Substack

Samuel C. Winchester | August 31, 2023                                                

According to the 2020 census Black Americans make up 12.1 percent of the United States population, down from 12.6 percent in the 2010 census. This may seem insignificant in terms of political power, but the Black American vote has been the most important voting bloc in every presidential election of the modern era. Black voters have enormous political power, and as a voting bloc, the Black vote has the power to pick the President of the United States every 4 years. Black voters have the power to decide the fate of an incumbent running for reelection, and the power to make a challenger president and change the course of the country. No constituency in America has more powerful. 

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You may be wondering, “how does 12 percent of the population have so much political power?” The answer lies in where that 12 percent is located in the country. The vast majority of that 12 percent is centered in the urban areas of the most important swing states. To understand how this came to be, and the political impact that it has in the United States today, you must understand the Great Migration. 

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The Great Migration was the movement of approximately 6 million Black people out of the South during reconstruction and Jim Crow, over a period of about 60 years from 1915 to early 1970s. If you have never heard of the Great Migration, it is no surprise. Isabel Wilkerson wrote the award-winning book on the Great Migration called, “The Warmth of Other Suns”. She refers to it as, “the biggest underreported story of the 20th century”. One reason so few people know about the Great Migration is because it happened over 6 decades. If 6 million people all at once migrate to another location it is going to register, but when 6 million people migrate separately over 6 decades it can go unnoticed, especially when they stay within the borders of a nation. 

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Several factors were driving the migration. For some it was the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, or the outright dehumanization and frequent lynchings of Black people in the South. For others it was the opportunity for job in a factory in the North instead of struggling as a sharecropper to feed their family in the South. Many reasons motivated so many people to pack up and say goodbye to their friends and the only homes they had ever known. Wilkerson writes,

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