The first large movement of blacks occurred during World War I, when 454,000 black southerners moved north.  In the 1920s, another 800,000 blacks left the south, followed by 398,000 blacks in the 1930s.  Between 1940 and 1960 over 3,348,000 blacks left the south for northern and western cities.

The economic motivations for migration were a combination of the desire to escape oppressive economic conditions in the south and the promise of greater prosperity in the north.  Since their Emancipation from slavery, southern rural blacks had suffered in a plantation economy that offered little chance of advancement.  While a few blacks were lucky enough to purchase land, most were sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or farm labors, barely subsiding from year to year.  When World War I created a huge demand for workers in northern factories, many southern blacks took this opportunity to leave the oppressive economic conditions in the south.

The northern demand for workers was a result of the loss of 5 million men who left to serve in the armed forces, as well as the restriction of foreign immigration. Some sectors of the economy were so desperate for workers at this time that they would pay for blacks to migrate north.  The Pennsylvania Railroad needed workers so badly that it paid the travel expenses of 12,000 blacks.  The Illinois Central Railroad, along with many steel mills, factories, and tanneries, similarly provided free railroad passes for blacks.  World War I was the first time since Emancipation that black labor was in demand outside of the agricultural south, and the economic promise was enough for many blacks to overcome substantial challenges to migrate.

In additional to migrating for job opportunities, blacks also moved north in order to escape the oppressive conditions of the south.  Some of the main social factors for migration included lynching, an unfair legal system, inequality in education, and denial of suffrage.

The great migration, one of the largest internal migrations in the history of the United States, changed forever the urban North, the rural South, African America and in many respects, the entire nation.

My father left the South as a young man, and then he went back there and got himself an education. He was a wonderful and very special kind of man. He died in 1945, at the age of fifty-one—of a cerebral hemorrhage, supposedly, but American racism helped kill him. He died in Mexico, where he was making preparations to move all of us out of the United States. My brother Carl had just come back from Europe, where he fought with Patton’s army. My father wanted to leave this country because, although he had tried to do everything in his power to make it otherwise, he felt he still didn’t have his freedom. He was a very successful and very wealthy businessman. He had been a U. S. marshal. He had founded one of the first Negro banks in Chicago. He had fought a very famous civil-rights case on restrictive covenants which he fought all the way up to the Supreme Court, and which he won after the expenditure of a great deal of money and emotional strength. The case is studied today in law schools. Anyway, Daddy felt that this country was hopeless in its treatment of Negroes. So he became a refugee from America. He bought a house in Polanco, a suburb of Mexico City, and we were planning to move there when he died. I was fourteen at the time. I’m afraid I have to agree with Daddy’s assessment of this country. But I don’t agree with the leaving part. I don’t feel defensive. Daddy really belonged to a different age, a different period. He didn’t feel free. One of the reasons I feel so free is that I feel I belong to a world majority, and a very assertive one. I’m not really writing about my own family in the play. We were more typical of the bourgeois Negro exemplified by the Murchison family that is referred to in the play. I’m too close to my own family to be able to write about them.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

 The production made history at the Tony Awards when Rashad was honored with the Best Actress in a Play trophy, becoming the first African-American woman to receive the honor. Director Kenny Leon reassembled his leading players for a 2008 adaptation of the production, which was seen by 12.7 million viewers on ABC.