated
by American history, or maybe you just really
want to know the true literal origins of your
favorite music, understanding this migration
is the ultimate shortcut to understanding modern
American cities. Absolutely. metropolis you can
think of Chicago New York Detroit Los Angeles
Philadelphia they were all fundamentally reshaped
by this event and to do this justice we are drawing
on a really comprehensive stack of sources today
We're looking at historical demographic statistics,
census data spanning over a century, sociological
reports from the era, and deep cultural analyses.
Yeah, the sources are incredibly detailed on
every facet of this Exodus. They really are.
And the central question we are trying to answer
from all this data is really one of logistics
and motivation. Right. Okay, let's unpack this.
How did a population that was 90 % concentrated
in the American South in 1910 manage to completely
redistribute itself across the entire United
States? And completely change the nation's cultural
and economic DNA in the process? Exactly. Because
moving six million people before the invention
of the interstate highway system, before the
internet, before modern communication, I mean,
that doesn't just happen by accident. No, it
absolutely doesn't. And to understand the mechanics
of that movement, we have to look at the starting
point. Let's look at the Let's sense this data
from our sources for a second. Hey, let's hear
it. From the earliest U .S. population statistics
back in 1780, all the way until 1910, that 90
% concentration figure held incredibly steady.
Wow. 1780 to 1910. So well over a century of
virtually no movement. Right. African Americans
made up the absolute demographic majority of
the population in three entire southern states.
Louisiana until about 1890, South Carolina until
the 1920s, and Mississippi all the way until
the 1930s. Which means, logically, before we
can even begin to talk about where these millions
of people were going, we first have to understand
the absolute pressure cooker they were leaving
behind. Yes, the push factors. Right, because
nobody leaves the only home they've ever known,
the place where their families have lived and
been buried for generations, unless the alternative
of staying is simply unbearable. Exactly. So
let's talk about that push. What was the environment
like in the South in 1910 that necessitated this
mass exodus? Well, the South during this era
was defined by a severe multi -layered social
and economic chokehold. And we really need to
look at these two layers, the social and the
economic, because they operated together to trap
people. OK, let's start with the social reality.
Right. So the Deep South operated under Jim Crow
laws. And I think sometimes in modern discourse,
Jim Crow gets sanitized. Yeah, like it just means
separate water fountains or sitting at the back
of the bus. Precisely. But the sources we are
analyzing today detail a rigid, legally enforced
and violently upheld caste system. It was designed
to systematically exclude African -Americans
from any semblance of political or social power.
Disenfranchisement was was the literal law of
the land. But I want to dig into the mechanics
of that, because it went far beyond just not
being allowed to vote. The sources detail a system
that effectively tried to recreate the institution
of slavery by another name. And I'm talking specifically
about indentured servitude and convict leasing.
Yes, convict leasing. Break down how convict
leasing actually worked mechanically because
reading about it, it's deeply disturbing. It
is. Convict leasing was a remarkably cynical
and brutal loophole in the justice system. Following
the abolition of slavery, southern states passed
what were known as vagrancy laws. These laws
essentially made it a criminal offense to be
unemployed. or even just to be unable to prove
employment. Wait, so you could be arrested just
for not having a job? Basically, yes. An African
-American man could be arrested for simply walking
down the street if he couldn't produce a document
proving he worked for a white landowner. It's
a manufactured crime designed entirely to generate
arrests. Precisely. And once arrested on these
trivial or completely fabricated charges, the
individual wasn't just put in a cell. The state
would lease these prisoners out to private companies.
Unbelievable. They provided forced, unpaid, brutal
labor for plantations, for railroad construction,
and, incredibly dangerously, for coal mines.
Private corporations essentially bought a disposable
labor force from the state justice system. I
really want to pause here and emphasize this
for you listening, because we can't just speed
past this. Holding this entire legal and economic
system together wasn't just the gavels of local
judges. It was absolute unchecked terror. Yes.
The violence. The statistics in our sources are
chilling. Nearly 3 ,500 African -Americans were
lynched between 1882 and 1968. It's a horrifying
number. And this wasn't random discrimination.
These weren't isolated hate crimes committed
by lone extremists. This was a systemic reign
of terror. It was a public. communal tool of
social control used to enforce the subjugation
we just mentioned. It was domestic terrorism,
plainly speaking. It was designed to send a message
to the entire community. You know, do not organize,
do not demand higher wages, do not attempt to
vote and do not challenge the social order or
this will be your fate. Yeah. When we look at
the historical data, the threat of this violence
motivated a massive portion of the early migrants.
They were searching for literal physical reprieve.
the basic human desire to wake up in the morning
and not fear for your life or the lives of your
children. So you have this suffocating blanket
of social terror, but then you layer the economics
on top of that, and it somehow gets even worse.
It does. Let's talk about the sharecropping system.
Let's do it. Because again, I think a lot of
us hear sharecropping in high school history
class and just think tenant farming. We think
of it as a standard landlord -tenant relationship.
But the math was entirely rigged, wasn't it?
Oh, completely rigged. It was an agricultural
system designed to ensure the worker could never,
ever win. Walk us through it. After the Civil
War, landless farmers, predominantly black, would
rent plots of land from a white landowner. The
agreement was that the farmer would pay for the
rent of the land. the seeds to plant and the
tools to harvest by giving the landowner a share
of the crop they produced at the end of the season.
But wait, mechanically, how do you pay for the
seeds and tools if you start with zero dollars?
Right. That's the catch. You buy them on credit
from the local commissary store. And here is
where the trap snaps shut. The landowner almost
always owned that local commissary store. Ah,
of course. So the landowner sets the exorbitant
prices for the supplies. The landowner sets the
astronomically high interest rates on that credit.
And then, at the end of the harvest, when it's
time to weigh the cotton and settle the debt,
the landowner is the one keeping the books and
determining the market value of the crop. So
it's essentially a rigged casino where all the
exits are blocked by armed guards. That's a great
way to put it. You're forced to play at the tables,
the house sets the odds, the house keeps the
score, and surprise surprise, no matter how hard
you work or how bumper the crop is, the ledger
at the end of the year always shows that you
owe the landowner more than you earned. Exactly.
And because of those vagrancy laws and debt peonage
laws we discussed earlier, if you owed a debt
to the landowner, it was illegal for you to leave
the land. So you're trapped. You were legally
bound to stay and work another year to try and
pay it off, which, of course, you never could.
It was perpetual, inescapable, multi -generational
debt. So the entire southern agrarian economy
is operating on this trapped, impoverished labor
force. But then, as our sources point out, Even
that deeply flawed rigged system suddenly collapsed.
Yes, the agricultural foundation of the South
began to crumble in the early 20th century. There
was a broader agricultural depression that lowered
global cotton prices, compounded by devastating
natural disasters like the Great Mississippi
Flood of 1927. Right. But the real killing blow
to the cotton economy wasn't weather or global
markets. It was an insect. The cotton bull weevil.
The bull weevil. I am fascinated by this detail.
Explain the mechanism of the boll weevil. Like,
how does a tiny beetle dismantle an entire regional
economy? Well, the boll weevil crossed into Texas
from Mexico in the late 19th century and slowly,
methodically, ate its way across the entire deep
south. It feeds specifically on cotton buds and
flowers. And cotton was everything, right? Exactly.
Because the entire southern economy was a monoculture
almost exclusively reliant on cotton as a cash
crop, the arrival of the weevil was apocalyptic.
It destroyed on a biblical scale. Landowners
went bankrupt and suddenly they couldn't even
afford to float the credit for their sharecroppers.
The system just broke. This brings up a massive
pushback question I have when looking at all
this data. OK, what of it? When you look at the
sheer numbers of people packing up and leaving
in this era, was this migration fundamentally
more about fleeing the terror of the Jim Crow
South? Or was it simply about chasing a paycheck
because the cotton crops had failed and people
were starving? I mean, are we looking at our
refugee crisis or an economic migration? What's
fascinating here is that the sources make a very
compelling case that you really cannot separate
the two. Really? They're that tied together?
The social and economic factors were deeply,
inextricably intertwined. You couldn't separate
the economic destitution of the sharecropping
system from the racial terror of lynching because
both were tools wielded by the exact same power
structure to achieve the exact same goal. Total
subjugation. Yes, total subjugation. You were
kept poor by the economic system and you were
terrorized by the social system if you tried
to challenge your poverty. I see. So when the
boll weevil destroyed the cotton, the economic
justification for keeping people trapped on the
land started to fracture. The terror remained,
but the meager survival aspect, like the bare
minimum caloric survival of sharecropping, vanished.
Yes. The Pulitzer Prize -winning journalist Isabel
Wilkerson, whose exhaustive work on the subject
is heavily cited in our sources, notes that despite
the profound trauma of these conditions, and
despite the monumental barriers they faced in
leaving, The migration was ultimately an act
of individual and collective agency. I love that
quote. She describes it beautifully as a declaration
of independence that was written by their actions.
They didn't just passively get swept away by
economic currents, they made calculated courageous
decisions to reclaim their autonomy. which transitions
us perfectly into the timeline of the Exodus
itself. We are looking at this migration in two
distinct waves. Let's examine the first wave,
which covers the period from roughly 1910 to
1940. OK, the first wave. We've clearly established
the push. You know, the southern economy is collapsing
and the social conditions are a waking nightmare.
But. Millions of people can't just move unless
there is a destination. A pulled door to walk
through, essentially. Right. You don't just wander
aimlessly. Exactly. You can't just walk hundreds
of miles north on a whim. There had to be an
equally powerful magnet pulling them up. And
according to the historical data, that door was
blown open by a sudden, massive geopolitical
shock. It was a shock that completely scrambled
the global labor market. World War I. Let's break
down the mechanics of this, because it's a fascinating
chain reaction. Before the outbreak of World
War I, northern factories, the engine of American
industry, relied heavily on a steady, seemingly
endless stream of European immigrants for cheap
labor. Yes, the immigration pipeline. The sources
give us a staggering statistic to illustrate
this. In the year 1914, around 1 .2 million European
immigrants arrived in the United States. But
the very next year, 1915, as the war raged across
Europe and the Atlantic became a naval battleground
with U -boats disrupting shipping, that number
plummeted to just 300 ,000. That is nearly a
million workers suddenly vanishing from the expected
labor pool in a single calendar year. Right.
The pipeline was completely severed and at the
exact same time Domestic workers in the U .S.
were being drained from the labor supply because
of military enlistments. Young men were putting
down their tools and picking up rifles to go
fight. So northern industrialists look around
and their factories. I'm talking the massive
steel mills of Pennsylvania, the expanding railroad
networks, the chaotic meatpacking plants of Chicago,
the burgeoning automobile industry in Detroit.
They are utterly desperate, desperate for bodies.
Yeah, they have massive lucrative wartime production.
quotas to meet for the government and literally
nobody to work the assembly lines. This created
an unprecedented wartime opportunity in the north.
Suddenly the northern industrialists had to look
domestically for a massive new labor supply and
they turned their eyes toward the untapped heavily
subjugated labor force languishing in the American
south. And they didn't just put ads in the paper
and hope people showed up right. The sources
detail how they actively covertly went hunting
for workers. They did. Northern businessmen actually
sent labor agents down south. Just showing up
to recruit. Yes. And they had to be covert about
it because, as we'll discuss later, southern
authorities did not take kindly to this. But
the incentives these northern agents were offering
were completely wild compared to the sharecropping
reality. The contrast was night and day. These
labor agents offered free transportation, literally
handing out train tickets. Wow. They offered
low -cost housing upon arrival. And the wages,
the wages could be double, triple, or even more
than what a worker could theoretically make in
the South. And crucially, it was paid in actual
cash, not in rigged commissary credit. To put
the scale of this demographic shift into perspective,
James Gregory's calculations in his book, The
Southern Diaspora, which is referenced in our
stack, show that the pace accelerated dramatically
with the outbreak of the war. It really spiked.
By 1930, there were 1 .3 million former Southerners
living in other regions. To contextualize that,
in the year 1900, only about 740 ,000 African
Americans lived outside the South in total. That
was just 8 % of the nation's Black population.
Within a few decades, they more than doubled
the entire population living outside the South.
It's a profound historical irony. If you think
about it, here's where it gets really interesting.
Expand on that. What's the irony? The irony is
that the unprecedented carnage of global warfare
happening thousands of miles away across the
Atlantic Ocean was the exact catalyst required
to break the domestic labor gridlock here in
America. Oh, yeah. The sudden halt of European
immigrant labor forced northern industrialists
who previously had little interest in black southern
labor to actively aggressively court the very
people that southern elites were systematically
subject The war created a sudden desperate demand
for their existence as free laborers. And I think
it's important to note that these industrial
jobs waiting for them in the north were not a
walk in the park. working in a 1920s Pennsylvania
steel mill next to a blast furnace, or standing
on the disassembly line of a Chicago meatpacking
plant that was grueling, exhausting, and highly
dangerous work. Oh, absolutely. The conditions
were brutal by modern standards. But the sheer
existence of a wage, a physical cash wage that
you earned with your sweat and kept in your pocket,
completely outside of the rigged ledger of a
sharecropping landlord, was revolutionary for
these migrants. It's real freedom. represented
economic agency. And the shift was massive. Between
1910 and 1920, the number of black workers employed
in industry nearly doubled, growing from roughly
500 ,000 to over 900 ,000. So that's the first
wave. The boll weevil pushes and the World War
I industrial boom pulls, but then history rarely
moves in a straight line. No, it doesn't. The
momentum hits a massive wall in the 1930s. The
Great Depression essentially froze this first
wave in its tracks. The northern jobs dried up,
factories closed down, the stock market crashed,
and the economic pull simply vanished. Nobody
is handing out free train tickets when unemployment
is at 25 percent. Right. The migration slowed
to a trickle during the 1930s. But it was only
a temporary pause. because as we move into the
1940s, the second wave of the Great Migration
begins. The second wave. And what's fascinating
here is that while the overarching theme of moving
north and west remains the same, this second
wave is driven by an entirely different set of
economic and technological engines. Let's break
down that shift, because if the first wave was
about World War I and the bull weevil, the second
wave running from the mid 1940s all the way to
1970 was defined by World War II and the invention
of a tractor. Exactly. Let's look at the World
War II. two aspects first, because it mirrors
the first ways but on a much larger scale. Just
like the first war, WWII created a massive urgent
defense buildup, which is what finally pulled
the country entirely out of the depression. Our
sources highlight Louisville, Kentucky as a prime
specific example of this war boom economy. Louisville's
defense industry absolutely exploded overnight.
What were they actually building in Louisville?
Everything the military needed. They built plants
producing synthetic rubber, smokeless powders
from munitions, artillery shells. The conversion
of civilian industry to military production was
total and sweeping. Right. The whole economy
pivoted. The Ford Motor Company converted its
massive assembly plant there to stop making civilian
cars and start producing military jeeps. I read
this detail in the sources and it blew my mind.
Even the company Hilleric and Bradsby, which
most people know as the manufacturers of the
famous Louisville slugger baseball bats, completely
switched their production lines. That's an incredible
detail. They stopped turning baseball bats on
their lathes and started making wooden gun stocks
from military rifles. It perfectly illustrates
the total mobilization of the economy from hitting
home runs to equipping soldiers. And this defense
industry in Louisville alone reached a peak employment
of over 80 ,000 workers. Now, it is crucial to
note that initially these lucrative defense jobs
were not open to African Americans due to widespread
systemic discrimination by the factory owners
and white labor unions. So how did they break
through that barrier? Because the sources say
this became a massive pull factor for the second
wave. They broke through through intense political
pressure. Civil rights leaders, most notably
a Philip Randolph, threatened a massive march
on Washington to protest the exclusion of black
workers from their offense. Boom. OK, so a direct
threat to the government. Exactly. Under this
intense pressure and facing a desperate need
for maximum labor output to win the war, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order
8802. This created the Fair Employment Practices
Committee. And what did that do exactly? It officially
banned discriminatory employment practices by
federal agencies and all unions and companies
engaged in war -related work. It forced these
massive industries to finally open their doors.
So you have this massive federally mandated opening
of high paying industrial jobs in the north and
west. But simultaneously there was an irreversible
technological push happening down south. The
first wave was pushed by an insect destroying
the crop. The second wave was pushed by a machine
harvesting the crop perfectly. Right. We're talking
about the widespread mechanization of agriculture
in the 1930s and 1940s. The invention and adoption
of the mechanical cotton picker, most notably
the one developed by the Rust Brothers, along
with the widespread use of tractors, fundamentally
and permanently altered the southern landscape.
I'm trying to visualize the sheer socioeconomic
impact of this. Sharecropping had survived everything
up to this point, right? Depressions, the bull
weevil, new laws, floods. Why was a tractor the
thing that finally killed it? Because it changed
the fundamental math of the agrarian economy.
A mechanical cotton picker could do the work
of 50 manual laborers in a fraction of the time
without needing to rest and without needing to
be housed or fed via a commissary store. The
machine just replaced the man. It did. Mechanization
brought the institution of sharecropping, which
had existed in various forms since the Civil
War, to a definitive, unceremonious end. I mean,
put yourself in those shoes for a second. Imagine
being a sharecropper in the 1940s. You've lived
your whole life and your parents lived their
whole lives, working this specific plot of dirt.
You are trapped in debt. Suddenly, a landowner
buys a tractor. It rolls up, does the harvest
in an afternoon, and your job is just... Done.
Gone. Manual agricultural labor isn't just underpaying
anymore. It is entirely obsolete. Where do you
go when the only economy, the only land, suddenly
explicitly tells you it no longer requires your
physical existence? You have absolutely no choice
but to go where the jobs are. And the scale of
this second wave completely dwarfs the first.
According to our demographic data, approximately
1 .4 million Black Southerners moved north or
west in the 1940s alone. 1 .4 million in just
one decade. That was followed by another 1 .1
million in the 1950s and then a staggering 2
.4 million people in the 1960s and early 1970s.
So wait, let me make sure I'm tracking the overarching...
Timeline and demographics here. Let's do an episode
focus check. Sure. If my grandfather moved during
the first wave, say around 1920, he was likely
a rural agricultural worker pushed by the ball
weevil and pulled by WWI steel mill shortages
heading to places like Chicago or Pittsburgh.
But if my father moved during the second wave
in the 1950s, it's a completely different dynamic.
Very different. The second wave migrant is being
pushed out permanently by tractors making manual
farming obsolete and pulled by massive post -WWII
economic prosperity. Right. It's permanent obsolescence
versus a temporary crop failure. Exactly. And
crucially, this second wave included a much higher
percentage of townspeople with existing urban
skills mechanics, domestic workers, tradespeople,
not just rural farmers. And the destinations
expanded too, right? Yes. The first wave was
primarily focused on the Northeast and the Midwest.
The second wave saw massive migration routes
open up to Western cities. People were heading
to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle,
and Portland to work in the booming aerospace
and shipbuilding industries out there. Which
opens up a huge logistical mystery for me. We
just nonchalantly threw around numbers like 1
.4 million and 2 .4 million people moving. Millions
of people don't... just magically teleport across
the country. And remember, we are talking about
an era long before the internet, before smartphones,
before GPS or social media networks. Oh, absolutely.
The logistics are mind boggling. Right. I want
to know the mechanics. How did these families
know exactly where to go, how to get there, and
how did they coordinate it all while living under
a regime of terror that actively wanted to prevent
them from organizing? This brings us to the fascinating
sociology of the migration. The movement was
heavily dictated by something sociologists refer
to as chain migration. Chain migration? The patterns
of where people ended up weren't random at all.
They were deeply tied to geography, specifically
longitudinal lines and existing transportation
networks, particularly the major railroad lines.
So it's not like a family in rural Georgia threw
a dart at a map of the United States and said,
I think we'll try our luck in Seattle. Not at
all. The routes were highly predictable based
on train infrastructure. For instance, almost
half of the migrants leaving Mississippi during
the first Great Migration ended up in Chicago.
Why Chicago? Because they would simply board
the Illinois Central Railroad, which ran a straight
shot right at the middle of the country from
New Orleans through Mississippi directly into
Chicago. That makes perfect sense. Meanwhile,
people migrating from East Coast states like
Virginia or the Carolinas tended to follow the
Eastern Seaboard train lines straight up to Philadelphia,
New York, or Boston. And people from Texas and
Louisiana were much more likely to utilize the
Southern Pacific rail lines heading west to Los
Angeles or Oakland. They followed the iron paths
of the people who went before them. The sources
note a fascinating 2021 economic study on these
migration networks. Oh, the 1 .9 multiplier study.
Yes. It found that when one randomly chosen African
-American moved from a southern birth town to
a specific northern destination county, an average
of 1 .9 additional black migrants made the exact
same move to the exact same county. That 1 .9
figure is the literal numerical proof of the
network effect in action. You don't go to a random
city. You go where your uncle went five years
ago or where your former neighbor from down the
road went. Because it's safer. Exactly. Because
when you arrive in a strange, overwhelming industrial
city, they can help you find a room to rent in
their boarding house. Or they can put in a good
word for you with the foreman at the meatpacking
plant to get you a job. It lowers the extreme
risk of the journey. But the network had to be
much larger than just word of mouth, right? Word
of mouth doesn't move six million people. The
ultimate information hub of the great migration,
the real logistical engine, was a newspaper.
The Chicago Defender. The historical importance
of the Chicago Defender cannot be overstated.
It was a primarily black owned and operated newspaper
based in Chicago, but its reach was national.
It served as a massive intentional catalyst for
the migration. It wasn't just a passive observer.
No, not at all. It didn't just passively report
the news of the day. It actively aggressively
campaigned for black southerners to pack up and
leave the South. They explicitly called the North
the promised land. And they weren't subtle about
their editorial stance. They published blazing
headlines exposing Southern lynchings alongside
powerful editorial cartoons depicting the horrors
of Southern subjugation contrasted with the opportunity
and freedom of the North. It was incredibly bold.
But beyond the ideology, they provided the actual
literal logistical blueprint. Yes, the practical
information was what made it so revolutionary.
The Defender published job listings directly
from Northern factories. They published train
schedules and ticket prices. They printed letters
from successful migrants who had already made
the journey detailing their new wages and living
conditions. They gave people the actionable intelligence
they needed to plan an escape. They did. In fact,
the Defender famously designated a specific date,
May 15, 1917, as the Great Northern Drive. The
Great Northern Drive. Yes. Their goal was to
establish a coordinated movement where over 100
,000 African Americans would migrate to Chicago
alone during the height of the WWI labor shortage.
But it raises another mechanical question. If
this newspaper is publishing train schedules
and telling people to flee the south, and the
southern landowners are desperate to keep their
sharecroppers trapped, how on earth is a Chicago
newspaper reaching a rural farm in Mississippi?
I mean, they couldn't just drop it in the mail.
No, it was essentially a massive smuggling operation.
Southern authorities eventually realized what
the defender was doing and tried to completely
ban its distribution. They confiscated it from
the mail and threatened anyone caught reading
it. How did it get through? So the distribution
relied heavily on black Pullman railcar porters.
These were the men who worked the sleeper cars
on the trains traveling between the north and
south. They would secretly bundle stacks of the
Defender in Chicago, hide them in the train ceilings
or in the dirty laundry bags. And as the trains
rolled through the south, they would covertly
toss bundles off at specific junctions or hand
them off to local barbers and preachers who would
distribute them underground. It's incredible.
It's like an early analog underground version
of crowdsourcing or, you know, a primitive social
network. Instead of a Facebook group or a subreddit
organizing a movement, you had the Chicago Defender
passed hand to hand in secret and you had what
the sources call migration clubs. Yes, historian
Joe Trotter explains how African -Americans formed
these clubs as localized logistical nodes in
the safety of barbershops, pool rooms, churches
and lodge halls. People would gather this smuggled
information. They debated the pros and cons of
moving. Like a strategy meeting. Exactly. And
crucially, they pooled their meager financial
resources together to buy train tickets at reduced
group rates or to fund the journey of one member
who would then send money back for the rest.
I just want to sit with this for a second because
this is astounding. This wasn't a chaotic, panicked
scatter of refugees fleeing into the night. It
was a highly organized, community -driven, logistical
masterclass. It really was. They funded and executed
a mass exodus of millions of people without any
modern technology, relying on smuggled newspapers
and pooled pennies, all while actively being
surveilled and threatened by heavily armed local
authorities. If we connect this to the bigger
picture... It is a testament to extraordinary
organizational capability under duress, which
naturally brings us to the reaction to this mass
movement. Right. Because as Newton's third law
states, every action has an equal and opposite
reaction. When you certainly shift millions of
people and thousands of tons of economic labor
out of one region and into another, the people
left behind and the people in the new destination
are going to react. And according to our sources,
they reacted dramatically and often violently.
Let's look at the southern panic first. As the
migration accelerated, a glaring paradox in the
southern economy was suddenly exposed for everyone
to see. The paradox is that southern white elites
treated African Americans with extreme violent
hostility, subjecting them to intense legal discrimination,
disenfranchisement, and terror. They explicitly
campaigned on platforms of white supremacy. Yet
their entire agrarian economy their immense personal
wealth was utterly completely dependent on the
presence of those exact same African Americans
as an abundant captive supply of cheap labor.
They hated them socially, but they desperately
needed them economically to pick the cotton.
A South Carolina politician actually summed this
paradox up perfectly in a quote from our sources.
He said, politically speaking, there are far
too many Negroes, but from an industrial standpoint,
there is room for many more. Wow. So initially,
in the very early 1910s, some of the white elite
actually thought the initial trickle of migration
was a good thing. They thought it was just siphoning
off surplus unemployed labor. Oh, they thought
it was helpful. But as the sheer volume of the
migration became clear, as the trains kept rolling
out full of workers and coming back empty, the
South began to severely panic. The labor force
they relied on to maintain their wealth was quite
literally vanishing into thin air. And they tried
to stop it. And as we've established, they didn't
just ask nicely. They did try to raise wages
slightly to compete with the northern factories,
but when that failed, they used the law and outright
violence to trap people. They leveraged every
tool of the state. Local governments across the
South passed harsh new work -or -fight laws.
More laws just to trap them. Yes. These demanded
that all males either be employed locally by
a white landowner or be conscripted into the
military or forced labor. They passed ordinances
requiring labor agents from the North to pay
exorbitant licensing fees, sometimes tens of
thousands of dollars, just to operate in a southern
town. Effectively outlawing recruitment. Exactly.
And when the legislation failed to stop the tide,
they resorted to physical intimidation. The sources
detail how local police and deputized mobs would
literally show up at the train stations. Yes,
the platform violence. They would beat people
waiting on the platforms, physically tear up
the train tickets they had saved for months to
buy, and terrorize them into returning to the
farms. The situation became so egregious that
the U .S. Secretary of Labor at the time, William
B. Wilson, actually had to issue official statements
condemning these tactics for interfering with
the natural constitutional right of American
workers to move freely between states. But despite
the beatings and the torn tickets, the migrants
kept leaving. They found other stations. They
walked miles to catch trains in the next county.
They hid in the baggage cars. They were determined.
But the tragic reality is that when they finally
arrived in the North, seeking the promised land
they had read about in the Defender, the reception
they received from the locals was deeply hostile
as well. Let's unpack the northern hostility.
We mentioned earlier that northern factories
were desperate because European immigration had
plummeted. Well, there were already established
working class European immigrants living in these
cities, like the Irish and the Italians, who
had recently fought bitter battles to secure
their own positions and wages in these northern
factories. And suddenly these established ethnic
working class neighborhoods felt deeply economically
threatened by this massive sudden influx of new
labor competition from the South. They viewed
the black migrants as a threat to their wages,
especially since industrialists would sometimes
cynically use the migrants as strikebreakers.
The labor unions, which were supposed to protect
workers, turned against them. The American Federation
of Labor, the AFL, which was the dominant union
force, actually indicated for strict segregation
between European Americans and African Americans
in the workplace. That's right. White workers
routinely staged nonviolent walkouts, shutting
down production lines to protest the integration
of the factories. And tragically, the tension
rapidly escalated from nonviolent walkouts to
horrific, lethal violence. The competition for
jobs, combined with intense competition for limited
housing in these rapidly overcrowding cities,
created a powder keg. In 1917, the East St. Louis
riot exploded. It became one of the bloodiest
workplace and racial riots in American history.
Mobs of white workers attacked the black community,
killing anywhere between 40 and 200 African -Americans,
burning neighborhoods to the ground and displacing
over 6 ,000 people from their homes. I want to
slow down here because the scale of the violence
is staggering and East St. Louis was just the
prelude. The violence peaked shortly after the
end of World War One. Yes. The summer of 1919
came to be known as the Red Summer because of
the prolonged incredibly violent rioting that
erupted between black and white Americans across
dozens of major U .S. cities, Washington, D .C.,
Omaha, Knoxville, and many others. The violence
was particularly acute in Chicago. Returning
white soldiers from WWI came home expecting their
old factory jobs, only to find that black men
had taken those positions during the war. And
they were often willing to work for far less
due to their sheer desperation to escape the
South. Right. The economic tension boiled over.
It exploded into warfare on the streets. 38 people
died in Chicago during the Red Summer Riots.
Over 500 were severely injured and a thousand
were left completely homeless as their residences
were torched. And as the decades progressed and
the second wave brought even more millions of
migrants into the northern and western cities,
the hostility didn't disappear. It just transmuted.
It shifted from overt physical mob violence to
insidious structural state -sponsored violence.
I'm talking about the weaponization of exclusionary
housing policies. Let's explain the mechanics
of this because this is how the modern American
city was geographically shaped. We are talking
about systemic redlining and mortgage discrimination.
How did redlining actually function as a financial
quarantine? Well, the federal government, through
the homeowners loan corporation, literally created
maps of every major American city. They evaluated
neighborhoods to determine how safe they were
for banks to issue mortgages. Neighborhoods with
African -American populations, regardless of
the actual wealth or stability of the residents,
were outlined in red ink. Literally a red line.
Yes. This red lining officially designated the
area as hazardous for investment. which meant
that banks would simply refuse to give a mortgage
to anyone trying to buy a home in that redlined
area. And at the same time, white suburbs implemented
restrictive covenants, which were legal clauses
in the property deeds explicitly for hitting
the sale of the home to anyone who wasn't white.
Right. So you have millions of black migrants
arriving, but they are financially quarantined.
They can't get a loan to buy a house in their
own neighborhood. And it's illegal for them to
buy a house in the suburbs. It was an invisible
economic wall that replaced the physical terror
of the South. Let's look at the statistics regarding
the GI Bill after World War II to see how devastating
this was. OK, let's look at the numbers. The
GI Bill is historically hailed as the great engine
of the American middle class, allowing returning
veterans to buy homes and build generational
wealth. But our sources highlight a staggering
disparity. In the expanding suburbs of New York
and northern New Jersey after the war, 67 ,000
mortgages were insured by the GI Bill. 67 ,000
new suburban homes. Out of those 67 ,000 mortgages,
fewer than 100 were taken out by non -white veterans.
Wait, less than 100. Less than 100. Out of 67
,000. Exactly. The federal backing was systematically
denied to black veterans due to redlining and
restrictive covenants. Less than 100 out of 67
,000. That is the exact mathematical definition
of systemic exclusion. So the millions of arriving
migrants were forced by these invisible boundaries
into incredibly overcrowded, geographically constrained
inner -city neighborhoods creating what sociologists
termed black metropolises. So we have to ask
ourselves what does this all mean? for the human
beings actually living through this. Right. Put
yourself in the shoes of a migrant. You exhibit
incredible bravery to escape the sharecropping
debt traps and the terrifying threat of lynching
in the South. You take a train north, seeking
the promised land you read about in a smuggled
newspaper, only to be met with workplace walkouts,
race riots like the Red Summer burning your neighborhood,
and bankers literally redlining a map so you
can never build wealth through home ownership
in the suburbs. It's overwhelming. It sounds
like an inescapable, crushing nightmare from
every direction. What it means is that we must
recognize the profound, almost unimaginable resilience
of this demographic. They were physically threatened
and legally trapped in the South, and they were
systemically walled off and financially quarantined
in the North. Yet they survived. They more than
survived. Exactly. They didn't just survive,
they adapted. Barred from participating in the
wider white economy of the city, they built thriving,
self -sustaining, internal economies within these
redlined districts. They built their own ecosystem.
They did. They built their own banks because
the downtown banks wouldn't lend to them. They
built their own insurance companies, their own
thriving newspapers, massive church congregations,
and vibrant cultural institutions in places like
Chicago's Bronzeville, New York's Harlem, and
Pittsburgh's Hill District. They turned their
quarantine zones into thriving metropolises.
Which carries us right into the profound cultural
impact of this movement. Because when you push
millions of people seeking freedom into concentrated
northern urban enclaves, and you explicitly bar
them from integrating into the wider suburban
society, you inadvertently create massive, highly
pressurized incubators for unprecedented cultural
creativity. The concentration of talent was incredible.
The concentration of experience, pain, hope,
and sheer proximity resulted in an explosion
of art. Let's get into the influence on northern
music and literature. The Great Migration directly
laid the demographic foundation for some of the
most important cultural movements in American
history. The most famous, of course, being the
Harlem Renaissance in New York and the Chicago
Black Renaissance. The density of these neighborhoods
allowed artists, writers, and musicians to collaborate,
influence one another, and build a massive audience
that shared their specific generational experience.
The literature that emerged from this period
is foundational to the American canon. The Chicago
Defender, which we talked about earlier as a
purely logistical hub publishing train schedules,
also evolved to act as a crucial cultural cornerstone.
Yes, they became a literary hub. They published
the early writings and poems of literary titans
like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, who
are capturing the rhythm and reality of the urban
migrant experience. And in the theater, you have
playwrights like August Wilson. His masterpiece,
the Pulitzer Prize -winning Play the Piano Lesson,
draws direct inspiration from the legacy of the
migration, exploring the tension between the
trauma left behind in the South and the struggle
to build a new life in the North. Oh, absolutely.
And in the visual arts, you have figures like
Jacob Lawrence. When he was just a young man
living in New York in 1941, he created the migration
series. Those paintings are iconic. Yes, an iconic
sequence of 60 vivid paintings chronicling the
exact journey we've been discussing today, the
struggles, the trains, the hopes of the African
-American migrants. It was exhibited at the Museum
of Modern Art and immediately cemented him as
one of the most important visual artists of the
20th century. But if we're talking about cultural
impact that rippled out, transcended the red
line boundaries and touched quite literally every
single person listening to this deep dive right
now. we have to talk about the music. We do,
because the Great Migration fundamentally, irreversibly
altered the trajectory of American and global
popular music. The sources detail how blues singers,
seeking to escape the exact same racial discrimination
and economic dead ends of the sharecropping fields
we discussed, packed up their guitars and joined
the migration. They moved from the rural acoustic
environments of the Mississippi Delta to the
industrial, crowded North, primarily flowing
up that Illinois Central Railroad line straight
into Chicago. We're talking about absolute legends
of the genre making this journey. Muddy Waters,
Chester Burnett, who the world knows better as
Howlin' Wolf and Buddy Guy. But the music couldn't
just stay the same. It had to adapt to its new
environment. Explain the mechanics of how the
sound actually shifted. Right. So down in the
rural south, the Delta Blues was primarily acoustic.
It was a man, an acoustic guitar, maybe a harmonica,
playing on a porch or in a small juke joint.
But when they arrived in the northern cities,
the environment was entirely different. Much
louder, I imagine. Exactly. They are playing
in crowded, incredibly loud clubs on the south
side of Chicago. You have the roar of the elevated
trains going by, the noise of a packed room of
factory workers letting off steam. An acoustic
guitar simply couldn't cut through the noise
of the bustling, crowded, industrial northern
city. So out of sheer acoustic necessity, they
adapted. They plugged in. They amplified the
instruments. The Great Migration, Birth, Chicago,
Electric Blues. They added drum kits, electric
bass, and amplified harmonicas to match the volume
and the frantic pacing of the urban environment.
There is a remarkably powerful quote in our sources.
from Delta -born pianist Eddie Boyd, speaking
to Living Blues magazine, that perfectly encapsulates
this intersection of geography, trauma, and art.
Let's hear it. He said, I thought of coming to
Chicago where I could get away from some of that
racism and where I would have an opportunity
to, well, do something with my talent. It wasn't
peaches and cream, man, but it was a hell of
a lot better than down there where I was born.
It's such a poignant reflection. The trauma didn't
magically disappear in Chicago, it just changed
shape. But he had the opportunity to wield his
talent. The Delta Blues didn't just move, it
morphed. It absorbed the grit, the sheer volume,
the electricity, and the frantic pacing of the
northern factory city. And we cannot overstate
the historical importance of that specific shift.
That electrified urban blues sound developed
by migrants like Muddy Waters in Chicago is the
literal, direct, undeniable foundation for modern
rhythm blues and subsequently rock and roll.
Exactly. You don't get Chuck Berry without Chicago
electric blues. You don't get the Rolling Stones
or Led Zeppelin without Muddy Waters and Howlin'
Wolf plugging in their guitars. And Muddy Waters
isn't playing an electric guitar in a Chicago
club if he isn't participating in the Great Migration
to escape the Mississippi Delta. The entire soundtrack
of the 20th century is a direct byproduct of
this demographic shift. The culture of the United
States was irreversibly transformed by the artistic
output of these concentrated resilient communities.
The art was born of necessity, forged in quarantine,
and ultimately conquered the world. Which brings
us to the synthesis of this massive 60 -year
journey. We've tracked an incredible historical
arc today. We watched six million individuals
pushed to the absolute breaking point by the
rigged economic collapse of the sharecropping
system and the horrific systemic racial terror
of the Jim Crow South. We saw them pulled northward
and westward by the insatiable industrial engines
of two world wars, navigating their way out of
the South via complex community networks, chain
migration, and smuggled papers like the Chicago
Defender. We saw them overcoming frantic southern
attempts to physically trap them at the train
stations and surviving northern attempts to redline
them into overcrowded slums. And ultimately,
despite every legal, physical, and financial
obstacle thrown in their path, their resilience
reshaped the political demographics, the literature,
the art, and the foundational music of the entire
country. The legacy of the Great Migration is
truly omnipresent. It is woven into the very
fabric of how America looks, sounds, and operates
today. It is. I want to remind you, the listener,
the next time you look at a demographic map of
the United States when you see large, vibrant
African -American populations in Detroit or Philadelphia
or Los Angeles or Seattle or the next time you
listen to a heavy electric blues guitar riff,
you are experiencing the direct living ripples
of the Great Migration. migration, you are looking
at the legacy of millions of individual acts
of courage. And yet history is never static.
The snow globe never truly settles permanently.
I want to leave the listener with one final fascinating
data point from our demographic sources that
brings the story full circle. OK, what is it?
Since the 1970s, as the industrial boom in the
northern Rust Belt faded and as the civil rights
movement secured hard fought political and social
gains in the South, there has been a documented
demographic phenomena. dubbed the new great migration
a reversal of the historical trend precisely
Driven by deindustrialization, colder climates,
and high costs of living in the North, juxtaposed
with lower costs of living and massive corporate
job growth in the New South, black Americans
are returning to southern states in massive numbers.
Wow, really? Returning south? Yes. The black
populations of metro areas like Atlanta, Charlotte,
Houston, and Dallas -Fort Worth have absolutely
exploded over the last few decades. The snow
globe is being shale again, but the snow is swirling
in the exact opposite direction. It's a fascinating
twist, and it challenges us to ponder a profound
question. What will happen to the cultural identity
of those historic northern black metropolises,
places like Harlem, Bronzeville, and Detroit,
now that the descendants of the original Great
Migration are charting a course back to the very
region, sometimes the very same states? Their
ancestors risked absolutely everything to escape
a century ago. It proves that the demographic
map of America isn't a settled picture at all.
The push and pull factors are always evolving,
always pulling people toward new opportunities.
The map is still being drawn. Thank you for joining
us on this deep dive. Keep questioning the map,
keep listening to the history and the music,
and we'll see you next time.