America at 250: The Great Migration and The Freedom of Departure

A baseball game sent me back to one of the best books I read in graduate school. During a Mets–White Sox game the other day, the broadcaster's conversation drifted from the game to the city of Chicago itself. During the broadcast, Ron Darling mentioned the impact of the Great Migration on the city. He noted Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns as one of his favorite books. I had read it for a class and remember being deeply affected by it. Hearing the title again, with the historic juxtaposition of the game being played on Chicago's South Side, sent me back to Wilkerson's account of the Great Migration. Then, of course, the question hit me: how do we tie this back to America at 250?

One reflection point could be: as the United States marks its 250th anniversary, what does it mean that millions of American citizens had to move within their own country to find more room to exercise the freedoms their citizenship was supposedly already guaranteed?

Wilkerson's book gives that question a human face. In autumn 1937, in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, a planter's missing turkeys sparked a hunt that targeted Joe Lee, a young Black sharecropper. He was dragged off, jailed, and severely beaten. The missing turkeys were later found roosting safely nearby. But when Joe's cousin, George Gladney, retrieved him from jail, the illusion of security vanished. George returned home and delivered a quiet verdict to his wife, Ida Mae: this was the last crop they would ever make in Mississippi.

They quietly sold what little they owned, packed their belongings, and traveled to the train depot in Okolona to purchase tickets secretly. When their train pulled out into the night, the Gladneys were joining what Wilkerson describes as a vast "defection," part of the movement of roughly six million Black Americans out of the Jim Crow South. The Great Migration began millions of times in private, through decisions made by people like George and Ida Mae. Yet those private decisions accumulated into something national. Families withdrew their labor, talent, purchasing power, and future generations from a Southern social order that had never expected them to leave.

The Reconstruction Amendments of the United States Constitution, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ratified between 1865 and 1870 following the Civil War, represented a constitutional revolution. On paper, they abolished slavery, established birthright citizenship and equal protection, and prohibited denying the vote on account of race. Yet as federal commitment receded in the late nineteenth century, Southern states built systems that sharply limited what those guarantees meant in daily life.

The Reconstruction Amendments rewrote the Constitution. Then the Jim Crow system spent decades testing how little those constitutional guarantees could mean in practice when enforcement was nonexistent. For millions of Black Southerners, the Constitution said one thing. The Jim Crow system and where they lived determined something very different.

Crossing state lines became one way of claiming greater access to rights that were already supposed to belong to them. And something else happened as people left: departure itself began to create leverage.

In 1916, as the first large waves of Black Southerners headed north, Southern newspapers began sounding alarms. One editorial warned that the loss of Black workers threatened the region's economic "solvency." The reaction revealed an uncomfortable contradiction, one that has echoed across American history, from 1916 down to today's headlines over Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian immigrants, where hundreds of thousands of essential healthcare and industrial workers face shifting legal stability. That same social order that denies these workers full political inclusion depends heavily on their labor.

World War I accelerated the change. Immigration from Europe fell sharply, leaving Northern factories, steel mills, slaughterhouses, railroads, and foundries searching for workers. Recruiters traveled south. Black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender published job opportunities and train schedules. Family members who had already made the trip sent letters home. Historian James Grossman, in Land of Hope, shows that migrants were not simply swept north by rumor or desperation. Families compared wages, considered safety, relied on relatives and friends, and tried to understand what awaited them in places like Chicago. They were making difficult calculations about where they might have a better chance to direct their own lives.

For generations, the South had treated Black labor as if it were geographically fixed. The Great Migration demonstrated that workers with little bargaining power where they stood could instead bargain with geography. When courts, unions, and ballots offered little protection, geography became one of the few forms of leverage available. Southern employers understood the threat, forcing some to raise wages. Authorities and employers attempted to discourage recruiters, interfere with tickets and transportation, and make departure more difficult. Yet people continued to leave.

What started as decisions around kitchen tables became something much larger. One family left, then another. A cousin followed a cousin, a neighbor followed a neighbor. Eventually, millions of private decisions began changing the economic balance between regions. Wilkerson makes that enormous movement understandable by following three people whose reasons for leaving were very different:

1. For Ida Mae Gladney, the issue was first and foremost safety. Sharecropping offered little possibility of economic independence, but the beating of her husband's cousin made the danger impossible to ignore. Chicago did not make Ida Mae wealthy. She and her family struggled to find work and affordable housing. What Chicago offered was something more basic: greater control over the circumstances in which they would raise their family.

2. George Starling's story was different. He worked in the citrus groves around Eustis, Florida, and challenged the way Black pickers were paid. When he tried to organize workers for better wages, he learned that his life was in danger. In 1945, he fled to New York. Starling did not leave because he disliked the work. He left because demanding a fair return for that work could get him killed.

3. Then there was Robert Pershing Foster, a physician from Louisiana. His problem was neither a cotton field nor a citrus grove. It was the ceiling placed over Black ambition and advancement. Despite his education, military service, and medical training, the Jim Crow system restricted where he could practice and what kind of medicine he could perform. So, in 1953, he loaded his belongings into his Buick and drove west to Los Angeles. There, he built a successful medical practice as the physician he wanted to be. Dr. Foster's story raises a different issue: What does a country lose when talent exists but local rules prevent it from being fully used?

Each person's story shows that there was no single Great Migration experience. Some people were escaping violence. Some were seeking better wages. Some wanted education, professional opportunity, or simply the chance to live without constantly negotiating a racial code. They were not all thinking about constitutional theory when they left; their focus was on their families and their futures. But when viewed together, look at the Constitution, and their choices tell us something about citizenship.

The trains reached Chicago, Harlem, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and dozens of other cities. These were not the gates of paradise for the traveler from the South, and Wilkerson makes sure we know this. She never turns the Migration into a simple story of leaving oppression and arriving at freedom. The North and West had their own racial boundaries. Migrants encountered restrictive housing covenants, redlining, employment discrimination, segregated neighborhoods, racial violence, and hostility from people who did not necessarily welcome the newcomers.

Ida Mae struggled to find work in Chicago. At the same time, her husband initially hauled ice up several flights of stairs in South Side apartment buildings. They moved repeatedly while trying to find affordable housing. George Starling discovered that New York had workplace hierarchies of its own. Robert Foster achieved extraordinary professional success in Los Angeles, but neither money nor a medical degree erased racial prejudice.

The Great Migration changed the terrain on which freedom could be pursued, but the destinations offered no guarantee of equality. They did, however, often offer larger labor markets, greater access to voting, better-funded schools, Black newspapers and churches, civic organizations, and political networks that gave migrants more room to maneuver.

An interesting observation Wilkerson makes about her three central subjects is that they made mistakes, as everyone does. But leaving the South was not something they regretted. They had not found perfection. They had found a greater possibility. And when millions of people make that kind of decision, the consequences do not remain personal.

Before the Great Migration, more than 90% of Black Americans lived in the South. By 1970, that share had fallen to just over half. At the same time, Black America had become overwhelmingly urban. People from Mississippi traveled to Chicago. Virginians headed toward Philadelphia and Washington. Louisianans and Texans increasingly moved west toward California. Family and friendship networks reinforced the routes. And as the people moved, political power moved with them.

Black populations grew in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and other cities. People who had lived under systems designed to suppress their votes now became part of urban electorates that politicians had to court. Ida Mae Gladney could not have imagined any of that when she left Mississippi in 1937. Decades later, she lived long enough to vote for Barack Obama in his Illinois Senate race. Ida Mae's ticket north did not single-handedly shift national politics. History is not that clean. But she was part of the demographic wave that created Chicago's Black political power—the very foundation upon which a Black presidency would later be built.

Culture traveled on those trains, too. The title The Warmth of Other Suns comes from Richard Wright, who left Mississippi for Chicago carrying what he described in Black Boy as an insatiable "hunger" for a larger, freer life. Wright imagined taking his Southern experience and transplanting it into new soil to see whether it might grow differently. And that is essentially what millions of migrants did. They carried Southern foodways, speech, church traditions, family customs, gospel, blues, stories, and wounds with them across state lines. Then those Southern traditions bumped up against urban life, and in many instances, it was the cities, not the traditions, that changed. The migrants did not simply adapt to American culture. By carrying the South with them, they helped redefine American culture.

Chicago blues is unthinkable without the Mississippi Delta and the Migration. Indeed, the movement created by the Migration reshaped the core pillars of American life—everything from literature and gospel to politics, food, journalism, and city culture. Wright's own trajectory from a starved child in Mississippi to a literary titan in Chicago proved that when migrants brought the soul and spirit of Southern life into Northern light, they forced the entire nation to see itself anew.

And then there are the generations that followed. Wilkerson herself is part of that story. Her parents migrated from the South to Washington, D.C., where they met and eventually had a family. In an interview about the book, she made a wonderfully simple observation: without the Great Migration, she would not be here. Migration determines who meets whom, who marries whom, where children grow up, what schools they attend, what they come to believe is possible, and what stories they inherit.

The Great Migration changed not only where one generation lived, but what the next generation could imagine. Wilkerson has described growing up around families with roots throughout the South, surrounded by their language, food, music, and ambitions. As a child, she heard classmates tell stories about ancestors who had come from Ireland, Germany, Russia, and other countries. At first, she did not think she possessed an equivalent migration story. Eventually, she realized that she did. That may be one of the most useful ways to understand the Great Migration. It was an American migration story in which the migrants did not cross an international border. They were already Americans. They crossed state lines in search of more room to experience what being American was supposed to mean.

Decades after Ida Mae Gladney left Mississippi, Wilkerson traveled back there with her. They came upon a cotton field, and Ida Mae wanted to stop. She got out of the car, walked into the rows, and began picking cotton again. Wilkerson remembered being nervous about whether they should be doing it. Ida Mae apparently was not. She began picking almost gleefully. The image is difficult to forget because the physical act had not changed. The meaning had. As a young woman, Ida Mae picked cotton because someone else's economic system required it. Her labor belonged to somebody else's land, somebody else's accounting, somebody else's expectations. Now, older, standing again on Mississippi soil, she could reach toward the same cotton because she wanted to. And when she was finished, she could walk away.

Two hundred and fifty years after the United States declared that people possess rights governments are supposed to respect, the Great Migration and Wilkerson's book leave us to consider:

What does citizenship mean when Americans have to change their geography to enlarge the freedom their citizenship is supposed to guarantee?

I don't think the Great Migration gives us a simple answer, and Wilkerson does not offer one. What it gives us instead are millions of lives that force us to keep asking that question. Ida Mae's return to the cotton field offers one answer. Freedom did not erase the field or the past; it changed her relationship to both. She could reach toward the cotton because she chose to, and she could walk away when she was done. Sometimes it begins with something that simple: not the absence of struggle, not a perfect destination, not the disappearance of prejudice, but choice. The ability to decide for yourself where to live, what work to pursue, what risks to accept, how to raise a family, whether to stay, and whether to leave. That was the power contained in millions of departures.

Ida Mae left Mississippi, built a life in Chicago, raised a family, voted, grew old, and eventually returned to the cotton fields of her youth on her own terms. The field was still there. What had changed was her power to choose whether she remained in it.

The Great Migration was not six million people giving up on America. It was six million people refusing to give up on the possibility of America.