re moved both by forces within the South which pushed them
out and by those within the North which pulled them in. On one hand,
continuing violence and segregation drove many to leave their homes. When
the boll weevil spread across the Southern states like a plague, it wiped
out many poor farmers, and it drove them to seek other means of
livelihood elsewhere. On the other hand, the war had interrupted the flow
of immigrants from Europe into the Northern industrial centers, and at
the same time it created the need for even more unskilled labor in the
factories. After the war, the restrictive immigration laws which were
passed kept the flow of European immigration low, and Northern industry
continued to draw labor from the Southern rural pockets of poverty.

Between 1910 and 1920, some 330,000 Afro-Americans moved from the South
into the North and West. By 1940, the number of those who had left the
South since 1910 had soared to 1,750,000. Between 1940 and 1950, there
were another 1,597,000, and between 1950 and 1960, there were 1,457,000
more who left the South. The percentage of the Afro-American community
living still in the South had dropped from 89.7 percent in 1900 to 59
percent and for the first time, more than half of them lived outside of
the Deep South.

Another indication of the northward migration which had occured was that
a Northern state, New York, had acquired an Afro-American community which
was larger than that of any of the Southern states. Much of this
migration was also a move from the country to the city. In the South, 58
percent of the Afro-Americans lived in cities. In the West, there are 93
percent who live in the cities, and in the North, there are 96 percent.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the Afro-American community
had been transformed from a rural and regional group into a national one.

Harlem: "The Promised Land"

Alain Locke edited a volume of critical essays and literature entitled
The New Negro. In it, Locke heralded a spiritual awakening within the
Afro-American community. It was manifested by a creative outburst of art,
music and literature as well as by a new mood of self-confidence and
self-consciousness within that community. The center of this explosion
was located in Harlem. Famous personalities such as Claude McKay,
Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, James Weldon Johnson, Duke Ellington, and
Louis Armstrong either moved to Harlem or visited it frequently in orde