The Great Migration was a long-term movement of African Americans from the South to the urban North that transformed Chicago and other northern cities between 1916 and 1970. The Chicago Defender delivered a new message of hope through the Pullman Porters, and the Illinois Central Railroad brought to Chicago more than 500,000 of the approximately 7 million African Americans who left the Jim Crow South during these decades in search of the "Promise Land." African Americans constituted 33 percent of Chicago's population by 1970 and emerged by the mid-twentieth century as a powerful force in the city's political, economic, and cultural life.
