The Great Migration was an indelible mass movement of people. Over approximately fifty years, starting in 1915 and ending in 1965, at least 6 million American descendants of enslaved Africans, along with other Black denizens, drove, rode, and strode out of the South. Their destinations, often predetermined, sometimes disappointing, and occasionally temporary, were anywhere and everywhere North, West, and between those cardinal directions.
Like many Black people today, a portion of my family was part of the Great Migration. Most of my family departed the Eastern Shore of Virginia for New York City. Specifically, they left a Northampton County community not far from the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula. True of many southern locales Black migrants left, the landscape of their departure point was acre upon acre of mostly white-owned pines and other agricultural lands, sustained and profitable often because of strong and knowledgeable Black hands. Northampton County was a...
University of California Press