The Great Migration: Highway 51 North

Between nineteen ten and nineteen seventy, approximately six million Black Southerners left the South for Northern and Western cities. Isabel Wilkerson, who spent fifteen years documenting the migration for "The Warmth of Other Suns," calls it the largest uncoerced domestic migration in American history. The Mississippi Delta was its single most productive source.

The primary artery was the Illinois Central Railroad, running north from New Orleans through the Delta, through Memphis, through Cairo, Illinois, and into Chicago. The train cost about thirty dollars. That was three months' wages on a Delta plantation, but if you were going, you saved it. The Illinois Central ran what people called the City of New Orleans route. On a good day, Chicago was about eighteen hours from Memphis.

The decision to go was shaped by everything the Delta system had built around keeping people from going. If you left before your crop debt was settled, you were a criminal. If the planter found out you were planning to leave, the crop advance could be called in immediately. Some planters met the northbound trains at the station and pulled workers off before departure. Others called ahead to the next county's sheriff. The system had been designed to prevent exactly the movement that was happening.

What overrode the system was a combination of factors: the boll weevil, an insect that arrived in Mississippi around nineteen fifteen and destroyed cotton crops systematically for years; the labor shortage in Northern factories during and after the First World War; and the Chicago Defender, the Black newspaper that was smuggled into the Delta on the Illinois Central's mail cars because it was too dangerous to display on newsstands, whose front pages described a different kind of life possible in the North.

When the mechanical cotton picker arrived in the Delta in the nineteen forties, the sharecropping system that had held millions in place for eighty years lost its economic rationale. The departure accelerated. The Delta blues traveled north in the same suitcases.