Between 1910 and 1970 more than six million African Americans fled the US South for cities and towns in the Northeast, Midwest, and western states. This massive movement of Black men, women, and children is called the Great Migration, and it changed the complexion, political economy, and culture of America. The Great Migration, like many migrations and immigrations from the American past, has primarily been described as the search for a better life. This notion of a better life is understood specifically within the context of job opportunities, reinforcing the idea of America as a land of prosperity. But as much as African Americans were searching for new economic opportunities, they were also seeking refuge from the crippling conditions of Jim Crow racial segregation from within the US, particularly in the South. Therefore, we must understand the Great Migration not just as a movement of people but also as a social movement where people resisted racial oppression with their feet. And this movement was part of a broader search for Black freedom: what many, with full biblical meaning, described as an “Exodus from Dixie.”

The Great Migration took place in two significant phases. The first phase happened between approximately 1915 and 1930 when more than 1.5 million African Americans moved, largely from southern cities and towns—not yet from the rural South—overwhelmingly to the Midwest and Northeast. Between 1940 and 1970, another 4.5 million African Americans also made the trek north. This second phase has been called the Second Great Migration or the Greater Migration. And it was this second phase that primarily drew African Americans from the rural South while also witnessing a larger stream of African Americans moving to the West. Increased Black mobility was influenced by greater access to new transportation technologies like the automobile, alongside improved road, bridge, and tunnel construction.

Yet even more than transportation technology, “migration chains” profoundly shaped the destination of different groups of migrants. Migration chains linked particular populations in the South with specific destinations or regions in the North. Family connections or pre-existing cultural, religious, and community ties in a northern destination helped encourage movement to one place over another. For example, even to this day, descendants of the Great Migration living in the Midwest can largely trace their family roots to Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Georgia. These migration chains continue to hold significance for tracing people’s historical roots. Such chains also help us understand the Black cultural trends in different locations, from regional language and foodways to political strategies and styles of dress. The various ways Black people in the North perceived or understood what it meant to be Black was heavily influenced by the migration chain that their family traveled.

The reasons for such a massive exodus have been largely understood in terms of what are called push and pull factors. The traditional view is that the two major phases of the migration orbited around the world wars because immigration from Europe stalled. As a result, wartime industry needed a new supply of labor. Therefore, African Americans were pulled north to feed increased demands in industry. But we must also consider the brutal realities of southern life: Jim Crow segregation, lynching, sexual violence, the backbreaking demands and exploitation of Black farmers through sharecropping, and the daily acts of disrespect in a racially unequal society. It is these push factors that help clarify the meaning of the Great Migration as part of a broader social movement for freedom. This freedom was not just tied to a bigger paycheck. Black migrants were pushed out of the South, propelled by desires for human dignity, control over one’s body, designs on a vision of collective justice, and sometimes the possibility of simply living without the constant threat of violence and death.

The US North, however, was never fully a promised land. African Americans continued to face new forms of racial injustice through lower wages, inferior housing and schools, or the explosive eruptions of race riots. Still, migrants helped transform segregated communities into organized blocs of Black activists, voters, and consumers. These restricted neighborhoods became “cities within cities” in places like Harlem (New York), Chicago’s South Side, or Central Avenue in Los Angeles. Such residential segregation was never the goal. But these communities still created American innovations including various forms of Black cultural renaissance; the new sounds of jazz, blues, and gospel music; and the independent Black economic system called policy or the numbers; now taken over by state lotteries. Driven by the desires for freedom in their native land, Black migrants bridged South and North to create new ways of living, learning, and imagining freedom. These activities remain central to our understanding of America—both its limits and its possibilities.