A lack of job opportunities, coupled with agricultural setbacks (the boll weevil, flooding), made it difficult to climb out of that poverty if one remained in the region. So to improve their lot in life, nearly 5 million African Americans rode the rails, trekked, and otherwise made their ways north from 1890 to 1950, a movement otherwise known as the Great Migration. The North seemed to be a sort of Promised Land, offering jobs and hope for a more equitable life than in the South. Leaving behind the rural landscape and agrarian lifestyle that had been home for roughly three centuries since the first Africans had landed in Jamestown in 1619, most of these migrants stepped out of the southern countryside into sprawling metropolises and, far more often than before, out of rural work into industrial jobs. The transition was not a simple one, nor was it always even desirable.
The black press had done much to promote the North, “To die from the bite of frost is far more glorious than at the hands of a mob,” advised the Chicago Defender in the 1910s (Franklin and Moss, p.
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