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The Great Migration
In 1890, African Americans were the most rural racial or ethnic group in the United States; by 1960, they had become the most urbanized. During the first half of the 20th century, millions of African-American men, women, and children moved from rural communities to new urban ones: Southern cities such as Atlanta, Baltimore, Memphis, Houston, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C., and Northern destinations such as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, and Pittsburgh. According to the Census Bureau, in 1890, 20% of the 7,489,000 African Americans lived in urban areas, and 93% were born in the South. By 1970, 81% of the nation's 22,539, 000 African Americans lived in urban areas, and only 49% were born in the South.
Some left to escape the pervasive violence and oppression (renewed after the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877) they'd confronted in the South. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers wanted to escape a troubling economic cycle: they suffered considerable financial losses when crops failed, and when landlords demanded usurious rents during good harvests. And many families sought improved educational opportunities for their children in urban and Northern schools.
Would-be migrants learned of the promises that cities and the North held through personal correspondence, materials provided by northern employment agents to recruit new laborers, influential weekly African American periodicals like the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier, and the word-of-mouth of individual African Americans, like the Pullman Porters who worked on the railroads
During the industrial expansion following the first World War, men arriving in Northern cities typically found work in industry and manufacturing, where they expected -- and sometimes found -- higher wages, better conditions, and steady work; many black women found employment in domestic service as laundresses, cooks, or housekeepers for white families.
While migrants hoped that the movement to the North would better their living conditions overall, they still faced expensive rents along with the new hardship of urban overcrowding -- and they did not necessarily escape from the threats of white supremacy, discrimination, or violence.
In both the rural and urban U.S., civic and religious leaders anticipated how the major movement of African Americans could transform the texture and shape of black community life. To build and maintain the quickly expanding African American communities in urban centers, some formed migration clubs, while others built upon on existing social and religious networks to ease the transition to the new environment.
Quincy Jones' family's moves -- from Mississippi to St. Louis, from St. Louis to Chicago's South Side and eventually to Bremerton, Washington -- were typical of the gradual, multi-staged migratory paths upon which many families embarked.
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