When World War I began in Europe, immigration to the United States slowed sharply. Northern and Midwestern industry expanded wartime production and faced growing labor shortages, creating new incentives to recruit workers from inside the U.S., including the South.
As factories and railroads sought workers, recruiting agents increasingly targeted Black Southerners for industrial jobs. This recruitment interacted with long-standing push factors in the South—Jim Crow segregation, racial terror, and limited economic opportunity—helping turn individual moves into a mass migration.
The Chicago Defender, a widely read Black newspaper, promoted migration as a practical way to escape Southern oppression and pursue better wages in Northern cities. Its advocacy helped spread information about jobs, travel routes, and opportunities, especially through copies circulated in the South.
As the U.S. entered the war and the draft drew many men into military service, employers’ demand for industrial labor grew. Recruitment of Southern Black workers helped fill jobs in meatpacking, steel, railroads, and other industries, increasing migration to cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia.
In spring 1917, the Defender publicly framed migration as an organized “Great Northern Drive,” calling for coordinated movement to Northern industry. The campaign mattered because it linked wartime labor demand with a mass communication strategy aimed at Southern Black communities.
In early July 1917, white mobs attacked Black residents in East St. Louis, Illinois, after mounting tensions tied to labor competition and migration. The violence killed dozens of Black people (estimates vary) and displaced thousands, showing migrants that racial danger was not confined to the South.
On July 28, 1917, thousands of African Americans marched silently down Fifth Avenue to protest lynching and mass violence, including East St. Louis. The demonstration showed how migration-era violence could trigger national organizing, not only private decisions to relocate.
After the war, major labor disputes created situations where Black workers—often new arrivals with limited access to unions—were used as replacements for striking workers. This practice deepened hostility in some industrial cities and tied the recruitment system to broader conflict over jobs and race.
By 1919, the Chicago Defender’s readership grew substantially, with many subscribers in the South. Wider circulation strengthened the paper’s ability to advertise Northern work and encourage travel, reinforcing migration networks built around rail routes and family or community contacts.
In late July 1919, racial violence in Chicago lasted about a week, killing 38 people and injuring hundreds. The unrest was part of the wider “Red Summer” and underscored the instability migrants could face even in destination cities where jobs were more available.
The Immigration Act of 1924 set restrictive quotas and reinforced an era of reduced European immigration. With fewer immigrants entering, Northern employers had ongoing reasons to recruit domestic workers, including African Americans from the South, even as wartime pressures faded.
By the mid-1920s, the Great Northern Drive–era surge had established durable migration pathways and larger Black communities in Northern cities. These communities became hubs for later migration phases, shaping housing patterns, labor markets, and politics for decades beyond 1925.
Interwar Northern Recruitment and the Great Northern Drive (1916–1925)