The Great Migration: The First Moving-to-Opportunity Project

In the late 1990s the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development conducted an experiment on economic mobility by tracking thousands of public housing tenants and residents of low-income neighborhoods to see how they fared when moved to other neighborhoods, particularly those with less poverty. Called the Moving To Opportunity project, it tracked nearly 4,600 families, making it one of the largest-scale experiments of its kind—unless you count that other enormous moving-to-opportunity project of the early 20th century called The Great Migration.

For that grand experiment, more than 6 million African Americans escaped the racial terror and degrading labor conditions of the South, throughout the entire first half of the 20th century, moving to northern and western regions of the U.S., where they hoped sanctuary and better jobs awaited them. Dozens of researchers have studied the plight of this migrant group, among them Isabel Wilkerson in her 2010 book The Warmth of Other Suns, looking closely at how those migrants were treated, educated, and employed in their new settings. But how did their kids turn out? This is the focus of a new study from demographers Catherine Massey and J. Trent Alexander, of the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center, and sociologists Christine Leibbrand and Stewart Tolnay, of the University of Washington.