1970sThe reversal "began as a trickle in the 1970s, increased in the 1990s, and turned into a virtual evacuation from many northern areas in the first decade of the 2000s," says William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who has laid out the reversal in painstaking detail in his new book Diversity Explosion: How New ...
The rapid mobilization of resources and weapons during World War II prompted many African Americans to migrate to Northern and Western cities in search of jobs in the booming munitions industry.
Driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws, many Black Americans headed north, where they took advantage of the need for industrial workers that arose during the First World War.
The economy, jobs, and racial discrimination remained top factors for black migration to the North. The advent of World War II contributed to an exodus out of the South, with 1.5 million African Americans leaving during the 1940s; a pattern of migration which would continue at that pace for the next twenty years.
In the 1920s, Congress passed a series of immigration quotas. The quotas were applied on a country-by-country basis and therefore restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe more than immigration from Northern and Western Europe.
This second wave saw more migration to coastal cities of California, Oregon, and Washington. Oklahoma lost 23,300 African Americans, 14 percent of its black population, while the state of California gained 338,000. In 1930, there were slightly over 50,000 African Americans living in California's major cities.
After the 1880s, immigrants increasingly came from Eastern and Southern European countries, as well as Canada and Latin America. By 1910, Eastern and Southern Europeans made up 70 percent of the immigrants entering the country.
Like most immigrants that came before them, early 20th century immigrants came to better their lives. In Europe, many left their homelands in search of economic prosperity and religious freedom. Living conditions in Europe were degraded, as poverty and an exploding European population led to food shortages.
It was caused primarily by the poor economic conditions for African American people, as well as the prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld.
About 4.3 million African Americans migrated out of the southern United States between 1940 and 1970, an exodus known as the Second Great Migration. The first Great Migration occurred when African Americans moved north in the first decades of the 1900s.
African Americans migrated to Newark in the 20th century in search of a better life.