<Tr> <Td> <Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> </Td> </Tr> <Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> <P> The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African - Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970 . Until 1910, more than 90 percent of the African - American population lived in the American South . In 1900, only one - fifth of African - Americans living in the South were living in urban areas . By the end of the Great Migration, 53 percent of the African - American population remained in the South, while 40 percent lived in the North, and 7 percent in the West, and the African - American population had become highly urbanized . By 1970, more than 80 percent of African - Americans lived in cities, and by 1960, of those African - Americans still living in the South, half now lived in urban areas . In 1991, Nicholas Lemann wrote that the Great Migration: </P> <P> was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements in history--perhaps the greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation . In sheer numbers it outranks the migration of any other ethnic group--Italians or Irish or Jews or Poles--to (the United States). For African Americans, the migration meant leaving what had always been their economic and social base in America, and finding a new one . </P>

When did large numbers of african-americans first leave the south