Graphic detail | Political movements

America’s other great migration

White migrants from America’s South turned its northern politics rightwards

After America’s civil war, millions of black Americans left the country’s southern states. Many were newly freed from slavery. They sought, and often found, better and safer lives, in manufacturing centres such as Detroit and New York. Known as the country’s “Great Migration”, this flow of people transformed the culture and economies of the places where migrants arrived. It also gave politics in northern cities an enduring push left.

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