One of the factors contributing to the rise of the Harlem Renaissance was the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities between 1919 and 1926. The two major causes that fueled the Great Migration were the Jim Crow segregation laws of the south and the start of World War I. When World War I began in Europe, foreign workers were no longer able to emigrate to America and the factories in the north needed a new labor source and they looked to the south for this work force. Hundreds of thousands of blacks migrated during this period, but it is estimated that five million blacks migrated from the south between 1900-1960.
