Born Then
1916–1970

Life during the Great Migration of Black Americans

Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.

What it meant for ordinary people

About six million Black Americans left the rural South for northern and western cities, escaping segregation, lynching and sharecropping for industrial jobs. It remade the cities they arrived in and the South they left.

How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.

Around the same time