“G” is for Great Migration. During the 1910s and 1920s, hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the South for the urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest. Spurred by declining opportunities at home, this internal migration of Black Americans in the United States, dubbed the “Great Migration” by historians, significantly altered the racial makeup of the South Carolina population. In 1930, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that for the first time since 1820, a majority of South Carolinians were White. By 1930 there were more than 41,000 Black Carolinians living in New York state and they comprised ten percent of the Black population of Philadelphia. However, by the turn of the twenty-first century the lingering effects of the Great Migration were over as the 2000 census reported more Black Americans were moving into the state than leaving it.
“G” is for Great Migration
