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

W. L. Sheppard

Harper's Weekly, August 3, 1867

Although their legal status was often problematic in the North, and despite often harsh working conditions there, thousands of free people of color made the decision to emigrate in order to escape certain oppression in the South. This movement from the South to the North continued well after the end of the Civil War, and reached its apogee in the twentieth century. Between 1870 and 1890, the Northern and Western states gained more than 120,000 people through migrations.