Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division

Harper's Weekly, March 31, 1877

By 1860, a number of Northern cities had seen an increase in their population of free African Americans born in the South. In Boston, about 30 percent of the black population was from the South. More than half of Chicago's free blacks were Southerners. About one-third of Philadelphia's African American population was Southern-born.