The Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance (c. 1910-1940)

This topic examines how the largest internal migration in U.S. history reshaped Black life and gave rise to a transformative cultural movement in northern cities.

Why This Topic Matters on AP AAS

• It connects economic geography to cultural production and political organizing.
• It supports continuity/change prompts about Black freedom across emancipation and the twentieth century.
• It tests primary source analysis using Harlem Renaissance literature, art, and music.

1) Push and Pull Factors of the Great Migration

• Roughly 6 million African Americans moved north and west between 1910 and 1970, in two waves (1910-1940; 1940-1970).
• Major destinations: Chicago, New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.

2) Northern Cities Transformed

• Black populations of Chicago and Detroit grew more than tenfold between 1910 and 1940.
• Restrictive covenants and redlining concentrated Black residents in segregated neighborhoods (the South Side, Harlem, Bronzeville).
• Black-owned businesses, fraternal orders, and churches built dense civic infrastructure in these neighborhoods.

3) The Harlem Renaissance

Literature and Thought

• Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer used poetry, novels, and folklore to articulate modern Black identity.
• W.E.B. Du Bois (The Crisis) framed art as both aesthetic and political work.
• Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925) launched the movement as a public phenomenon.

Music and Performance

• Jazz spread from New Orleans to Chicago to New York, becoming the dominant urban sound.
• Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, and Bessie Smith's blues defined the era.
• Black musical theater and dance reshaped American popular performance.

Visual Art

• Aaron Douglas's murals and Augusta Savage's sculpture used African motifs to argue for Black artistic heritage.

4) Political Movements of the Era

• The NAACP (founded 1909) pursued anti-lynching legislation and legal challenges to segregation.
• Marcus Garvey's UNIA (founded 1914) attracted millions with a Black-nationalist program of self-help, separatism, and Pan-Africanism.
• A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (1925), the first Black-led union recognized under federal labor law.

5) Core AP Patterns

6) High-Yield Terms

• Sharecropping
• Chicago Defender
• Restrictive covenants / redlining
• The New Negro (1925)
• UNIA
• Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

7) AP Writing Tips

1. Treat migration and cultural production as causally linked: northern cities provided the audience and infrastructure for the Renaissance.
2. Distinguish the NAACP's legal strategy from Garvey's mass-membership Black nationalism for comparison prompts.
3. Cite at least one specific Harlem Renaissance figure with their medium (Hughes-poetry, Ellington-jazz) when analyzing primary sources.

Quick Check

• Why did the boll weevil and World War I both accelerate Black migration north?
• How did segregation in northern cities both constrain and concentrate Black cultural and political life?
• What does the contrast between Du Bois and Garvey reveal about debates over Black strategy in the 1920s?