When McKinley Morganfield lived in Mississippi, he wanted to be one of three things: “a heck of a preacher, a heck of a ball player, or a heck of a musician.”
But in 1943, at age 28, Morganfield wasn’t any of those things—at least not yet. He was earning 22.5 cents an hour working on a cotton plantation, and when he asked for a raise—to 25 cents an hour—his boss exploded in rage, prompting Morganfield to hop a train to Chicago.
“I got off that train, and it looked like Chicago was the fastest place in the world—cabs dropping fares, horns blowing, the peoples walking so fast,” he later told The New York Times. “But I changed my luck all the way around when I moved up there.”
He landed a job in a container factory, rented a four-room apartment, and within a few years was well on his way to becoming the legendary blues musician known as Muddy Waters. In fleeing the economic caste system and
It’s been 100 years since the start of what’s known as the Great Migration, which saw 7 million black Southerners push north and west to escape racism and seek better jobs and opportunities. Black populations swelled in industrialized cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia (see chart, p. 18)—the largest demographic shift of any group in U.S. history. That shift radically transformed the nation in ways still felt today.
“It changed the whole profile and landscape of American cities: culturally, politically, and socially,” says James R. Grossman, author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. “There was absolutely nothing about urban life that wasn’t reshaped by the Great Migration.”