The Great Migration: Racialized Labor and Class Struggles in the United States (1910–1940)
The First Great Migration began in the 1910s as Black southerners moved to Northern and Midwestern industrial cities to escape Jim Crow violence and pursue jobs and education—reshaping urban labor markets and racial/class politics.
A major outbreak of racial terror and labor conflict erupted in East St. Louis, Illinois, amid wartime industrial hiring and competition; white mobs attacked Black residents, killing many and driving thousands from their homes—illustrating how migration and labor demand could trigger violent backlash.
In response to the East St. Louis violence and other racial atrocities, the NAACP organized a large Silent Protest Parade in New York City, projecting migrant communities’ demands for safety and civil rights into national public politics.
The Chicago race riot (July 27–August 3) became one of the most severe episodes of the 1919 Red Summer, fueled by housing segregation, job competition, and heightened racial tensions in a rapidly growing migrant city.
In Phillips County, Arkansas, violence exploded as Black farmers organized against peonage and exploitative settlements; the massacre underscored how racialized labor control in the rural South helped push migration and intensified class conflict.
The Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson–Reed) sharply restricted immigration, reshaping the national labor market; in many industries, constrained immigration intersected with ongoing Black migration and employers’ search for controllable labor forces.
Pullman porters launched the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Harlem, creating a durable Black-led labor organization that linked migration-era railroad work to unionization, economic dignity, and broader civil-rights strategy.
The Mississippi River flood (April 1927) displaced hundreds of thousands; discriminatory relief practices and coercive labor conditions in camps contributed to political shifts and reinforced pressures driving Black out-migration from the South.
Nine Black teenagers were arrested in Alabama and falsely accused of rape, becoming a landmark series of cases about racist criminalization, coerced legal processes, and the struggle for fair trials—conditions that shaped migrants’ political consciousness and organizing.
The New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act created the NRA and (notably through Section 7(a)) recognized workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively—energizing union drives that many Black workers in northern cities sought to access despite discrimination.
The Harlem riot of March 19–20, 1935 erupted amid economic hardship, discriminatory employment, and mistrust of police; it signaled intensified urban conflict in a major migrant community and is often described as an early “modern” race riot.
The Wagner Act guaranteed private-sector workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively and created the NLRB—transforming labor relations during the 1930s and shaping how industrial employers, unions, and Black workers contested power.
The FLSA established a federal minimum wage, overtime rules, and child-labor limits; its limited initial coverage—and major exclusions—help illuminate how New Deal labor protections were unevenly distributed across a racialized, segmented workforce.
By 1940, the First Great Migration (1910–1940) had substantially reshaped northern cities’ demographics and political economy; the National Archives frames this first phase as a distinct period within the broader Great Migration that continued after 1940.
