In this three-lecture course, Dr. Terry Anne Scott will examine the Great Migration in American history. From the late nineteenth century continuing until the 1960s, millions of African Americans migrated out of the South in search of what Mississippi-born author Richard Wright once characterized as the “warmth of other suns.” Black Southerners escaped the Jim Crow South for a less racially oppressive North and West. They left, altering the racial and political landscape of the entire country.

Dr. Terry Anne Scott

Wednesdays, November 1, 8, 15

5:00 pm PST / 8:00 EST

All lectures will be recorded and available until December 1.

Lectures One and Two: Why They Left

In his famed 1925 anthology, The New Negro, Harlem Renaissance writer Alain Locke summarized the desire for change, for humanity that governed the hopes and dreams of Black migrants during the early twentieth century:

The tide of [Black] migration, northward and city-ward, is not to be fully explained as a blind flood started by the demands of the war industry coupled with the shutting off of foreign migration, or by the pressure of poor crops coupled with increased social terrorism in certain sections of the South and Southwest. Neither labor demand, the boll-weevil nor the Ku Klux Klan is a basic factor, however contributory any or all of them may have been. The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers are to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions.

During lectures one and two, we will examine the push and pull factors outlined by Locke. What led people to engage in an amazing, frightening, urgent, courageous journey for a new life?