Black skilled and semi-skilled workers, such as blacksmiths and carpenters, recognized they could make more money in the North, even if they found work as unskilled laborers. This especially affected laborers in the tobacco, cotton, iron, and related industries on average, workers in the South earned three-fourths the wage of workers in northern states. Meanwhile, African Americans in cities and towns across the South faced competition for jobs that drove down wages. African Americans also heard from family members, friends, and neighbors who had already made the move north about new opportunities and their better lives. Black newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, advertised jobs and the benefits of migrating to northern cities. Some of these industries sent labor agents south to recruit workers. They heard of the growth of northern cities and industries that desperately needed to hire individuals in order to keep up with the expanding economy. Some migrants felt pulled by economic reasons. Scholars frequently debate these push and pull factors that sparked the Great Migration. The reasons African Americans left the South varied. First, a “trickle of brave souls” left for the North after the Civil War, followed by a “stream after Jim Crow laws closed in on Blacks in the South in the 1890s.” Finally “a river, uncontrolled and uncontrollable” of southern Blacks migrated north during the decade of World War I. Author of the award winning work The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson describes the evolution of the Great Migration from the 1870s to the 1910s. While accurate, some African Americans had already moved north prior to the war. Scholars frequently associate the beginning of the Great Migration with the advent of World War I. African Americans in Savannah, Ga, waiting for a labor train heading north.
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