 Suppression of the black vote and re-establishment of white supremacy suppressed knowledge of what had been a thriving black middle class in the state.The Republicans were no longer competitive in state politics, although they had strength in the mountain districts.Reacting to segregation, disfranchisement in 1899, and difficulties in agriculture in the early twentieth century, tens of thousands of African Americans left the state (and hundreds of thousands began to leave the rest of the South) for the North and Midwest - for better opportunities in the Great Migration; in its first wave, from 1910–1940, one and a half million African Americans left the South.