primary source analysis paper

Racial Violence as Impetus for the Great Migration

Historians traditionally point to economic and social conditions as the primary causes for the Great Migration, but racist hate crimes played a role as well.

Employment of Negroes in Agriculture by Earle Richardson

 

courtesy  Digital Public Library of America

By:  Matthew Wills

February 6, 2019

 

 2 minutes

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The Great Migration during the first half of the twentieth century is one of the epic demographic transformations of the United States. People left the rural south in droves, and headed to Southern cities and, more numerously, to Northern cities. During the 1910s, for example, the South saw an out-migration of 450,000 African Americans. During the 1920s, an additional 750,000 moved away. In 1900, 90% of all African Americans had lived in Southern states. By 1930, it was 79%.

Sociologists Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck cite these numbers in  their exploration of how violence pushed African Americans to leave the South.  Traditionally economic and social conditions, as well as natural disasters, have been identified as the primary causes for this demographic shift, which continued through the 1960s—by 1970, 47% of all African Americans lived outside the South. As Tolnay and Beck explain:

During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries southern blacks were exposed to truly incredibly levels of lethal violence, both at the hands of white mobs and within the white criminal justice system.

Tolnay and Beck don’t claim that white supremacist terrorism has been ignored by historians of the Great Migration. But this racial violence has typically been considered a secondary factor. Tolnay and Beck argue that for some counties in the “black belt” of South Carolina and Georgia, it was more than that.

They show that the “exodus from southern counties was not uniform across the south.” The counties stretching across the north central border of South Carolina and Georgia had a record out-migration rate of greater than 35 per 1000 people during the period between 1920 and 1930. In these counties, “blacks were more likely to leave areas of more frequent lynching, and heavy out-migration was associated with lower levels of racial violence in following years.”