The Great Migration , sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of six million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970. It was substantially caused by poor economic and social conditions due to prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld. In particular, continued lynchings motivated a portion of the migrants, as African Americans searched for social reprieve. The historic change brought by the migration was amplified because the migrants, for the most part, moved to the then-largest cities in the United States ( New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. ) at a time when those cities had a central cultural, social, political, and economic influence over the United States; there, African-Americans established culturally influential communities of their own. Carter Godwin Woodson (December 19, 1875 – April 3, 1950) was an American historian, author, journalist, and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). He was one of the first scholars to study the history of the African diaspora , including African-American history . A founder of The Journal of Negro History in 1916, Woodson has been called the "father of black history." In February 1926, he launched the celebration of "Negro History Week", the precursor of Black History Month. Woodson was an important figure to the movement of Afrocentrism, due to his perspective of placing people of African descent at the center of the study of history and the human experience.