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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - III. Population and Migration - 8. Migration - 1. Overview
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Chapter Migration 183
wandering locally. Perhaps, Negroes moved locally more than did whites
in the South since Emancipation gave them a psychological release, and
since they did not own much land to tie them down. Even today Negroes
are less ^‘attached to the soil” than whites, and the turnover of Negro share
tenants is high." But there was, for a long time, little long-distance migra-
tion out of the South. And even within the South the Negroes seem, on
the whole, to have become rather more tied to the districts where they
lived before Emancipation than they had been earlier when they were
productive capital owned by the employers, and when the plantation
economy was in its expanding stage. Outside the local migration, the only
numerically significant migration of Negroes between the Civil War and
the World War was from rural areas to cities within the South (including
Washington, D.C.).
The proportion of Negroes in the North and West^ rose from 5.1 per
cent in i860 to 10.4 per cent in 1910. In 1910 Negroes made up only 1.6
per cent of the total Northern and Western population (it was 1.2 per
cent in i860). In 1910, 79.3 per cent of all Northern Negroes lived in
cities (it was 64.3 per cent in i860). The urban Negro population in the
South increased during the same period from 6.7 to 22.0 per cent of the
total Negro population in the region. In i860 Negroes constituted 19.3
per cent of the Southern urban population and 24.5 per cent in 1910.
The Great Migration, starting in 1915 and continuing in waves from
then on, has brought changes in the distribution of Negroes in the United
States. The proportion of all Negroes living in the North and West rose
to 23.8 per cent in 1940, which signifies a total net migration between
1910 and 1940 of about 1,750,000 from the South.® Negroes constituted,
in 1940, 3.7 per cent of the total Northern population. Practically all of
the migrants had gone to the cities and almost all to the big cities. In 1940,
90.1 per cent of all Negroes in Northern and Western states outside of
Missouri lived in urban areas. New York City alone claimed 16.9 per cent
of all Negroes living in the North and West. If the Negroes of Chicago,
Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh are added to those of
New York, the proportion rises to 47.2 per cent. The rural North and
West still remain practically void of Negroes. The total Negro rural-farm
population outside the South was only 269,760 in 1940° as against 190,572
in 1910. In most smaller cities in the North Negroes are also absent, or
* See Chapter 1 1, Section 8.
**
In this chapter we include Missouri in the South together with the i6 states and the
District of Columbia, defined by the census as the South. The West, as we define it here,
includes all states west of the Mississippi River except Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas
and Oklahoma.
* Of these 269,760 Negroes, 218,963 were rural-nonfarm Negroes and only 50,797 were
rural farm Negroes. A comparable breakdown in the figures for 1910 is not available.
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