The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970. It was caused primarily by the poor economic conditions as well as the prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld. 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 DC) at a time when those cities had a central cultural, social, political, and economic influence over the United States. There, African Americans established influential communities of their own.