 During his childhood in the 1910s, author William Attaway traveled with his family from the segregated south of Mississippi to the northern city of Chicago, Illinois; in doing so his family became part of what would be known as the Great Migration.From 1910 to 1930, approximately six million African Americans moved from the rural southern United States to the industrialized North.The northern states of Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, New York and Michigan received the majority of the migrating African Americans.