The Great Migration

When the Industrial Revolution changed the economy of the United States from predominantly agricultural to predominantly industrial at the end of the nineteenth century, new opportunities opened up for African Americans who were former slaves or the descendants of slaves. Over the first several decades of the twentieth century, African Americans by the hundreds of thousands moved from rural areas in the South to the big industrial cities in the North in what came to be called the Great Migration. These migrants hoped to leave behind increasingly oppressive Jim Crow laws and mob violence directed against African Americans, as well as a poor agricultural economy worsened by a boll weevil infestation. World War I created a greater need for factory workers, because many workers were fighting and because it takes material goods to conduct a war, and many factories that had previously banned black workers...