![]() "Sometimes they would even say, 'Well, I migrated from Texas to Los Angeles in 1947, would that mean that I was part of it?' And that would mean they were right smack in the middle of it. Interestingly, many of the people who Wilkerson encountered - who moved during the time period of 1915 to 1970 - had no idea that they were even part of the Great Migration. The book weaves together three narratives of ordinary people - a sharecropper's wife, a surgeon and a farm worker - making their way from the South to an uncertain future up North.ĭuring her research for the book, Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,000 people who made the migration from the South to Northern and Western cities. Wilkerson, whose parents were part of the Great Migration, details the mass exodus of African-Americans in her new book, The Warmth of Other Suns. the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration." "The suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where could live in the North And. " had such an effect on almost every aspect of our lives - from the music that we listen to to the politics of our country to the ways the cities even look and feel, even today," says Isabel Wilkerson. Between 19, cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland saw their African-American populations grow by about 40 percent, and the number of African-Americans employed in industrial jobs nearly doubled. This relocation - called the Great Migration - resulted in massive demographic shifts across the United States. ![]() (National Archives/Getty Images)īetween 19, more than 6 million African-Americans moved out of the South to cities across the Northeast, Midwest and West. In the 1920s, Harlem's African-American population exploded - with nearly 200,000 African Americans inhabiting a neighborhood where there had been virtually no blacks 15 years earlier.
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