The decades-long movement, roughly from 1910 to 1970, in which an estimated six million Black Americans left the rural Jim Crow South for the industrial cities of the North, Midwest, and West — one of the largest internal migrations in American history. It was a mass act of self-liberation that turned a Southern, rural Black population into a largely urban one, built the great Black communities and political power of cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York, and carried Southern Black culture into the national mainstream, even as the migrants met new walls of segregation, hostile unions, and racial violence in the places they fled to.
Between about 1910 and 1970, some six million Black Americans packed what they could carry and left the South. No one ordered them to go and no one organized them. They simply left, one family and one train ticket at a time, until a Southern, rural people had become an urban one and the map of Black America was redrawn. They were fleeing a region where a Black man could be lynched for the wrong glance and where the law existed to keep him poor and powerless. They were chasing factory wages and the simple dignity of a city sidewalk. The North they reached was no promised land — it answered them with packed ghettos, closed unions, and bloody riots. But the leaving itself was the point. It was one of the largest acts of people voting with their feet in the nation's history, and it remade American cities, music, and politics in the process.