Great Migrations: A People on The Move

(vocalizing) GATES: When Jacob Lawrence painted his iconic Migration series, he captured the pulsating life and bright hopes of a people in transition, a people no longer Southerners but not yet Northerners.

"The migrants kept coming," Jacob Lawrence said, "A refrain of triumph over adversity."

And keep coming they did.

The migration nearly halted during The Depression.

So, no one could imagine that another mass movement was on the horizon.

This next wave, between 1940 and 1970, exceeded the first nearly three times over.

BALDWIN: The second wave of the Great Migration was 4.5 million people.

The impact was far greater in sheer numbers.

GATES: Global conflict would rekindle Black migration, during the Second World War.

(explosions).

JONES: Wars provide leverage for working people in the sense that there's a need for increased production to fight the war.

ROOSEVELT: We must be the great arsenal of democracy.

JONES: Wars also depend upon the idea that you're fighting for something bigger than yourself.

ROOSEVELT: Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.

All our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them.

GATES: President Franklin Roosevelt defined the quest for victory abroad in moral terms.

But fundamental citizenship rights for African Americans here at home remained far out of reach.

But race relations were slowly beginning to change, and so had the Black community.

The migration's first wave created a sense of collective power and possibility that a second wave would only solidify more firmly.

WILLIAMS: They work in concert, and that lays the foundation for what's to come.

GRANT: The second wave of migration is where the magic happens.

It's where everything starts to coalesce.

GATES: Nicknamed the "Black Mecca," Harlem became a metaphor for the possibilities of individual freedom that few Black southerners could imagine.

The promise of equal civil and political rights drew a young A. Philip Randolph to New York in 1911.

Randolph would become the most effective Black labor organizer in the nation.

JONES: A. Philip Randolph was born in Jacksonville, Florida.

He was the child of a minister, and like a lot of young Black people, he wanted to leave.

He chose to move to Harlem.

There were other Black political activists, and White political activists who were publishing newspapers, who were forming unions and political organizations, and he wanted to be part of that.

GATES: In 1925, Randolph became president of the legendary Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first Black labor union to be chartered by the American Federation of Labor, bringing together workers nationwide.

But The Great Depression of the 1930s ravaged the country.

No group was harder hit than African Americans.

Black unemployment reached a devastating 50%.

SUGRUE: They were the last hired and the first fired.

Despite the supposed freedoms of the North, migrants found often really significant obstacles to advancement.

Workplace discrimination was rife.

GATES: Early in the Second World War, the federal government began heavily investing in the nation's defense.

And that meant one thing... jobs.

Randolph was determined to ensure that a fair share of these new jobs went to Black workers.

He called for a massive March on Washington to demand that the nation's defense industry be desegregated.

WILLIAMS: A. Philip Randolph announces this defiant call.

He's actually challenging, not only assumptions that White politicians have about African Americans, but he's challenging the Black community itself.

We have the numbers.

And why do we have those numbers now?

Because of migration, because we're here.

And so, A. Philip Randolph's initial modest appeal for 10,000 Black men to go to D.C. grows over time.

JONES: The NAACP, the Urban League are starting to get interested in this idea.

By March or April of 1941, A. Philip Randolph's able to say you know, actually, we're going to bring 50, 60,000 Black people to Washington.

GATES: The date was set for July 1st, 1941.

Activists around the country rallied their communities.

As word spread, it was estimated that 100,000 marchers might show up.

WILLIAMS: Roosevelt worried about what impact this march will have on the war effort and America's image abroad.

He even sends aides to appeal to Randolph directly, and yet Randolph doesn't back down.

He recognizes that this is a huge bargaining chip.

JONES: At the last minute before the march is supposed to take place, President Roosevelt concedes, and he calls A. Philip Randolph into the White House.

RANDOLPH: He said, "I'm going to have a committee set up here to settle this question."

I said jobs must be secured for Black people in this country, and they must be secured, now.

GATES: Ultimately, to head off the march, the president agreed to sign an executive order that banned racial discrimination in the defense industry.

He also established a fair employment practices committee to monitor discrimination and persuade employers to hire Black workers for the duration of the war.

JONES: This was a tremendous victory for African Americans.

It was really the first time since Reconstruction that a presidential administration had taken really any act in terms of affirming the principles of racial equality.

GATES: Randolph called off the march, but his idea would resurface 20 years later.

Meanwhile, chances of finding work in the nation's expanding wartime economy dramatically increased for Black women and Black men.

A new wave of job seekers would, once again, flee the South, just as they had during the First World War.

But this time, the North wouldn't be the only promised land.

BALDWIN: We find an explosion of movement from the South to the West.

GREGORY: They're going to the places where the West Coast defense buildup is so important.

WASHINGTON: There's a big shipyard that was established on the north side of Portland to help build ships.

MILLER: My mother, she joined Boeing and was a riveter building B-17s and B-29s in Seattle, during World War II.

Mamie, the riveter.

PINES: My father went to the Bay Area where he found a job in the naval shipyard of Oakland.

JEFFERSON: The Southern California region became the area where more African Americans came for the war industry production.

FREEMAN: There's a place of opportunity.

The California dream.

California's booming.

NARRATOR: It's a warm and welcoming land, and it's waiting for you with open arms... beautiful, bountiful southern California.

BROWN: That journey west was uncharted territory.

Came with a lot of uncertainty, lot of risk but for many with great, great, great rewards.

BALDWIN: What does it mean to strip off those dirty, dusty coveralls, from working in a plantation cotton field, unbowing yourself from Jim Crow conditions in the South?

Walking upright at a Southern California beach.

Being able to take in the sunshine, the same sunshine but under very different conditions.

The juxtaposition between these two was profound.

GATES: In the 1940s, wartime jobs would attract Black Southerners to California as never before.

Many headed to the city of Los Angeles, where an earlier generations of migrants had carved out a small Black oasis known as Central Avenue.

(car horn) Just as they had in Chicago, in New York City, and in Detroit, Black people in Los Angeles developed a vibrant business and cultural community within the confines of residential segregation.

Over time, the neighborhood expanded around the spine of Central Avenue, just south of downtown.

It would become known as South Central.

CHAPPLE: The Black community is staking a claim in the geography and owning the businesses and generating new revenue that is supporting a healthy Black community.

JEFFERSON: You have the newspapers, the beauty salons, the florists, your doctor's office, all of this energy of Black business development, and you had some blossoming of entertainment activity.

CHAPPLE: In its heyday, it becomes this kind of jazz mecca or entertainment mecca with all of its clubs.

When you said "The Avenue," you knew what that was.

It was a place that actually built dreams of freedom.

GATES: Much has changed since those days, so I was eager to visit one of the few Black-owned businesses still open from that time.

Hi, Jeannette.

BOLDEN-PICKENS: Hi, Doc!

This is my grandfather, Harry, and my grandmother, Sadie.

And this is my grandfather teaching my brother on our old black stove.

GATES: Oh man, that is so, that is so cool.

BOLDEN-PICKENS: Training him right there.

GATES: I like this, a pun, a slice of tradition.

That's cool.

BOLDEN-PICKENS: That's what it is.

It's the tradition that everyone appreciates around here.

GATES: Mh-mm.

Can you tell me a little about your family's history?

BOLDEN-PICKENS: My grandparents came from Shreveport, Louisiana in 1940, and they brought with them a tin can full of recipes that had been handed down to them.

My grandfather, Harry Paterson, came here to Los Angeles because he thought that all of his ideas, he can flourish here.

And this bakery actually started as a restaurant.

GATES: What was Central Avenue like when your ancestor came here?

BOLDEN-PICKENS: Central Avenue back then was the community for African Americans when they did come from the South, especially in the entertainment business.

Everyone performed at the Dunbar Hotel, which is down the street.

You had Sammy Davis, Jr., Billie Holiday.

Everybody was here on Central Avenue.

This was where you came.

This was where everyone knew to come.

GATES: Yeah, and they all had to eat, and they all liked, they all liked sweet potato pie.

BOLDEN-PICKENS: And this is why my grandfather started the restaurant because he wanted to make sure, "Look, if you're going to come here for entertainment, grab something to eat, make you feel like you're still at home."

GATES: What kind of restaurant?

They sell, like, soul food?

BOLDEN-PICKENS: Soul food.

His favorite cooking from the South, Shreveport, Louisiana, he brought that same flavor here to Los Angeles.

GATES: Now, tell me about how you're going to let me taste this pie.

BOLDEN-PICKENS: Sweet potato pie, right?

GATES: Yeah, I want sweet potato pie.

BOLDEN-PICKENS: 'Cause I've got the pecan and everything.

GATES: No, no I want sweet potato pie.

BOLDEN-PICKENS: Let me go get that for you.

GATES: OK, great!

Oh man, look at that, that's beautiful.

Look like it's on a magazine.

(laughs) Oh my goodness, so I can just do it like that.

BOLDEN-PICKENS: That, that, that's it.

GATES: Mm, that's it?

BOLDEN-PICKENS: That's it.

GATES: Mm-hmm, mm.

BOLDEN-PICKENS: Mm-hmm.

GATES: Mm, yeah, that's good, crust is light.

Does it have cinnamon in it, right?

Little cinnamon?

Or I can't say?

(clearing throat).

BOLDEN-PICKENS: Lot of love, lot of love, Doc.

GATES: I love that!

I love the traditions, keeping Black traditions alive.

That's so important.

BOLDEN-PICKENS: Yes.

NARRATOR: The art of telling stories with camera and film has become one of the nation's greatest industries, with a capital... GATES: L.A., of course, is most famously the home of Hollywood.

In the 1930s and 40s, movie-making was experiencing its golden age.

Slowly but steadily, opportunities for Black actors began to open up.

WATTS: The American media plays a great role in engaging people's interest in coming to California and Hollywood, and the Black press is a part of that as well.

In the "Pittsburgh Courier," Ruby Berkeley Goodwins highlights the glamorous life of Black Hollywood stars.

And there's a secondary kind of edge to what she writes about.

She writes that Black stars have so much talent and they shouldn't be confined to these stereotypes.

COOPER: For the Black actor who wants to see themselves on the big screen, they're often appearing as supporting characters in a larger White drama.

MCDANIEL: I just loves to work for you, Mrs. Liz!

MRS. LIZ: Yeah.

GATES: One of the most successful Black actors during Hollywood's golden age was Hattie McDaniel.

McDaniel was born into a family with a long history of migration from the South and across the West.

She made it all of the way to Los Angeles in 1931, harboring dreams of Hollywood stardom, but her path to fame wasn't easy.

WATTS: Like most migrants, Hattie McDaniel is confined to living within the area along Central Avenue.

She's working as a maid.

She's pinging back and forth between experiencing that reality as a domestic laborer... MCDANIEL: My, my.

WATTS: And then playing that fantasy that Hollywood has constructed on the screen.

MCDANIEL: I had plenty of lows mixed with the highs.

I'd get a job as a domestic in people's homes.

Cooking washing, ironing, and all the rest of the housework, until another booking came along.

WATTS: Later, when she's defending her career, she says I could be a maid for $7 a week or I could play a maid for $700 a week.

GATES: In 1939, McDaniel's determination finally paid off.

She landed the role of Mammy in "Gone With The Wind."

MCDANIEL: And then he say, Miss Scarlett ain't never cared nothing about Miss Bonnie.

It like to turned my blood cold, the things they say to one another.

GATES: While she would long be criticized for acting in a film that romanticized slavery in the antebellum South, her performance earned her the first Oscar for any Black actor.

MCDANIEL: I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry.

COOPER: Her speech was designed to address some of the criticism and draw attention to the fact that there could be some sort of progress despite the road traveled to get there.

There is this pattern of progress, barrier, success, and migrants would find that everywhere they went.

(crossing bell ringing) GATES: In the decade between 1940 and 1950, a flood of migration out of the South, by both Black and White people, redrew the map of the United States population.

2.6 million White Southerners and 1.4 million Black Southerners moved to the North and to the West.

While White people were free to live in any neighborhood they could afford, Black people had little option but to head to Black neighborhoods, whose boundaries had been firmly fixed by racial segregation.

This new wave of migrants quickly faced a harsh reality, limited space.

FREEMAN: Overcrowding is a severe problem.

People sometimes shared a bed, and someone would sleep at a bed from 8 P.M. to 4 A.M.

Someone else would have the bed from 4 A.M. to noon, and so on.

There was just a total lack of housing space.

GREGORY: The fight against White neighbors that wanted to contain Black communities becomes very profound.

There are massive race riots in Detroit and elsewhere as Whites tried to limit African American migrants' use of space.

GATES: Overpopulation was a problem in major cities nationwide.

But in the city of Los Angeles, the squeeze was especially tight.

During the 1940s, more than 100,000 African Americans would land in Los Angeles, tripling its Black population.

SIDES: It's hard to overstate how utterly unprepared Los Angeles was for the wartime migration.

There was nowhere near enough housing stock, and this created real problems for the new incoming migrants.

JEFFERSON: You have folks looking for spaces to live in the Central Avenue area, but you had no new housing development.

GREGORY: Newcomers coming in meant you either tightened up or you expanded out.

GATES: As the housing crush intensified around Central Avenue, the Black residents with the means to move were the first to take their chances crossing the color line.

SIDES: It was kind of the leading lights of the Black community that said, we're tired of being hemmed in.

As much as we love Central Avenue, we want to have bigger, statelier houses, as affluent people tend to do.

And so, they started to buy up houses in West Adams.

CHAPPLE: There is a part of it that becomes known as Sugar Hill because there's an incline that gives you a 360-degree view of Los Angeles.

And so, when you got to the top of the hill, it was almost like you had made it.

GATES: Among the well-heeled Black celebrities who found homes in the White suburb of West Adams, none was better known, of course, than Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel.

WATTS: The West Adams house becomes kind of a symbol of her success, for her personally but also within the Black community.

GATES: But success alone couldn't free McDaniel from the strictures of a system rigged by racism.

WATTS: She was accepted for a time, but by 1943, there were a number of neighbors, especially in her proximity, that began pushing back and wanted her out.

They wanted the Black residents evicted.

And so, the White homeowners formed the West Adams Improvement Association.

SIDES: The West Adams Improvement Association took them to court, and that began their struggle to get equality in West Adams.

GATES: The lawsuit alleged that by buying homes in a White neighborhood, McDaniel and the other Black residents had violated their property's restrictive covenants.

FREEMAN: The idea of covenants really dates back to the late 19th century.

As developers were building housing, they wanted to be able to ensure to buyers of their properties that the neighborhood would be stable.

Restrictive covenants are attached to deeds, and typically they might say you cannot sell this property to a Jewish person, or more commonly, a Black person.

And so, they were very instrumental in keeping Blacks out of certain neighborhoods.

JEFFERSON: Los Angeles had the most number of challenges to racially-restrictive covenants in the country.

WATTS: It's going to be a big fight.

The NAACP has handled a bunch of different restrictive covenant cases throughout Los Angeles, and they really seize upon this one as a really important case because Hattie McDaniel's so high-profile.

She organizes the meetings within her home where people get together in order to strategize and talk about fighting in the court against the White homeowners who are attempting to oust them from their properties, and so she plays a really critical role in terms of organizing the suit.

GATES: In late 1945, the West Adams case went to court, and McDaniel and the other Black residents won, at least initially.

Appeals left the case in limbo for the next three years.

At the same time, Black working-class families crowded out of Central Avenue, began to integrate affordable White neighborhoods to the south.

JEFFERSON: You have Black folks moving into certain neighborhoods where the White folks are selling even with the restrictive covenants on it, and then some of the other White folks in the neighborhood are complaining and they're trying to push the Black folks out.

GATES: That's what happened to Henry and Texanna Laws, who migrated from Texas to Los Angeles and worked in domestic and defense jobs, saving their pennies so they could buy land and build a house.

Finally, in 1944, they moved into their dream home.

You know, I'm an East Coast guy, and when my parents wanted to buy a home in our little town, they wouldn't let Black people.

They would only let them rent.

So, tell me the story behind that lovely house.

In what part of L.A. did your grandparents build their house?

LAWS: It was a geographical area in Los Angeles city, it's called Watts.

GATES: They were pioneers at integrating Watts?

LAWS: Right.

GATES: Interesting.

LAWS: Bought property on 92nd Street.

92nd Street was the dividing line.

Black on this side, White on that side.

So, after they bought the property, they built the house, and when they moved in... GATES: All hell broke loose.

LAWS: All hell broke loose.

MARSHALL: If you lived in the area and you weren't recognized as White, you had hostilities, harassment.

I remember Anna, my great-grandmother, she used to like to sit on her front porch with a shawl over her legs and a shotgun.

GATES: A shotgun?

MARSHALL: A shotgun.

GATES: Wow.

MARSHALL: She always kept the shotgun with her, because when they first acquired the house and moved in there, people would come and try and take the house from them.

JACKSON: Right.

MARSHALL: One night, a whole crowd of people came up on the house.

The crowd is rah, rah, rah, rah, get out of here, get out of here, and she takes a shotgun, and she racks it.

And at the same time, you hear about four other shotguns behind the crowd rack.

GATES: Oh, wow.

MARSHALL: And the crowd decides maybe it's not a good time to try and take this property right now.

GATES: Yeah, they moved, they moved here to get away from racism.

LAWS: Right.

GATES: They come out and get West Coast style.

So, what happened next?

MARSHALL: Oh, they went to jail.

LAWS: Jail, went to jail.

GATES: L.A. county charged Henry and Texanna, along with their daughter Pauletta, with violating the restrictive covenant on the land on which they had built their home.

FEARS: An eviction notice was issued.

We were ordered to move.

When we refused, we were put in jail like common criminals.

MARSHALL: Pauletta is here on the end.

This is the daughter.

GATES: Okay.

MARSHALL: Anna, in the middle, and this is... GATES: Oh man, that's terrible.

MARSHALL: Yeah.

What do you think made your ancestors fight back?

Some people would have said that this is too much trouble.

Just sell to some White people, they don't want us here, buy a nice house in the hood.

So where did their strength come from?

JACKSON: I think it's just inside you.

Sometimes you're just born to be a fighter.

You just are going to stand up for what you believe you have the opportunity and the right to have.

GATES: Uh-huh.

The Laws stood their ground and continued to fight their case through the courts, at both the local and the state levels, over the next several years.

In 1948, L.A. attorney, Loren Miller, who represented both Hattie McDaniel and the Laws family, joined Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP's lead attorney to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court, known as Shelley versus Kramer.

To many peoples' surprise, they won with the court ruling that racially restrictive covenants could not be enforced in state courts without violating the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.

As a result, the cases against the Laws family and Hattie McDaniel were voided.

CHAPPLE: That is the first time that we see a court actually saying, hey, it is time for people of African descent to be able to participate in the American dream of home ownership.

SIDES: The reaction in the Black press to the Shelley decision was one of extraordinary excitement.

They even had a picture of Hattie McDaniel's house, and it said, "Negroes free to live anywhere now."

WATTS: And the house stands as not only just a symbol of Black achievement, but it also stands as a symbol of Black resistance.

SIDES: The Laws' vigilance, their determination to seek equality in Los Angeles, as well as countless other families in Los Angeles we don't know about, these are stories that need to be told because they represent, in a very real way, the making of the modern civil rights movement.

You have Black people moving and deciding they will not tolerate this.

GATES: Following the war, across the North and West, pockets of Black upward mobility began to surface.

And in no place was that more stunning than in the city of Detroit.

GRIFFIN: Detroit is special for a number of reasons.

It is seen as one of the sort of Midwestern Black meccas.

It looks like Black people can do well there financially.

GATES: Between 1910 and 1920, Detroit's Black population jumped more than ten times, then grew exponentially in each decade that followed.

Detroit's appeal stemmed from its rapidly expanding auto industry, which boomed in the post-war economy.

SUGRUE: Migration really profoundly shaped Detroit.

The economic growth in the city created sort of a feedback loop where migrants heard of and knew that there were decent, well-paying jobs there and so came in growing numbers.

POWELL: My family, they moved to Detroit.

My mother, she sort of fell in love with it.

DUKES: Arriving in Detroit was a strikingly different world, where people were relatively free.

BOYD: My mother was a dreamer.

She didn't want her children to grow up under the conditions that she grew up under.

I was four years old when I got up to Detroit.

That was a whole wonderful new experience for me.

GREGORY: Detroit was the mecca of world industrialization.

It's where the heart of American industry was, the most innovative and powerful parts, those auto companies.

GATES: Henry Ford's assembly line system revolutionized the industrial process.

Ford's astonishing promise to pay even his Black workers five dollars a day was unheard of, a tantalizing draw difficult to resist.

Finally allowed to join the powerful union movement, Black workers, bolstered by the activism of local civil rights organizations, slowly gained access to more jobs in the auto industry.

JONES: You get Black people with enough clout in largely White unions, so Black people gain really significant leadership power.

BOYD: Hold onto that dream, brother.

Don't let it go.

All of this is a product of the ingenuity of the migrants, who are coming in from the outside.

There's a certain kind of endurance, kind of stick-to-it-ness.

GATES: By the early 1950s, Black Detroiter's efforts to secure better-paying jobs began to pay off.

Detroit even saw the rise of a robust Black middle class, composed of entrepreneurs, ministers, undertakers, as well as doctors and lawyers who had moved to the city to serve a burgeoning clientele.

SUGRUE: They were able to buy decent, modest houses.

They were able to save money to buy nice cars, to educate their children, and those avenues to mobility and economic opportunity were really substantial.

BROWN: The Great Migration afforded the children of migrants, perhaps not an unencumbered experience, but enough distance from the rigidity of Jim Crow and the direct, daily interaction with it to allow children to be children and to see there's all these other horizons for one to encounter and see themselves in.

GATES: One of the most famous children of Detroit's migration is the entrepreneurial genius and founder of Motown, Berry Gordy.

GATES: Gordy's Detroit-based record label would almost single-handedly revolutionize American popular music.

ROSS: I need love, love to ease my mind.

Berry Gordy's parents had moved up from Georgia during the early phase of the migration.

His father worked multiple jobs, then started his own businesses.

That hard work allowed Gordy to pursue his passions, which ranged from boxing to music.

BOYD: If you were kind of caught in the general flow of the city in terms of jobs you started with, get out of high school, get me this job at Ford Motor Company, as your uncle had, as your cousin had.

And he got a job at Lincoln Mercury Ford where his whole life just dramatically changed.

He got on the assembly line.

He saw how a car was produced.

Henry Ford had the idea you start with the molten steel.

Go all the way through the process in one space, in one place.

That's what Berry recognized, and he said ah.

Berry saw the genius, the vision that he had in terms of putting together the assembly line of the whole Motown production.

GATES: It was Ford's assembly line model that inspired the formula for Gordy's record company, a literal hit factory that would develop artists, craft its signature sound with a team of writers, musicians, and arrangers, then distribute the music, just like building and selling a car.

GORDY: I noticed the way the beautiful brand-new cars would start out as just frames and end up brand new spanking cars.

I wanted the same thing for Motown.

I wanted an artist to come in the front door, an unknown, and come out another door a recording artist.

GATES: In 1959, Gordy founded his record label.

He named it Motown in honor of the Motor City.

GRIFFIN: Berry Gordy becomes one of these figures where the cultural and the economic all come together.

I think of him like a sponge, taking everything in.

BOYD: And there was like, a pool of talent in Detroit in those days.

The doo-wop singers on the corners, he just corralled them.

You know, you're singing on the corner.

Come on into the studio.

GATES: Like Gordy, many of Motown's artists were also children of the Great Migration.

GRIFFIN: All of these Black musical forms that migrants brought with them, that migrants created, their children then build upon.

BROWN: Blackness is improvisation.

Blackness is, there's a jazz about it.

We improvise on the things that we've created or picked up along the way, but also then we flip it and reverse it.

JACKSON: It ain't goin' that well.

Imma shout!

ISLEY: You make me wanna.

GROUP: Shout.

ISLEY: Kick my heels up and... GROUP: Shout.

GAYE: Can I get a witness?

BACKGROUND VOCALS: Can I get a witness?

GAYE: I want a witness.

GRIFFIN: It's both rhythm and blues, it's soul.

And by becoming the music of White American youth, as well as Black American youth, it becomes American popular music at the same time that social and political movements are challenging that segregation, Motown is already doing it musically.

MARTHA: Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat?

Summer's here... GATES: Berry Gordy turned Motown into the most successful Black-owned corporation in the entire country.

The Motown label not only produced some of R&B's most legendary acts, it also demonstrated that the racial integration of mainstream American culture was here to stay.

MARTHA: This is an invitation, across the nation, a chance for folks to meet.

GRIFFIN: Culture opens up doors, and I think that's the direct consequence of these large migrations.

When there is mobility, they're becoming more visible, and Black people end up in spaces where they have not been known to be.

VANDELLAS: Dancing in the street.

MARTHA: All we need is music.

VANDELLAS: Sweet, sweet.

MARTHA: Sweet music.

GATES: During the migration's sixth decade, Black flight to the North continued to surge, ironically just as the civil rights movement was gaining momentum in the South.

BAKER: The day has come when racism must be banished.

GATES: Northern organizations sent reinforcements.

One group, the Congress of Racial Equality, would tackle segregation head-on with its bold series of freedom rides in 1961.

WILLIAMS: We had these mixed groups of Black and White activists who are traveling throughout the South to test whether southern states are abiding by the fact that there is no federal segregation laws that govern these spaces.

This is very threatening to White Southerners who act accordingly.

What these rides inevitably do is bring national attention on the South and a spotlight on the treatment of these integrated riders, these integrated groups.

GATES: While the Freedom Rides generated a violent backlash, one pro-segregationist group had something much more devious in mind.

A New Orleans chapter of the White Citizens Council organized what became known as the "reverse freedom rides."

It was a diabolical attempt to disempower the growing political movement and make a mockery of the Great Migration.

They paid Greyhound to take busloads of Black Southerners to Northern cities for free, promising that they'd be received with jobs and housing accommodations.

MAN: I'm going because I'm trying to better my condition.

I'm looking for employment.

The work is very slow.

WILLIAMS: They select the poorest of the poor, people who are out of work, who lack skills, those who would have not had access, to begin with.

GATES: Of course, it was a ploy.

When the buses finally arrived in cities like New York, Cleveland, or Chicago the passengers, to their horror, found no one waiting to welcome them.

WILLIAMS: The reverse freedom rides, preys on the Great Migration, prays on the hopes and aspirations of Black folks, what they were still utilizing as a means of escape from southern apartheid.

It's done in ways that disregards their humanity in the worst possible way.

GATES: Despite attempts by advocacy organizations to come to their rescue, many of these reverse freedom riders were stranded in the North and left to fend for themselves.

SIMMONS: We believe in segregation for exactly the same reason that the White people in New York don't want to live in Harlem.

Now they can examine their own motives and their own consciences... GREEN: The Southern architects of this strategy were interested only in trying to discredit desegregation, but they recognized that there were limits on how far White liberals in the North would go to really create the conditions for justice.

SUGRUE: There was a lot of frustration among Black Northerners in the 1960s about the slow pace of change.

Frustration grows out of unmet expectations, and migrants had come to the North with really high expectations.

FREEMAN: Shelley v. Kramer moved a major stumbling block to Blacks being able to buy houses where they want, but then they run into the other obstacles: mortgage discrimination, realtor discrimination, and White flight.

The underlying tax base and the fiscal status of cities declined.

JONES: And you see rising rates of Black unemployment because Black workers are still shut out of jobs.

So, there's still this discrimination.

This is not a welcoming place that we found ourselves in.

WILLIAMS: By the early 1960s, A. Philip Randolph is seen as the elder statesman of the civil rights movement, universally liked and revered by the younger generation of activists, including Bayard Rustin whom he mentored.

And Rustin at this point has been building his own career of organizing.

As 1962 is drawing to a close and economic opportunities for African Americans remain meager, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin start kicking around the idea of bringing back the March on Washington from 1941.

JONES: The prominent thing in their mind is permanent federal law banning employment discrimination based on race.

Every year between the end of the Second World War, 1945, and the early 1960s, Black activists had pushed in Congress, and every year that law would either die in committee or be rejected on the floor.

So, they couldn't get this passed.

GATES: But Randolph was undaunted.

Could a truly nationalized Black population answer a new crawl to Washington?

RANDOLPH: Negroes want the same things that White citizens possess.

They want complete equality.

And no force under the sun can stem and block and stop this civil rights revolution which is now underway.

GATES: As Randolph and Rustin began planning the second March on Washington, they were clear that its goals had to include both expanded employment opportunities and the strongest push to end Jim Crow, finally and forever.

Accordingly, the march's slogan evolved from a march for jobs to a march for jobs and freedom.

GREEN: They're national problems, and they require a national will to address them.

GATES: The leaders of the "big six," the most prominent civil rights organizations, made up the march's executive committee.

Working together, they helped to deliver the largest demonstration that Washington had ever seen.

WILLIAMS: It's almost as if the March on Washington completes the circle.

It begins with this journey in 1910 where 90% of Black people still live in the South.

Now we've moved up to 1963, certainly that migration has led to this dispersal of African Americans throughout the nation, but the issues impacting the Black community really haven't changed.

You know, Southern apartheid is Northern apartheid, and so this movement in 1963 seeks to complete that arc and come full circle.

What is the value of civil rights if they're not backed up by concrete national action?

And that's what the March on Washington is calling for.

RANDOLPH: I think history was written today, which will have its effect on coming generations, with respect to our democracy.

GATES: The sheer number of marchers who descended on Washington from all over the country offered the nation perhaps its first glimpse of a truly national Black population.

And just as importantly, it allowed Black Americans to witness the reach, depth, and potential of their own power.

JACKSON: Oh my gosh.

LAWS: My grandparents were just stubborn.

They weren't going to let nobody tell them what to do.

MARSHALL: My father said it best that it's the foundation that we all go back to, that we all are part of.

It's, in, in... not only is it in our history, it is our DNA.

And that perseverance, that grit, has stayed with us.

BROWN: The African American Great Migration changed how we see ourselves as matters of consequence to the world, and that's so very special.

It changed the racial landscape of this country.

It changed the economic structure of this country.

It changed the political structure of the country and also the cultural landscape and all that comes with the beauty of what it means to be Black in this country.

GRIFFIN: We start to see more Black athletes than we've ever seen before.

ANNOUNCER: What a marvelous moment for the country and the world.

A Black man is getting a standing ovation.

BALDWIN: The music that we associate with America, the foodways we associate with America, the clothing styles that we associate with America.

Their presence changed the imaginations and understandings of the urban world.

Black people became urban.

GATES: African American migration out of the South was one of the most significant demographic transformations in the history of the United States.

Between 1910 and 1970, six million black people left behind much of what they knew, risking everything to stake their claim in the promise land.

But by the 1970s, migration north began to ebb, as people took stock of what they'd gained, what they'd lost, and whether or not that promise had been kept.

(music plays through credits) NARRATOR: For more information about "Great Migrations: A People on the Move" visit pbs.org/greatmigrations.

The DVD version of this program is available online and in stores.

Also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video (music continues through credits)