The Great Migration: Crash Course Black American History #24

In 1910, 90% of Black Americans lived in the South. By 1940, around 1.5 million Black Americans had left their homes, and 77% lived in the South. By 1970, 52% of Black Americans remained in the South. People moved away for many reasons, including increased opportunity in the more industrial North and West. They sought a relatively safer life away from the lynchings and violence that were concentrated in the South. This Great Migration shaped 20th-century America in countless ways, but we're going to try to count some of them in this video.

VIDEO SOURCES
Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Urban Black Life (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010).
The Origins of Southern Sharecropping, Edward Royce, 1993

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[ld]

One interesting thing I learned about the Great Migration is how the place of origin often determined the destination.
Migrants from Louisiana and Texas often ended up I'm Los Angeles or Oakland, whereas migrants from Georgia went to New York.

[GambittheGray]

Sometimes this stuff is so heavy on my heart to watch. But I cannot stop for those it was even heavier on to live.

[CMAlongi]

For those looking to add to their reading pile: Isabel Wilkerson also wrote a great book called CASTE: THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS, analyzing the caste system of America, with comparisons to India and Nazi Germany. It's a very important read for anyone wanting to better understand how our social structure has come into being, how it works, and what we can do to end it.

[mattyisforlovers]

Will there be any content regarding the black experience during world war one? Thank you for such a great series. Been riveted since week one!

[TragicallyDelicious]

This feels especially poignant now, and I am so grateful you are here this week with this episode <3

[brianklebig]

You really pulled off an amazing feat with this video. I talk about the Great Migration in my mass media class specifically because it was so difficult to condense. Despite being one of the most important occurrences in the 20th century United States, almost nobody knows about it because it could not be distilled to a single article or clipping. There was no singular "event" that could be pointed to, so it slipped through the cracks of the old Bennett Model for news rooms. A combination of racism, attitudes, and the traits of the available mass media of the day have made this a badly overlooked and undertreated subject. We use it as a platform to discuss the values and limits of various media, and how they may impact our understanding of history and the present. I really appreciate your distilling of this information, and I hope that it gets the attention it deserves. I'll be using it in my class.

[pookalobster]

Looking at you grandma!!
Her family were sharecroppers. She's 1 of 11 kids. She moved from NC to IA in the 60s!!

[Scorpio]

I just watched the Migration episode of Crash Course Geography the other day, so it was neat hearing similar terms about being "pushed" out from somewhere and "pulled" towards another place for the Great Migration. Great timing!

[kristenthomas]

I’m so pleased with this channel. You do an amazing job of research and explaining for kids and unfortunately some adults.

[jeyflan]

Years ago I read The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. It was a great book on this topic!!

[alishawalker]

I love the delivery of your video. The pace, tone, and timing is perfect for school age children (middle school). I was previously turned off to the crash course videos, because they were very fast paced and had to follow because of how fast the presenter was speaking. However, I can't say enough how much I enjoyed this video. Kudos!

[Linares]

I'm from an american country that had lots of enslaved people, and often struggle to find good material about it, so even though this series is not about my country, it still has been pretty interesting.

[dankimbro]

This a fantastic series. Thank you from a middle school English teacher.

[nialcc]

Oh dear God, The Red Summer of 1919 is next. Why does these seem to get worse?

[Jcorry]

This was a particularly well written episode. Thanks!

[paulmadryga]

Sharecropping sounds an awful lot like Newfoundland's Mercantile system prior to them joining Canada (except the latter didn't have the debtor's-prison part) - just substitute poor farmers with poor fishermen, both parties getting profoundly screwed by The Man.

[infinitivez]

The important history we never learned in school. Maybe someday?

[mariowalker]

Man this bring me back to 2015 when I use to watch crashcourse American history.

[tahomalewis]

This was informative. Thank you for producing this episode.

[BeatriceGibson-vq]

This was informative. Thank you for producing this episode.. This is an important episode.