The Great Migration and Healthcare to Black America

Abstract

The Great Migration, the movement of 6,000,000 black Americans from the South to the great urban centers of the eastern seaboard, the industrial Midwest, and West Coast port cities from roughly 1915-1970, was one of the defining demographic events in American history. It dwarfed the 100,000 49ers who swarmed westward in search of gold, the incarceration of 110,000 Japanese to concentration camps in the American interior during World War II, and the 300,000 Okies who escaped the Dust Bowl to California. In the words of writer Isabel Wilkerson, “[It] swept a good portion of all the black people alive in the United States at the time into a river that carried them to all points north and west.” Blacks crammed into urban districts rife with crime and communicable disease, subjecting them to risks of death far higher than their proportion of the population. Without access to adequate inpatient hospital facilities, they received care in public hospitals run by hospital staffs that excluded black physicians from their membership and medical schools that refused admission to black students. The untenable health station of Black America was one of the leading causes of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, activism that succeeded in integrating the hospitals and medical schools by federal acts passed in 1964 and 1965 that transformed American medicine.