In the 1920s, more than 750,000 African Americans left the South--a greater movement of people than had occurred in the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. The large-scale relocation to the Northeast and West brought many other changes with it, as many largely rural people moved into cities for the first time.
The Great Migration witnessed the push and pull for African Americans from the South, The conditions of sharecropping, tenant farming, lynching and segregation were the push factors. The pull factors in the West and North included better jobs, housing, civil rights, freedom of movement, ability to participate in the political process.
