1915 marked the beginning of the largest domestic migration in American history.
Responding to demand for factory labor during World War I, and seeking to escape the desperate economic conditions and oppressive cruelty of the Jim Crow South, hundreds of thousands of Black Americans began relocating north.
Researchers William Collins and Marianne Wanamaker examined individual census records for thousands of working-age Black men during this time and were able to match their entries from the 1910 and 1930 censuses, letting us examine their geographic movements and eventual economic outcomes[1].
Each line in the map above represents a real person and their migration north, sometime between 1910 and 1930.
During this first wave of The Great Migration, around 1.2 million African Americans would leave the South[7].