Second Great Migration

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Second Great Migration

Overview

• In the early 1900s, African Americans migrated in large numbers from the South to northern, midwestern, and western states.
• Beginning around 1940, the Second Great Migration saw millions of African Americans again move out of the South.
• Others consider this movement of millions of African Americans to be a continuation of the migration that began after the Civil War.
• In either case, by 1970, over five million African Americans left the South to seek new opportunities in other regions of America.

• The First Great Migration took place in the early 1900s as newly mobile African Americans moved away from the South.
• Agricultural production lost pace while industry grew, spurring even more migration from the rural South to the industrialized North.
• This steady relocation slowed considerably during the Great Depression, prompting some to call 1930 the end of the First Great Migration.

The First Great Migration

The Second Great Migration

• The passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 meant increased voting power to elect African American mayors and congressmen.
• The shift from agriculture to urban living greatly boosted African Americans to middle-class status, helping the black population to be counted and heard.

• The Second Great Migration began with World War II. Between 1940 and 1970, about five million African Americans migrated from the South to the North.
• Not all African Americans traveled to the Northeast during the Second Great Migration.
• When African Americans arrived in the cities, their new factory jobs allowed them to join unions, which protected all workers on their rosters.
• Before the Second Great Migration began in 1940, the majority of black Americans lived in an agricultural setting.
• By the migration's end in 1970, over 80 percent of African Americans lived in cities.

Racial Strife

• Racial tensions grew and sometimes boiled over into riots.
• In cities like Detroit, housing was imbalanced with white landlords renting unsafe units to African Americans and charging unreasonable rents because of the demand for housing.
• Many of the urban centers left to African Americans by white flight turned into ghettos.
• James Gregory details one such account of Dona Irvin, who migrated with her husband, four-year-old son, and 10-week-old baby girl from Houston, Texas, to Oakland, California, in September 1942.
• Though African Americans were finding employment in Oakland, there was a shortage of living space.

• Dona and her family packed into her aunt's overcrowded flat.
• Racial tensions were high enough for the Irvins to consider moving back to Houston.
• Due to the spread of African Americans throughout the nation, racial inequality was no longer contained in the South.

Racial Strife (continued)

• Many urban African Americans with ambition and the ability to work were able to climb the ladder of success and change their circumstances.
• The image of African Americans was changing for the rest of the country.

Long Hot Summers

• The incident sparked days of violence in what came to be known as the Harlem Riots, which were the first in a series of incidents that would occur over several summers in the 1960s.
• In Watts, California, in 1965, a routine traffic stop led to a race riot.
• In six days of rioting, 4,000 people were arrested and 34 people were killed.
• News of the Watts riot ignited over 150 incidents in other cities..
• On April 4, 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. sparked the continuation of race riots. During the summer of 1968, 125 incidents broke out.