The Great Migration of Black Americans from the Us South: A Guide and Interpretation

How does the appearance of a new immigrant group affect the integration of earlier generations of migrants? We study this question in the context of the first Great Migration (1915-1930), when 1.5 million African Americans moved from the US South to northern urban centers, where 30 million Europeans had arrived since 1850. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation induced by the interaction between 1900 settlements of southern-born blacks in northern cities and state-level outmigration from the US South after 1910. Black arrivals increased both the effort exerted by immigrants to assimilate and their eventual Americanization. These average effects mask substantial heterogeneity: while initially less integrated groups (i.e. Southern and Eastern Europeans) exerted more assimilation effort, assimilation success was larger for those culturally closer to native whites (i.e. Western and Northern Europeans). Labor market outcomes do not display similar heterogeneity, suggesting that these patterns cannot be entirely explained by economic forces. Our findings are instead more consistent with a framework in which changing perceptions of outgroup distance among native whites lowered the barriers to the assimilation of white immigrants.

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Selection and Economic Gains in the Great Migration of African Americans: New Evidence from Linked Census Data

American Economic Journal Applied Economics ◽

10.1257/app.6.1.220 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 220-252 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

William J. Collins ◽

Marianne H. Wanamaker

Keyword(s):

African Americans ◽

World War I ◽

Census Data ◽

Economic Status ◽

Great Migration ◽

World War ◽

Us South ◽

The Us ◽

The Great Migration ◽

New Evidence

The onset of World War I spurred the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the US South, arguably the most important internal migration in US history. We create a new panel dataset of more than 5,000 men matched from the 1910 to 1930 census manuscripts to address three interconnected questions: To what extent was there selection into migration? How large were the migrants’ gains? Did migration narrow the racial gap in economic status? We find evidence of positive selection, but the migrants’ gains were large. A substantial amount of black-white convergence in this period is attributable to migration. (JEL J15, J61, N32, N92, R23)

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Conclusion

Black Market ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469655581.003.0006 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 184-200

Author(s):

Aaron Carico

Keyword(s):

Black Americans ◽

Mass Incarceration ◽

Great Migration ◽

Racial Capitalism ◽

History Of ◽

The Great Migration

The conclusion turns to the trap of the ghetto where Black Americans found themselves caught in the wake of the Great Migration, on the brink of another reformation in U.S. slave racial capitalism. Linking the racial geography of these spaces to the history of slave racial capitalism, it outlines the colonialism inherent in segregation, from zoning laws to slumming to the Bronx “slave markets.” It connects the ghetto to the plantation and to the rise of the prison and mass incarceration, ending with the Watts uprising of 1965 and the call for total abolition.

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