Daughter of The Great Migration

By Guest Contributor Tami Winfrey Harris, cross-posted from What Tami Said

Over the course of six decades, some six million black Southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban American and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally lay aside a feudal cast system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheet weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.

During this time, a good portion of all Black Americans alive picked up and left the tobacco farms of Virginia, the rice plantations of South Carolina, cotton fields in East Texas and Mississippi, and the villages and backwoods of the remaining Southern states–Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, and, by some measures, Oklahoma. They set out for cities they had whispered about among themselves or had seen in a mail order catalogue. Some came straight from the fields with their King James Bibles and old twelve-string guitars. Still more were townspeople looking to be their fuller selves, tradesmen following their customers, pastors trailing their flocks.

– The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Reading The Warmth of Other Suns, I am reminded again that I am a member of a soon-to-disappear group–children and grandchildren of The Great Migration.

I was trying to explain to a friend–a 40-year-old white guy–how I really want to travel with my nieces and nephews to Mississippi, so they can experience going “down South” in the summertime, something they have never done. He replied, “Yeah, my family used to head down to the beach in Florida all the time, when I was a kid.” And I had a hard time articulating that what I am speaking of is different. Here in Central Indiana, it seems every white family clears out of town to the Florida beaches come Spring Break or summertime. But what I’m talking about is different.

For Midwestern families of The Great Migrations–African American families–pointing the family car South wasn’t about seeking sand and sun and maybe a visit to Disney World. It was about returning, as my father would say, “down home.” It was, I imagine, for the adults, about reconnecting with cultural roots; showing off children to relatives rarely seen. It was about introducing offspring to roots that were foreign to them. For me, It was about coolers packed with fried chicken, potato salad and drinks for lunch at tired-looking rest stops. It was about palettes of blankets in the “way back” of the station wagon, crayons melting in the sun and jockeying with my brother and sister for seat space. It was about looking out of a hot car window with awe as the roads turned to red clay and the pines grew taller and taller–a world away from my Northern Rust Belt city. It was about the dark; it gets so dark in the country that the stars seem to multiply a thousandfold.

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