Boll Weevil Devastates Southern Cotton, Accelerating Black Great Migration North

The boll weevil, which entered the United States from Mexico around 1892, spread rapidly through Southern cotton states by 1915-1916, destroying crops that Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers depended on. Combined with catastrophic flooding in 1915 and 1916, the destruction wiped out already precarious incomes. With demand for Northern industrial labor rising due to WWI cutting off European immigration, the weevil became a major push factor in the Great Migration of approximately 1.6 million Black Americans who left the South between 1910 and 1930.