James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration.

The Great Migration and Educational Opportunity

“…An additional 4.5 million moved during the second wave, from 1940 to 1970 (Census, 1979, Table 8). A key motivation for these migrants was better labor market opportunities (Scott, 1920;Henri, 1975;Gottlieb, 1987;Grossman, 1989;Marks, 1989;Gregory, 2005;Wilkerson, 2010). Manufacturing employment, which opened to Black workers with the onset of World War I, was an especially attractive pull factor, while declining opportunities in agriculture pushed migrants out of the South (Boustan, 2010).…”

“…These migrants relied on social networks to provide information and assistance with jobs and housing (Stuart and Taylor, 2021a). Migrants' information also came from labor agents-who offered paid transportation, employment, and housing-or newspapers from the largest cities, like Chicago and Pittsburgh (Gottlieb, 1987;Grossman, 1989).…”

African Americans, World War I, and the Awakening of a “Colored” Manifest Destiny

“…They thwarted African Americans' ability to realize their potential to excel and attain the full rights of citizenship (Anderson 1988;Fairclough 2007). These restrictions, in part, triggered the First Great Migration (1910Migration ( -1940, during which more than two million African Americans migrated to the Midwest and Northeast of the country to secure better living conditions and socioeconomic opportunities (Harrison 1991;Gregory 2005;Grossman 1989).…”

Race, Regional Origin, and Residence in Northern Cities at the Beginning of the Great Migration

“…On the one hand, as a result of serious housing shortages in northern cities, migrants frequently resided with relatives or friends who had come north before them. If coresidence with kin or friends was not a possibility, then migrants often lived in small "kitchenette" apartments, or as lodgers or boarders in the homes of black strangers (Drake andCayton [1945] 1962;Epstein [1918Epstein [ ] 1969Grossman 1989;Spear 1968). Obviously, such residential opportunities were more likely to have been available in areas of the city that contained large concentrations of African Americans.…”

“…First, we provide the first quantitative evidence describing residential settlement patterns and processes for southern migrants and native northerners near the onset of the Great Migration. Second, the cross-sectional nature of our data, representing several large northern cities, allows us to draw more general conclusions about neighborhood characteristics in northern cities than can be supported by studies of a single urban area (e.g., Bigham 1987;Bodnar, Simon, and Weber 1983;Du Bois [1899] 1990Epstein [1918Epstein [ ] 1969Gottlieb 1987;Grossman 1989;Philpott 1978;Spear 1968;Trotter 1985). Third, by also considering variation in neighborhood "quality" across racial and migrant-status groups, our analyses go beyond more traditional descriptions of racial and ethnic residential segregation early in the twentieth century (e.g., Hershberg et al 1979;Lieberson 1963Lieberson , 1980Massey and Denton 1993;White, Dymowski, and Wang 1994).…”