The Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance - Complete Interactive Lesson

Part 1: Core Concepts

🚆 The Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance (1910–1940)

Part 1 of 7 — Foundations & Key Concepts

Why this unit matters

Between 1910 and 1970, ~6 million African Americans moved from the rural South to northern, midwestern, and western cities — fleeing Jim Crow and pulled by industrial labor demand. In neighborhoods like Harlem, this demographic shift produced an unprecedented flowering of Black literature, music, theater, and political thought.

Core concepts

Core concept	What it refers to
Push factors	Lynching, sharecropping debt, boll weevil, disfranchisement.
Pull factors	WWI labor demand (immigration cut off 1917), higher wages, voting rights, urban Black institutions.
New Negro	Alain Locke's 1925 anthology framing self-confident, modern Black identity.

🔑 Key Concept: AP African American History rewards arguments that combine specific evidence (named figures, dates, primary sources) with claims about causation, continuity, and change.

📖 Key Figures of Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance

Figure	Dates	Why they matter
Robert S. Abbott	1870–1940	Chicago Defender publisher; promoted northern migration through targeted Pullman porter distribution.
Marcus Garvey	1887–1940	UNIA (founded 1914 in Jamaica, NYC by 1916); 'Back to Africa,' Black Star Line, mass nationalism.
Alain Locke	1885–1954	First Black Rhodes Scholar; editor The New Negro (1925).
Langston Hughes	1901–1967	Jazz-poetry of The Weary Blues (1926); 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' (1921).
Zora Neale Hurston	1891–1960	Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); folklorist of African diasporic culture.

⚠️ AP Alert: Strong responses cite specific figures by name and date — e.g., 'Robert S. Abbott (1870–1940)' rather than 'a famous leader.'

Concept Check 🎯

Historical Context

Event	Significance
1916 first wave of Great Migration intensifies	Wartime labor need pulls workers north.
1917 East St. Louis riot	White mobs attack Black workers; ~100 killed.
1919 Red Summer	White-on-Black violence in 25+ cities; Chicago riot kills 38.

Primary sources to know

Locke, The New Negro (1925) — Anthology of essays, fiction, poetry, and visual art.
Hughes, 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' (1926) — Aesthetic manifesto of the renaissance.
Hurston, Mules and Men (1935) — Ethnographic recording of Black folk culture.

Applied Recall ✍️

Use the exact historical term:

Universal Negro Improvement Association — Garvey's mass organization
Solidarity across the African diaspora
Du Bois's term for the educated Black elite he saw as race leaders

Match the Concepts 🔍

AP-Style Application 🎯

Part 2: Key Processes

🚆 The Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance

Part 2 of 7 — Key Processes & Mechanisms

What drove Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance?

This part focuses on the mechanisms — the systematic processes that produced the patterns historians describe.

Core concept	What it refers to
Push factors	Lynching, sharecropping debt, boll weevil, disfranchisement.
Pull factors	WWI labor demand (immigration cut off 1917), higher wages, voting rights, urban Black institutions.
New Negro	Alain Locke's 1925 anthology framing self-confident, modern Black identity.

Mechanisms in action

Event	Significance
1916 first wave of Great Migration intensifies	Wartime labor need pulls workers north.
1917 East St. Louis riot	White mobs attack Black workers; ~100 killed.
1919 Red Summer	White-on-Black violence in 25+ cities; Chicago riot kills 38.
1921 Tulsa Race Massacre	Greenwood ('Black Wall Street') destroyed; 100–300 killed.

Part 3: Patterns & Examples

🚆 The Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance

Part 3 of 7 — Patterns, Regions & Case Studies

Specific cases — not abstractions

Event	Significance
1916 first wave of Great Migration intensifies	Wartime labor need pulls workers north.
1917 East St. Louis riot	White mobs attack Black workers; ~100 killed.
1919 Red Summer	White-on-Black violence in 25+ cities; Chicago riot kills 38.
1921 Tulsa Race Massacre	Greenwood ('Black Wall Street') destroyed; 100–300 killed.
*1925 The New Negro* published**	Manifesto of Harlem Renaissance.
1929 Great Depression	Disproportionate impact on Black workers; renaissance funding collapses.

Comparing cases

AP comparison prompts ask you to identify a specific similarity AND difference between cases. For Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance, useful comparisons include:

1916 first wave of Great Migration intensifies vs. 1917 East St. Louis riot
1917 East St. Louis riot vs. 1919 Red Summer
1919 Red Summer vs. 1929 Great Depression

Strong comparison sentence

Both 1916 first wave of Great Migration intensifies and 1917 East St. Louis riot involved push factors, but they differed in the specific actors and consequences involved.

Part 4: Connections & Interactions

🚆 The Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance

Part 4 of 7 — Connections Across the Diaspora

How Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance connects to other units

Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance does not stand alone. Strong AP responses connect it to WWI & WWII Era, because wartime mobilization continued the migration's economic pull.

Connection table

Linked unit	Type of connection	Example
WWI & WWII Era	Causal / continuity	Wartime mobilization continued the migration's economic pull.
Atlantic / global context	Comparison	Parallel processes elsewhere in the African diaspora.
U.S. political history	Synthesis	Federal law (e.g., constitutional amendments) shapes outcomes.

Specific cross-unit connections

Event	Significance
1916 first wave of Great Migration intensifies	Wartime labor need pulls workers north.
1917 East St. Louis riot	White mobs attack Black workers; ~100 killed.

Part 5: Change Over Time

🚆 The Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance

Part 5 of 7 — Continuity & Change Over Time

Tracing Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance through 1910–1940

AP CCOT (Continuity and Change Over Time) prompts ask: what changed, what stayed the same, and what drove the change?

Period	What changed	What persisted
Early period	New institutions emerge	African cultural retentions persist
Middle period	Mechanisms of push factors expand	New Negro continues
Late period	Outcomes shift due to external pressure	Structural features endure

Specific moments of change

Event	Significance
1921 Tulsa Race Massacre	Greenwood ('Black Wall Street') destroyed; 100–300 killed.
*1925 The New Negro* published**	Manifesto of Harlem Renaissance.
1929 Great Depression	Disproportionate impact on Black workers; renaissance funding collapses.

Part 6: Problem-Solving Workshop

🚆 The Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance

Part 6 of 7 — Source & Evidence Workshop

Working with primary sources for Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance

AP DBQ-style work expects students to identify a source's purpose, audience, point of view, and historical situation — and to use that analysis to support a claim.

Primary sources for this unit

Locke, The New Negro (1925) — Anthology of essays, fiction, poetry, and visual art.
Hughes, 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' (1926) — Aesthetic manifesto of the renaissance.
Hurston, Mules and Men (1935) — Ethnographic recording of Black folk culture.

Source-analysis workshop

For each source, ask:

Who is the author? What is their position relative to events?
When was it produced? Before, during, or after the events described?
For whom was it written? Audience shapes argument.
What does it claim? What does it leave out?

Worked example

Locke, The New Negro (1925) — Anthology of essays, fiction, poetry, and visual art. A strong AP citation reads: 'According to Locke, The New Negro (1925), …' followed by an inference about authorial purpose.

Concept Check 🎯

Applied Recall ✍️

Name the source: Anthology of essays, fiction, poetry, and visual art.…
Name the source: Aesthetic manifesto of the renaissance.…

Part 7: AP Review

🚆 The Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance

Part 7 of 7 — AP Exam Strategy & Review

What the AP exam expects on Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance

Multiple choice

Stimulus-based questions citing a primary source — apply contextualization.
Comparison and CCOT prompts — recall specific dated events.
Synthesis prompts — connect to WWI & WWII Era.

Short Answer & Essay

Name two specific figures, two specific events, and one primary source.
State a clear, defensible thesis and tie evidence to claim.
Acknowledge regional, gender, or class differences when relevant.

Master review for Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance

Concepts to define on demand

Core concept	What it refers to
Push factors	Lynching, sharecropping debt, boll weevil, disfranchisement.
Pull factors	WWI labor demand (immigration cut off 1917), higher wages, voting rights, urban Black institutions.
New Negro	Alain Locke's 1925 anthology framing self-confident, modern Black identity.

Figures to deploy

Figure	Dates

The Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance

Causal chains

Strong CCOT sentence

Events to cite

Sources to attribute