Imagine being forced to flee from everything you love, everything you’ve ever known. From approximately 1916 through 1970, six million African Americans did just that. They suffered from one of the most significant migrations in history, as they were separated from their homes, forced to escape the harsh segregation laws, and seeking opportunities to pursue their dreams for themselves, their loved ones, and generations yet to come. This was the Great Migration. 

Isabella Cheeks, a freshman at Briar Woods High School, has relatives who were involved in this migration and has heard stories from numerous family members explaining, “African Americans have faced discrimination for hundreds of years. No matter the discrimination they faced they always found a way to keep pushing,” said Cheeks. 

Reconstruction was a period of time in the United States when the country tried to rebuild the South by giving previously enslaved people rights and freedom. This gave African Americans hope for a better tomorrow, also a guarantee that the conditions were going to improve.That is, until Jim Crow laws destroyed all those promises. Racial violence immediately became a constant threat to African Americans. 

Melissa Cooper, a professor at Rutgers University, who specializes in African American cultural and intellectual history, described in the PBS “The Great Migration Exodus” episode, “White supremacy and violent racism definitely intensified after Reconstruction, which made it very clear that the obstacles were going to remain.” 

Those dreams of new opportunities were no longer a reality, pushing many to migrate. Many African Americans migrated to the North, Midwest, or the West attempting to find freedom. These areas were depicted as someplace African Americans were able to live freely, unlike in the South. Segregation was not legalized in the North, therefore many African Americans thought they would be escaping the racial violence of the South. Unfortunately, that was not the case.    

Brian Graves, a descendant of migrants shared, “Our family decided to leave the South and go up North for greater opportunity. So they tried to leave what they had, the circumstance they had. They didn’t have that many job opportunities other than just farming, which was low pay. They also didn’t have the greatest living conditions.”

Within their communities, African Americans experienced housing discrimination, redlining, and restrictive covenant orders. This segregation pushed the African American communities to build their own neighborhoods within major cities. White people took this as a threat and decided to attack the African American dominated neighborhoods. African Americans faced injustice after migrating in cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. 

Steven Hahn, a specialist on the international history of slavery, emancipation, and race, on the construction of the American empire, and on the social political history of the nineteenth century of the United States noted in the PBS “The Great Migration Exodus episode”, “…moving to the North was not just escaping horrendous repression, it was also finding out that racism and racial discrimination and forms of Jim Crow were alive and well in the South,”

While in Chicago, living conditions proved to be much worse when compared to other major cities. Brutal riots occurred in each city, making it obvious that people of color were not welcomed. Housing issues and segregation limited the opportunities that African Americans were once so hopeful for.

As retold by Saje Mathieu, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota who earned a Ph.D. in African American Studies at Yale University explained in the PBS “The Great Migration Exodus” episode, “The Black neighborhood in Chicago is effectively under siege for three solid days. We can’t get food in there, we can’t get medicine in there. People can’t go to work. People are terrified.”  

Written in history forever, the Great Migration was not only a cry of despair, but an escape from the unthinkable.  

Picture credits: ITOLDYA420.getarchive.net