The largest human migration in American history began in 1915. Over the next half-century, nearly six million African Americans packed their belongings, left their homes in the Jim Crow South, and set out for the big cities of the North in search of jobs and freedom.
Known as the “Great Migration,” the poet Alain Locke wrote, this mass movement was “a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.” City life in the North was immeasurably enriched by the arrival of so many strangers from the South. But American culture was transformed forever because jazz was part of the newcomers’ baggage.
Wherever they settled it found eager new audiences. New York’s Harlem, Chicago’s South Side, the wide-open streets of Kansas City Missouri, the Paradise Valley neighborhood in Detroit, Central Avenue in Los Angeles, and many other new jazz-rich big-city enclaves all across the country became proving grounds for America’s music.
