The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1970. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration (1910–30), numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration (1940 to 1970), in which 5 million or more people moved and to a wider variety of destinations. From 1965–70, 14 states of the South, especially Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, contributed to a large net migration of blacks to the other three cultural (and census-designated) regions of the United States. By the end of the Second Great Migration, African Americans had become an urbanized population. More than 80 percent lived in cities. 53 percent remained in the South, while 40 percent lived in the North and 7 percent in the West.
When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed
in 1863, less than eight percent of the African American population lived in the Northeastern or Midwestern United States, but this would begin to change over the next decade. The already recognized migration would be investigated by the U. S. Senate in 1880.
By 1900 this figure would increase by about 25%, with
about 90 percent of blacks still living in Southern states.
While the Great Migration helped educated African Americans obtain jobs, eventually enabling a measure of class mobility, the migrants encountered significant forms of discrimination. Because so many people migrated in a short period of time,
the African-American migrants were often resented by the urban European-American working class (often themselves recent immigrants); fearing their ability to negotiate rates of pay or secure employment, they felt threatened by the influx of new labor competition.
Migrants often encountered residential discrimination, in which white home owners and realtors prevented migrants from purchasing homes or renting apartments in white neighborhoods. In addition, when blacks moved into white neighborhoods, whites would often react violently toward their new neighbors, including mass riots in front of their new neighbors' homes, bombings, and even murder. ... By the late 1950s and 1960s, African Americans were hyper-urban, more densely concentrated in inner cities than other groups.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American)
Chicago Race Riot of 1919
The sociopolitical atmosphere of Chicago was one of ethnic tension caused by competition among many new groups.
With the Great Migration, thousands of African Americans from the South had settled next to neighborhoods of European immigrants on Chicago's South Side, near jobs in the stockyards and meatpacking plants. The ethnic Irish had been established first, and fiercely defended their territory and political power against all newcomers. Post World War I tensions caused frictions between the races, especially in the competitive labor and housing markets.
Beginning in 1910, thousands of African Americans started moving from the South to Chicago as one destination in the Great Migration, fleeing lynchings, segregation and disfranchisement in the Deep South. The Ku Klux Klan committed 64 lynchings in 1918 and 83 in 1919 in southern states. With the pull of industrial jobs in the stockyards and meatpacking industry beckoning as European immigration was cut off by World War I,
from 1916 to 1919 the African-American population in Chicago increased from 44,000 to 109,000, for a total of 148 percent during the decade.
The riot lasted for nearly a week, ending only after the government deployed nearly 6,000 National Guard troops. They stationed them around the Black Belt to prevent further white attacks. By the night of July 30, most violence had ended.
Most of the rioting, murder, and arson was the result of ethnic whites attacking the African-American population in the city's Black Belt on the South Side. Most of the casualties and property damage were suffered by blacks.Newspaper accounts noted numerous attempts at arson; for instance, on July 31, more than 30 fires were started in the Black Belt before noon and were believed to be due to arson. Steel cables had been put across the streets to prevent fire trucks from entering the areas.
United States President Woodrow Wilson pronounced white participants the instigators of the prolonged riots in Chicago and Washington, D.C.....The riot shocked the nation and raised awareness of racial problems. It also demonstrated the new willingness of African Americans to fight for their civil rights despite injustice and oppression.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Race_Riot_of_1919
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