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It was the great migration, but it was also something quieter: a profound economic and cultural shift. The factories of Detroit and Chicago provided jobs, though not without struggle. In the North, racism still loomed—less overt, perhaps, but no less pernicious.

Image: Actor James Earl Jones as a boy. In the migration’s early years, 500 people a day fled to the North. By 1930, a tenth of the country’s black population had relocated. When it ended, nearly half lived outside the South.

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