Between 1910 and 1970, approximately six million African Americans left the rural South and relocated to cities across the North, Midwest, and West in one of the largest internal migrations in human history. Known as the Great Migration, this massive demographic shift did not simply move people from one region to another. It fundamentally remade American culture, politics, music, literature, and the very fabric of urban life in ways that continue to shape the nation today. The forces driving the migration were both push and pull. In the South, African Americans faced a suffocating system of racial oppression enforced through Jim Crow laws, sharecropping arrangements that trapped families in perpetual debt, and the constant threat of racial violence including lynching. The boll weevil devastation of Southern cotton crops and catastrophic floods adde ...