 Another change in American society that had a profound impact on the aesthetic advancement of African-Americans at the time of Locke's publication of The New Negro was the Great Migration. One major consequence of “that shifting of the Negro population” was that it “made the Negro problem no longer exclusively or even predominantly Southern” (NN 5). Locke did not however regard the cause of the great migration as chiefly racial; that is, escape from the segregation of the South was not the major motivation behind the mass African-American exodus from the South to the North and Mid-West. Instead,