Great Black Migration of the Twentieth Century

Catalog description

Although African Americans had been leaving the South since the days of slavery, it was not until the twentieth century that they migrated on a massive scale to begin new lives in the urban North. From about 1910 to 1970, millions of African American migrants embarked on millions of individual journeys that resulted in a dramatic redistribution of the African American population. This Great Black Migration, as it came to be called, shifted the center of African American social, economic, political and cultural life from the rural South to the urban North and West. Students will explore the Great Migration and its wide impact on African American life, culture and politics, through a variety of sources, including historical scholarship, literature, film, oral history, memoir, journalism and other sources contemporary to the period.