Great Migration from Alabama
In what came to be called the Great Migration, an estimated five and a half million African Americans moved from the South to the urban North and West between 1915 and 1970. This massive population shift profoundly transformed the twentieth-century United States politically, economically, socially, and culturally. During those years, many Black people left Southern towns and cities like Birmingham, Montgomery, and Florence in search of economic and political opportunities, while taking with them still-painful memories of life under Jim Crow segregation and their cultural traditions of religion, food, and music.