![]() ![]() MARTIN: at around 1900 or so, 90 percent of all black Americans lived in the South. She's expanded mightily on Langston Hughes' offering and the offerings of just about anybody who's studied and written on this remarkable movement of African-Americans from the rural South to places like Chicago, Harlem, Milwaukee, Detroit, Los Angeles, Oakland and Seattle. But Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson may have gone him one better. ![]() MARTIN: That's Langston Hughes, reading from his poem "One Way Ticket," published in 1947. So I pick up my life and take it away on a one-way ticket - gone up North, gone out West. LANGSTON HUGHES: I am fed up with Jim Crow laws, people who are cruel and afraid, who lynch and run, who are scared of me, and me of them. Why did they leave? Well, maybe Langston Hughes described it best. It became known as the Great Migration, the movement of more than six million people of African descent from the South to the North in a span of some 60 years. ![]() I was close to one of the vast waves of immigration that have done so much to shape this country, but these people were already here. It was bigger than the Dust Bowl migration. Now we're going to tell you about one of the largest mass migrations in this country's history. ![]() I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE, from NPR News. ![]()
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