The Pursuit of Opportunity: Explaining Selective Black Migration

This paper examines the destination choices of black migrants during the Great Migration. As previous research has shown, educated blacks were more likely to relocate to the North in the pre-World War II era. This analysis shows that this tendency can be attributed to better-educate migrants’ ability to finance transportation costs, greater responsiveness to intercity wage differentials, and stronger distaste for Southern disamenities. After 1940, the destination choice gap closed, largely because migrant responses to wage differentials and valuation of Southern disamenities changed. These changes are observed both in the population at large and within birth-year cohorts.