Editing Great Migration to Philadelphia (section)

== Causes of Migration ==

The Great Migration was driven by both "push" factors in the South and "pull" factors in the North. In the South, African Americans faced systematic oppression under Jim Crow laws: segregation, disenfranchisement, economic exploitation through sharecropping and debt peonage, and the constant threat of racial violence including lynching. Agricultural changes—including the boll weevil infestation that devastated cotton crops and increasing mechanization that reduced the need for labor—undermined the economic basis of rural Southern life. For many African Americans, remaining in the South meant accepting a future of poverty, degradation, and danger.<ref name="wilkerson">{{cite book |last=Wilkerson |first=Isabel |title=The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration |year=2010 |publisher=Random House |location=New York}}</ref>

The North offered what seemed like better alternatives. World War I created labor shortages as European immigration halted and white workers entered military service, opening industrial jobs to Black workers for the first time. Northern wages, though often lower than those paid to white workers for the same work, far exceeded what could be earned in the Southern agricultural economy. Northern cities promised freedom from the most oppressive aspects of Jim Crow—the right to vote, access to better schools, and at least the possibility of advancement. Word of these opportunities spread through personal networks, Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Philadelphia Tribune, and labor recruiters sent South by Northern employers. The migration became a self-sustaining phenomenon as earlier migrants sent home reports of their success and helped relatives and friends make the journey north.<ref name="trotter">{{cite book |last=Trotter |first=Joe William |title=The Great Migration in Historical Perspective |year=1991 |publisher=Indiana University Press |location=Bloomington}}</ref>