The great migration: a hundred years ago, blacks in the South began trekking north in search of a better life, changing America in ways still felt today.

• Author: Elder, Robert K.
• Position: TIMES PAST

When McKinley Morganfield lived in Mississippi, he wanted to be one of three things: "a heck of a preacher, a heck of a ball player, or a heck of a musician."

But in 1943, at age 28, Morganfield wasn't any of those things--at least not yet. He was earning 22.5 cents an hour working on a cotton plantation, and when he asked for a raise--to 25 cents an hour--his boss exploded in rage, prompting Morganfield to hop a train to Chicago.

"I got off that train, and it looked like Chicago was the fastest place in the world--cabs dropping fares, horns blowing, the peoples walking so fast," he later told The New York Times. "But I changed my luck all the way around when I moved up there."

He landed a job in a container factory, rented a four-room apartment, and within a few years was well on his way to becoming the legendary blues musician known as Muddy Waters. In fleeing the economic caste system and institutional racism of the South, Morganfield followed a path that black Southerners had begun to pave in 1916 and that lasted into the 1970s.

It's been 100 years since the start of what's known as the Great Migration, which saw 7 million black Southerners push north and west to escape racism and seek better jobs and opportunities. Black populations swelled in industrialized cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia (see chart, p. 18)--the largest demographic shift of any group in U.S. history. That shift radically transformed the nation in ways still felt today.

"It changed the whole profile and landscape of American cities: culturally, politically, and socially," says James R. Grossman, author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. "There was absolutely nothing about urban life that wasn't reshaped by the Great Migration."

Jim Crow & World War I

The factors that pushed so many Southern blacks to head north can be traced to slavery and its aftermath. For a brief window after the Civil War (1861-65), during the period known as Reconstruction (1865-77), life actually improved for African-Americans in the South. The 14th Amendment (1868) gave black people citizenship and equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment (1869) gave them voting rights. For a while, federal troops made sure that Southern states complied with the new rules.

But once the troops left in 1877, state and local governments in the South enacted a series of "Jim Crow" laws that discriminated against blacks politically, economically, and socially. (The name Jim Crow came from a popular 19th-century minstrel character and was used in the South as a derogatory term for blacks.)

The U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, a case involving segregated rail cars in Louisiana, essentially upheld Jim Crow by saying that "separate but equal" facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional. In everyday life, blacks in the South had to defer to whites, whether giving up their seats on a bus or letting whites pass on the sidewalk. If they didn't obey, they faced violence and even death. According to the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, almost 4,000 black men, women, and children were lynched by white mobs from 1877 to 1950.

In addition to the discrimination that pushed blacks out of the South, there were factors that pulled them north. The most important was the explosion of jobs in big cities during World War I (1914-18), when 5 million Americans left home to fight in Europe. Word spread among blacks that workers were needed in factories, slaughterhouses, and steel mills. (In some cases, northern manufacturers recruited black workers, even providing transportation.) The promise of a better life prompted 2 million blacks to leave the South from roughly 1916 to 1930 in a true grassroots movement.

Further encouraging this first wave was the newspaper The Chicago Defender. In 1916, its African-American publisher, Robert S. Abbott, read a report about black dockworkers in Jacksonville, Florida, leaving overnight for jobs in New Jersey--a revelation that led him to run ads for Northern jobs and openly urge black subscribers in the South to move north.

"He understood that migration could be a weapon to hurt the Jim Crow South," says Ethan Michaeli, author of The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America.

The Defender had black readers all over the nation, and many responded to the ads, even writing letters to the paper explaining why employers should hire them: "I am working hard in the South and can hardly earn a living," a man in Lutcher, Louisiana, wrote in 1917. "I thought to write and ask you for some information concerning how to get a pass for myself and my family."

At first, migration patterns (see map) tended to follow railroad lines. Later, blacks journeyed by car or bus, following friends and family who'd preceded them.

Culture & Political Power

Cities were transformed culturally, as jazz and blues music made their way to audiences in the North and West. Southern gospel music--which, along with jazz and blues, would stimulate the birth of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s--found a foothold above the Mason-Dixon line as more black churches sprang up to support new populations. The Great Migration also stoked what became known as the Harlem Renaissance (1917-35) in New York. It offered new opportunities for black writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and musicians like Louis Armstrong to redefine American arts and culture. And Southern cuisine also started to take hold in the North.

American political life changed too. Without the literacy tests and poll taxes that had been used in the South to prevent blacks from voting, African-Americans in the North could cast their ballots with minimal restrictions--and change the outcome of elections.

"Before the Voting Rights Act [of 1965], the Great Migration is what creates enfranchisement for millions of people," says Grossman. (This would later tip at least two presidents' elections: Franklin D...