what effect did the great migration have on the african american population
Great Migration (African American) The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African-Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970.[1] Until 1910, more than 90 percent of the African-American population lived in the American South.[2] In 1900, only one-fifth of African-Americans living in the South were living in urban areas.[3] By the end of the Great Migration, 53 percent of the African-American population remained in the South, while 40 percent lived in the North, and 7 percent in the West,[4] and the African-American population had become highly urbanized. By 1960, of those African-Americans still living in the South, half now lived in urban areas,[3] and by 1970, more than 80 percent of African-Americans nationwide lived in cities.[5] In 1991, Nicholas Lemann wrote that the Great Migration:
History of Mississippi The first European explorers to settle in the area of the present-day state were French colonists, and later some Spanish and English, particularly along the Gulf Coast. European Americans did not enter the territory in great number until the early nineteenth century, and then they brought many enslaved African Americans with them to serve as laborers to develop cotton plantations along major riverfronts. Through the 1830s, the federal government forced most of the native Choctaw and Chickasaw people west of the Mississippi River. White planters developed an economy based on the export of cotton produced by slave labor along the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. A small elite group of planters controlled most of the richest land, the wealth, and the politics of the state, which seceded from the Union in 1861. Its river cities particularly were sites of extended battles during the Civil War, and there was widespread destruction.