What Is Your American Migration Story?

‘One Way Ticket’ (Langston Hughes)

Most African Americans have a migration story. Some family narratives about the family moving from one place in America to another for a life change and opportunity.

As for me, my mother and grandmother migrated from Santuc, South Carolina (just outside Union, S.C.), in 1933, to Washington, D.C. They came North for freedom and opportunity. The South was violently racist and offered little chance of economic uplift. The country’s agricultural economy had diminished. Exodus.

My grandmother would find work and get married. My mother would attend the best public high school in the country many believed — Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. She would enjoy a long career as a civil servant for the local and federal government. She married my father in 1953. They had four children, bought a nice house in a quiet uptown neighborhood in Washington D.C. where I was born.

Graph of the Great Migration — Copyright — Pearson Education

Books have been written about the Great Migration. Documentaries. The writer-journalist Isabel Wilkerson wrote passionately about this history in her book The Warmth of Other Suns. Her book is where the African American sojourn in the nation that has never fully welcomed its Africans from the chattel slavery period is told best:

“They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent…the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.”

This is so very true. It was as if Africans in the United States had stepped again on ships and moved somewhere safer even though the North wasn’t hardly safe either. But it was better than the South. It was the smart decision at the time.

The most famous cultural expression about the ‘Great Migration’ is Jacob Lawrence’s 61 panels documenting the event (The Migration Series). It is as essential to understanding American history as European migration in the 20th century and the Louisiana Purchase. Lawrence with his paint brushes and paint told a timeless story that will never be lost now. Few American schools teach this amazing story.

According to the National Archives, between 1910–1970, at least “six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states.” The motivation behind “the mass movement was to escape racial violence, pursue economic and educational opportunities, and obtain freedom from the oppression of Jim Crow.” (NARA)

This decision forever changed America and American history. All of the cities in the North, Midwest, and West were culturally, politically, and historically altered by the Great Migration. Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and many other cities became different. America is still evolving because of it. Motown, Prince, West Coast hip hop music all happen because Black people moved. Politics in the North changed because Africans moved North.

Exodus

“I think the motivation for painting The Migration Series is that I grew up in a period where we all knew about it, we were a part of it, my family was a part of that migration.” — (Jacob Lawrence)

The Great Migration did not just change American history; it changed lives. The South, despite its rich culture, was an awful place for African people when they decided to move North. After the Civil War, the southern states sought to reinstitute chattel slavery but in a different way. Sharecropping, convict labor and leasing policies, Jim Crow laws, Black Codes, racial violence, racial hate, and no support from the federal government ruined millions of lives. Black people, in the interest of survival, had to go.

Even before they vacated the South in mass, African Americans, very aware of where they were living, built many thriving cities and communities full of economic activity. What was the response from some White Americans?

Violence, robbery, and sabotage of those cities and communities. Greenwood, Florida; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Wilmington, North Carolina are three cities where African Americans built thriving communities that were destroyed by white violence. The Great Migration is a response to the violence there and in other places.

While my mother’s roots are South Carolina, my father’s roots are in Texas and Louisiana. My grandmother and grandfather married down South and then moved North. They had ten children, settled in Baltimore, and made a life there in that great American city.

The Black Belt

Most African Americans trace their American lives to the South. There is a large swath of land from Maryland all the way to Texas and Oklahoma that shows the concentration of people of African descent in the South over American history. The poet Amiri Baraka called Black Americans “an oppressed nation in the Black-belt South.” The Great Migration changed that. It wasn’t that life in the North was amazing but the North did not have overt racial apartheid like the South.

Today, our individual migration stories from the South to the North and to the West continue. New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Baltimore, and other large cities have African American mayors and large African American populations. Yes, there are social challenges and financial inequities that remained in place due to decades of racist government policies and failings at times by African American leadership.

But today, African Americans are 47 million deep in America and standing firm preparing to continue to grow into the future. That’s why our migration story collectively and our migration stories individually are important to learn and pass down. They tell us each day we can do this — survive and thrive in a country that has never treated us fairly.

Aluta Continua!

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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