Cotton collapse, war industry, and immigration cuts triggered the Great Migration

Evidence

And when the cycle of drought, then heavy rains and the boll weevil vermin decimated cotton production in the years of 1915 and 1916 was combined with war industry and the cessation of European immigration, the migration of the Black masses became the Great Migration: [E]arly migrations were dwarfed by the surge of black people northward after 1900, and especially after 1910. According to various contemporaneous estimates, between 1890 and 1910 around 200,000 black Southerners fled to the North; and between 1910 and 1920 another 300,000 to 1,000,000 followed. The Department of Labor reported that in eighteen months of 1916–17 the migration was variously estimated at 200,000 to 700,000. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 906

Categorization

• XREF: Quantitative anchor for the demographic rupture that precedes radical organizing in northern cities; connects to later accounts of Black proletarianization feeding the radical tradition. — connects to: The Great Migration northward began before World War I — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 787