Harlem’s Renaissance

At the turn of the 20th century, more than 90 percent of black Americans lived in the South, where they endured violence and racial segregation. But in the early 1910s, as many as 500,000 African Americans fled the South. They left behind lives working as sharecroppers to take advantage of the many factory jobs that opened up in response to World War I (1914–1918). Another 700,000 black southerners left during the 1920s. They were the first waves in the Great Migration. The Great Migration was the movement of many black Americans from