The Great Migration
From 1916 through 1970 about six million Black Americans relocated from the South to cities in the North and West, a mass movement known as the Great Migration. This map shows the major routes and destination cities for those Americans.
Source: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
It was during this time period, we begin to see many Lambert ancestors move from places in Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama for destinations in the north like Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, St. Louis and west to Denver. Motivations likely included the opportunity to provide a better economic life than that available in the small towns and farms of Senatobia, Mississippi or Alabama towns of Florence, Sheffield, Tuscumbia, and southwestern Tennessee towns, like La Grange, Moscow, Grand Junction. Jobs in northern factories and meat packing plants or work on the railroads often paid higher wages than the farm labor. Many ventured away from their birth places after serving in the Armies of World Wars I and II. For many soldiers, time in the Armed Forces was their first time away from their place of birth.
Another driving force was the oppression many experienced under the Jim Crow segregationist laws of the southern states Jim Crow Laws – Wikipedia. Laws that denied Black citizens some their basic Civil Rights as citizens under the Constitution of the United States. State-sponsored discrimination was not fully overturned until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – Wikipedia.
Although life “up north” didn’t always prove to be the land of equal opportunity and many of our ancestors continued to suffer discrimination in jobs and housing as they pursue the “American Dream”, relocation did offer many the opportunity to experience upward economic mobility. Same can be said for the many that did not migrate with their relatives but remained home in the south often relocating to major cities like Memphis and Jackson, Tennessee. Many of us that were born in the north remember those summer trips “down south” to visit grandparents and relatives.
