The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
If you’re Black American, chances are that the threads of the Great Migration are woven into the fabric of your family history.
From around 1915 to 1970, an estimated six million Black men and women left their homes in the American South to start a new life up North. Whether they embarked on the journey themselves or watched their relatives and friends leave, this movement affected nearly every Black American – and changed the face of the country.
The key message here is: The Great Migration had many causes, origins, and destinations.
Though the Great Migration was the biggest and most significant inner-border mass migration in US history, it remains an understudied and often misrepresented phenomenon for a few reasons. The most tangible of these is the fact that it wasn’t a unified, single-purpose, organized movement.
Black Southerners who migrated to the Northern states didn’t consider themselves part of a movement. Ultimately, each of them had their own complex reason for leaving. They were tired of living as second-class citizens; scared of being lynched; fleeing personal problems; or lured by tales of money and freedom by job recruiters, friends, and relatives in the North.
There was one dominant reason for Black people’s mass exodus from the South, though: Jim Crow laws. After slavery was formally abolished in 1865, Southern states came up with myriad ways to keep Black people from exercising their newly gained freedoms.
Dubbed “Jim Crow” after a minstrel show figure, these measures prohibited Black people from using the same facilities, shops, and services as white people. They reinforced the practice of sharecropping, which kept Black farmers indebted to white plantation owners, and they were used to justify the gruesome lynchings of Black people by white mobs.
And so Black migrants from all over the South – from cotton plantations in Mississippi, tobacco farms in Virginia, and stifling cities across Alabama – escaped to the Northern metropolises like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia in pursuit of a better future.
Another key influence was war. During the First World War, the push out of the South was compounded by a pull into the North. The war had caused labor shortages in many Northern cities, which now started sending out recruiters to solicit cheap Black labor from the South. Once kicked off, the movement only gained momentum, peaking again during the Second World War.
In the following blinks, we’ll take a look at the real-life stories of three migrants from three different waves of the Great Migration: Ida Mae Brandon Gladley, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.
The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) tells the story of the Great Migration – the biggest inner-border mass migration in US history. From 1915 to 1970, millions of Black Americans left the Jim Crow South in search of a better life in Northern cities. Focusing on the lives of three of those migrants, these blinks paint a vivid picture of the fears, hopes, and dreams that shaped the movement.
They did not dream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
