The Great Migration: How Six Million People Remade America (and the World)

by bam

A cited, high-school-level history of the Great Migration, the movement of roughly six million Black Americans out of the rural South between about 1916 and 1970, and the country and culture they remade. The course follows the shape of the move itself: the forces that pushed people out (Jim Crow, sharecropping and debt peonage, racial terror, the boll weevil), the forces that pulled them north and west (wartime factory labor, the Chicago Defender, kinship chains), the three great routes they traveled, the cities and culture they built (the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago blues, Motown, the Black church and press, Black political power and a growing Black middle class), the costs they were made to pay (redlining, restrictive covenants, the second ghetto, white flight, deindustrialization), and the pillar most surveys skip: how the culture and the moral argument of the Migration went global. Built on Isabel Wilkerson's three-family narrative frame and standard scholarship (Wilkerson, Lemann, Grossman, Marks), with primary sources pointed to their real archives. Companion to this platform's homeschool 'Great Migration' course and its Hoodoo, History of Unions, and Pan-Africanism courses.