CHICAGO — There’s a sense of pride for many Americans in our identity as a melting pot. But until the early part of the 20th Century, the United States was deeply segregated.

That’s when millions in the Jim Crow South decided uproot their lives, hoping to live the American Dream.

A few months after the Confederate army lost the Civil War, the 13th Amendment was signed, abolishing slavery in the United States.

But in the nearly 100 years between the signing of the 13th Amendment and the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, something happened that would go on to shape the nation.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, 90% of the African American population lived in the South, under conditions that can really only be described as oppressive.

Author Brett Gadsden teaches history at Northwestern University.

“Lynchings were fairly common occurrence,” he said. “Race riots were a fairly common occurrence. I think so common that we ought to kind of consider them a normal way of being in the Jim Crow South. … And African Americans are looking for a way to fight back. Looking for ways to participate in the democratic process to overturn this system as American citizens.”

As Ethan Michaeli, author of “The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America” points out, what would come to be known as The Great Migration started with great journalism.

“Publishing was a fraught enterprise for African Americans in the South, but people did it very courageously and often times risked their lives to publish information that they felt their readers needed to have,” he said. “There were a lot of publishers that had to flee after they published something and there were people who weren’t able to flee and were caught and were killed. … The Defender was unique for decades really, in exposing the horrors of Jim crow segregation in the South.”

Launched in 1905, by Robert S. Abbott, the Chicago Defender started as a weekly, at first, distributed by Pullman Porters, which gave the paper the same reach as the railways, making its way deep into the segregated South.

“African Americans were literally running for their lives,” Gadsden said. “What makes The Great Migration so important in the larger history of African Americans and the United States in general is the sheer enormity of the numbers.”

During the first wave of the great migration, between 1910 and 1940, it’s reported that nearly two million Blacks left the South.

“Aa when they migrated to these northern cities, they faced many new challenges and some challenges that look a lot like the ones there were forced to flee,” Gadsden said. “The problem of police violence seemed to follow African Americans wherever they went, housing segregation, school segregation … I don’t think they were under any delusions that this was in a literal sense a promised land.”

“African Americans yes, are coming to the North because there are jobs, there are jobs in the North, there are opportunities in the North that are not available in the South,” Michaeli said. “But to be frank, they’re coming at a time that there are jobs in the South as well. There are steel mills in Birmingham just like there are in Gary, Indiana. The difference is in the North there is the opportunity to vote and to organize and participate in the political process in a way that is not available in the South.”

“I think it’s important to understand the emergence of these new concentrated, and in quantitative terms, pretty robust Black voting blocks,” Gadsden said. “We begin to see white elected officials begin to address the questions and concerns of their Black constituency, who can vote. And if Black voters didn’t have the option to vote for black representatives they certainly were positioned strategically to weigh in and determine the fate of one or another white candidate. … So much about aa and the ways they’ve resisted their conditions, the ways in which they’ve resisted racial subordination, and White Supremacy is about perfecting the union. … It reveals to us the ways in which African American history is national history.”

National Association of Black Journalists President Ken Lemon says the Black press is proud to continue pushing for justice for all.

“There’s always more work to do. Every now and then when I talk to people who have the opportunity to be in the media I say I am my ancestor’s wildest dreams. And then there’s always that caveat, but if our ancestors knew what we were capable of today, would they stop here?” Lemon said.  “Are we doing enough to say that we’ve stretched the bounds the way The Defender did? Are we doing enough to ensure that coverage duplicates what The Defender was doing at its station in time? So, the challenge never goes away.”

In all, it’s believed that 7 million people moved from the South to the North between 1910 and 1970.

Half a million stayed in Chicago.