![]() ![]() ![]() As a young man, he moved to Chicago to work as a postal clerk. Richard Wright grew up in Mississippi, the grandson of enslaved people. Black families were pulled by the lure of higher wages, educational opportunities, and more personal freedom away from the segregation practices of the South. Northern factories were short on labor, and there were new opportunities in the West. (Library of Congress/Peace Photo)īlack newspapers and other media touted a better life in the North and West. Here, conductors pose in front of trolley car number 52, circa 1940. In the mid-20th century, African Americans were hired into skilled positions by the Philadelphia trolley car system. Before this period, 90 percent of Black Americans lived in the South, and after, just 53 percent did, she says. It eclipsed the Gold Rush and the flight from the Dust Bowl in terms of population movement within the U.S., according to Allyson Hobbs, a Stanford University historian. The Great Migration - which took place from 1916 to 1970 - saw 6 million African Americans move from the South to the North and West. (Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Panel 1: During World War I there was a great migration north by Southern African Americans., 1940įifty years after Black Americans ended a period of unprecedented movement in the United States, their journeys reverberate through U.S. Artist Jacob Lawrence, himself the son of Southern migrants, said he wanted to paint “the excitement, the crowds, the tension” of the Great Migration. ![]()
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