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and 1970, another five million followed. Their impact could hardly have been more transformative. In Chicago, for example, African Americans went from 2 percent of the city’s population in 1910 to 33 percent in 1970. 8
    The migrants found jobs in the steel mills of Gary, the shipyards of Philadelphia, the automobile factories of Flint, the meat-packing plants of Kansas City. They found better schools for their children and escape from the threat of terrorists inwhite robes. What they didn’t find, for the most part, was anything like the Valhalla of racial integration and harmony that many had expected.
    On one level, the newly arrived African Americans were just like the other hyphenated ethnic groups that had arrived in their turn—except, of course, they didn’t use hyphens in those days. The Irish, the Italians, and the Poles were not yet assimilated, and they saw black newcomers from the South as competitors for jobs—and later, after the newcomers were settled, for political patronage. In that sense, African Americans were just another ethnic clan. As had been the routine with the other clans, new arrivals gravitated toward neighborhoods where a support system was already in place: relatives or acquaintances from the same Southern town who could offer temporary lodgings; a job or at least the rumor of employment; the phone number of someone who might know someone who could open the right doors; the possibility of making quick friendships with experienced city dwellers who knew the ropes. But these reasons only partly explain why blacks ended up in segregated enclaves like Harlem in New York City or Bronzeville in Chicago. There was, and is, something stubbornly powerful about race as a dividing line.
    Chicago, to take perhaps the clearest example, was a young city with no history of slavery or Jim Crow—a city whose first nonindigenous settler had been Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a black man. Illinois had progressive laws that outlawed segregation in education and public accommodations. Yet blacks were confined to the sprawling South Side through a web of racially restrictive housing covenants that put most fashionable North Side neighborhoods off-limits. In other words, the private sector did what the public sector would not. The SouthSide eventually grew to become—and remains today—the biggest and most populous black-majority neighborhood in the country.
    To be sure, there were exceptions. My father, Harold I. Robinson, was a statistic in the Great Migration. He was born in 1916 in Canon, Georgia, a small town in the northeast part of the state. This was during a relatively brief stopover in the family’s journey north, which took years to complete; each of his five siblings was born in a different city. They made it all the way to Michigan and settled in Ann Arbor—then, as now, a liberal-minded college town whose views on social issues were radically ahead of their time. My father attended integrated Ann Arbor High School, then went on to study at the University of Michigan and earn his law degree at Wayne State University in Detroit. An African American man whose entire secondary and postsecondary education came at integrated institutions was a great rarity.
    Still, when he was called to serve his country in World War II my father was relegated to racially segregated units. The friends of his that I met from his Michigan years were African American. Even with his atypical background, he grew up with a profound sense of himself as a black man who belonged to a black community that was not allowed to participate fully in the social, political, and economic life of its country—a community that had to construct a social, political, and economic life of its own.
    That was the case throughout the country. It’s true that racial segregation in the South, enforced by law and terror, wasn’t the same as racial segregation in the North and West, which was often enforced by housing covenants but also had to