The Great Migration in Perspective

Why Migration Heritage Foundation:  The Great Migration in Perspective

Migration Heritage Foundation's mission is to mark migration-related trails with factual stories, art, artifacts, and relics that enhance understanding and generate discourse about the experiences of African Americans in this country. Most African Americans in this country have roots in the southern states that thrived on an agricultural economy fueled by free or cheap labor blacks provided. From the time they arrived from Africa to the shores of this nation, most African Americans were confined to the South and chained to the bottom of a feudal social order. As servants, they were at the mercy of enslavers and often-violent vigilantes for centuries.

Concentrated in the South as they were, blacks had few avenues to escape the confines of servitude. When emancipation finally came, most remained confined by the ropes of sharecropping and debt peonage. Railroads, airlines, and interstate highways were not readily accessible to or affordable for many who depended on a plantation economy.  So for decades after freedom, African Americans in the South remained isolated from the rest of the country. 

The Great Migration offered the first opportunity for blacks to leave plantation life without permission from the white ruling class.  Collectively, the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy after slavery, expansion of the railroad, the emergence of the automobile, and the spread of the interstate highway system helped open relocation trails for blacks.  An account in Smithsonian Magazine explains the magnitude of movement. Accordingly, the migration era started during the early 1900s, when approximately 90 percent of all African Americans lived in the South. By 1970, the number saw a 43 percent decrease, when 47 percent of all African Americans lived in the North, Midwest, East, and West industrial cities. In effect, a rural population became urban, changing the racial makeup of areas throughout the nation. Today, it is not easy to find an African American in urban areas like Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles who do not have roots in the South.

Existing literature divides African American history into two epochs; almost three centuries of enslavement before the Civil War and the half-century or so after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Accounts for the almost 100-year-period starting with the upsurge of Jim Crow during Reconstruction to the 1950s are sparse at best. Relocations during the Great Migration peaked during the latter period.

Yet to be thoroughly examined is the human story of this large group of migrants  These were ordinary people whose hopes were temporarily lifted by emancipation but rapidly thwarted by pervasive practices of violence, terrorism, oppression, and injustices that re-surfaced with increased vigor after slavery. Remaining to be fully integrated into historical annals are internal and external motivations of African Americans who relocated during the Great Migration and the impact of disrupted family ties on them and their descendants. The internalizations of non-migrants, who remained in the South and withstood continuing oppressive practices, also merits analysis.

The large group of black migrants helped shape and reshape this country's social, economic, and political orders. Those who moved North pushed for and participated in democratic practices earlier than those left behind. Their presence and pressure--and that of their descendants--forced systems in big cities to pay attention to injustices. They organized to fight for equal opportunity, education, and social justice. Their actions and reactions changed the course of life for themselves, their descendants, African Americans they left behind in the South, and whites in the North and South. 

Many oppressive situations migrants found in large industrial cities remain to this day.  So, critical examinations of the impact of such a mass relocation could offer remedies for racial animosities and other disparities that plague this nation. Consider these examples. Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago lad killed in Mississippi in 1955, was a descendant of the Great Migration. Till's grandparents moved his mother, Mamie, from Mississippi to Illinois early in the 1920s. Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old who lost his life to police action in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2014, descended from Millie Lee Wylie. Millie's ancestors migrated from the bottomlands of Sumter County, Alabama. Finally, The mother's name George Floyd called with his dying breath migrated from North Carolina.  Floyd was African American who lost his life to police brutality in Minnesota in 2020. The fates of these and others attest to continuing perils migrants and their descendants.

This large segment of black migrants and their descendants appears caught in society's crosshairs. Current situations such as police killings of unarmed African Americans, mass incarceration of people of color, and widely documented biases in employment, housing, health care, and education dominate national headlines.  They suggest that encounters migrants sought to escape are confined neither to the South nor the past. They also suggest the need for history to communicate how populations came to be, withstood adversities, and overcome unequal treatments.  

Knowledge of history is one predictor of emotional health and happiness. In his study of the roots of resilience in children, Bruce Feiler, in an article in the New York Times, concluded that: "The more children knew about their family's history," Fieler wrote, "the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned."

So, it remains possible that awareness of real-life experiences of participants in the Great Migration and their descendants can help generate understanding, empathy, recovery, triumph, and happiness are communicate the notion that there are options to retaliation, violence, injustice, and inequality. Migration Heritage Foundation's mission is to mark migration-related trails with factual stories, art, artifacts, and relics that enhance understanding and generate discourse about the experiences of African Americans in this country.

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