When Europe and much of the globe plunged into the First World War, African-Americans confronted a new situation. As the southern economy worsened and racial violence spread, new opportunities appeared in the North. Many African Americans gave up their dream of independent farms and left the land they had lived on for generations.

World War I spurred an economic boom in the U.S. Bustling factories and steel mills needed new workers. Yet the war had almost entirely halted immigration from Europe. Factory owners looked for a new work force. In cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York, opportunities opened for African Americans willing to move North and take difficult but higher-wage industrial jobs.

Many African-American southerners heard about such jobs through African-American newspapers such as the Chicago Defender. These newspapers suggested that northern cities offered not only new jobs, but also greater freedom, better schools, and more political rights. Robert Horton was a Defender reader. He made a good living as a barber, but resented Mississippi laws barring him from politics. Horton read in the Defender that African Americans in Chicago could "elect whom they wished." He began to circulate the Defender in his barbershop and soon mobilized a group of 40 neighbors who would support each other in migrating to Chicago.

Meanwhile, women like Clara Robinson played key roles, organizing church-based "migration clubs" that helped many to go North. These women had long nurtured their families, built communities, and sustained their churches and social organizations. Now, in the migration clubs, women exercised organizing skills: sharing news, planning their journeys, and helping each other prepare for and actually make this difficult move.

Soon hundreds of thousands of African Americans were riding the trains, heading North. As the Great Migration spread, however, some white southerners grew alarmed. The migration threatened the South's economy. Plantation owners who depended on African-American labor did all they could to discourage the movement. Some raised wages as an incentive to stay. Southern newspapers often ran headlines reporting racial violence in the North: "Whites Mob Negroes in Jackson Park." Some African-American migrants were forcibly removed from trains by police or railroad officials.

The migration also sparked debate among African Americans. Some, such as Booker T. Washington, the president of Tuskeegee Institute, felt African Americans should stay in the South and seek progress by relying on the land and technical training. But others agreed with scholar W.E.B. DuBois, a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who argued that black people should go North and strive for full political and economic equality. "The North is no paradise," said DuBois, "but the South is at best a system of caste and insult and at the worst a Hell."

While leaders debated, the migration clubs continued their work. Letters from the first wave of migrants encouraged others to follow. Between 1914 and 1918, more than 500,000 African Americans headed North; more than 50,000 African Americans arrived in Chicago alone. Stepping off the train in Chicago, African Americans found themselves in a world of new opportunities and old problems.

Smith/Shivery Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations

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