Great Migration
1.
The Great Migration, a long-term movement of African Americans from the South to the urban North,
transformed Chicago and other northern cities between 1916 and 1970.
Source: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/545.html
2.
Source : http://lukeharold.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/great_migration_1916-1930.jpg
3.
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/history/odonnell/w1010/edit/migration/migration.html
Click on the link above and watch all four slide shows that tell the story of the
Great Migration with paintings by Jacob Lawrence.
4.
The Great Migration Begins
Rising industrial output in the North, caused by World War I, began to fuel what became known
as the "Great migration." In the course of the "Great Migration," millions of Blacks migrated
from the South to Northern cities-- in pursuit of better economic opportunities.
Source:
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.historycentral.com/AfiricanAmerican/GreatMigration.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.historycentr
al.com/AfiricanAmerican/GreatMigration.html&usg=__slAfy7phX-3SCY8575rlKB9w5U=&h=216&w=286&sz=8&hl=en&start=7&zoom=1&itbs=1&tbnid=0TbjDfSy7sYpTM:&tbnh=87&tbnw=115&prev=/search
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MY6asAPJwvmUCA
5.
On resistance from Northern African-American communities to the Great
Migration
"At the beginning of the 20th century, before the migration began, 90 percent of all
African-Americans were living in the South. By the end of the Great Migration, nearly
half of them were living outside the South in the great cities of the North and West. So
when this migration began, you had a really small number of people who were living in
the North and they were surviving as porters or domestics or preachers — some had
risen to levels of professional jobs — but they were, in some ways, protected because
they were so small. They did not pose any threat. There was a kind of alchemy or
acceptance of that small minority of people in these cities. So when you had this great
wave and flood of people coming in from the South, many of them untutored and
unaware of the ways of the big cities, it was in some ways threatening to those who
were already there because they feared the positions that they had worked so hard to
achieve — that was tenuous at best in these big cities — and that's why there was a
great deal of resistance."
Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129827444
6.
From an interview on National Public Radio
Monroe, Louisiana, Easter Monday, April 6, 1953
Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
In the dark hours of the morning, Pershing Foster packed his surgery books, his medical
bag, and his suit and sport coats in the trunk, along with a map, an address book, and
Ivorye Covington's fried chicken left over from Saturday night.
He said good-bye to his father, who had told him to follow his dreams. His father's
dreams had fallen apart, but there was still hope for the son, the father knew. He had a
reluctant embrace with his older brother, Madison, who had tried in vain to get him to
stay. Then Pershing pointed his 1949 Buick Roadmaster, a burgundy one with whitewall
tires and a shark-tooth grille, in the direction of Five Points, the crossroads of town.
He drove down the narrow dirt roads with the ditches on either side that, when he was a
boy, had left his freshly pressed Sunday suit caked with mud when it rained. He passed
the shotgun houses perched on cinder blocks and hurtled over the railroad tracks away
from where people who looked like him were consigned to live and into the section
where the roads were not dirt ditches anymore but suddenly level and paved.
He headed in the direction of Desiard Street, the main thorough- fare, and, without a
whiff of sentimentality, sped away from the small-town bank buildings and bail
bondsmen, the Paramount Theater with its urine-scented steps, and away from St.
Francis Hospital, which wouldn't let doctors who looked like him perform a simple
tonsillectomy.
Perhaps he might have stayed had they let him practice surgery like he was trained to
do or let him walk into the Palace and try on a suit like anyone else of his station. The
resentments had grown heavy over the years. He knew he was as smart as anybody
else — smarter, to his mind — but he wasn't allowed to do anything with it, the caste
system being what it was. Now he was going about as far away as you could get from
Monroe, Louisiana. The rope lines that had hemmed in his life seemed to loosen with
each plodding mile on the odometer.
Like many of the men in the Great Migration and like many emigrant men in general, he
was setting out alone. He would scout out the New World on his own and get situated
before sending for anyone else. He drove west into the morning stillness and onto the
Endom Bridge, a tight crossing with one lane acting like two that spans the Ouachita
River into West Monroe. He would soon pass the mossback flatland of central Louisiana
and the Red River toward Texas, where he was planning to see an old friend from
medical school, a Dr. Anthony Beale, en route to California.
Pershing had no idea where he would end up in California or how he would make a go
of it or when he would be able to wrest his wife and daughters from the in-laws who had
tried to talk him out of going to California in the first place. He would contemplate these
uncertainties in the unbroken days ahead.
From Louisiana, he followed the hyphens in the road that blurred together toward a
faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do. Alone in the car, he had close
to two thousand miles of curving road in front of him, farther than farmworker emigrants
leaving Guatemala for Texas, not to mention Tijuana for California, where a northerly
wind could blow a Mexican clothesline over the border.
Excerpted from The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
by Isabel Wilkerson. Copyright 2010 by Isabel Wilkerson. Excerpted by permission The
Random House Publishing Group of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
Source : http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129827444
7.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ppjmLWlKgc
Listen at home to the YouTube link above and you will hear Langston Hughes reading
his poem “One Way Ticket” about the Great Migration. See the poem below.
One Way Ticket
I pick up my life, And take it with me,
And I put it down in Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Scranton,
Any place that is North and East, And not Dixie.
I pick up my life And take it on the train,
To Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Seattle, Oakland, Salt Lake
Any place that is North and West, And not South.
I am fed up With Jim Crow laws,
People who are cruel And afraid, Who lynch and run,
Who are scared of me And me of them
I pick up my life And take it away On a one-way ticket
Gone up North Gone out West Gone! Source: http://www.georgeking-assoc.com/gointochicago/poetry.html