Series description:
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. These courageous migrants often thrived in their new urban settings by reestablishing community and gaining political power outside of the disenfranchising measures that defined their lives in the South. But the new environments often proved to be unwelcoming for Black people. While restructuring their economic, social, spiritual, and cultural communities, Black migrants often found themselves at the hub of contestation over physical, social, and political space. Black residents frequently became targets of white animosity in cities across the country and were subjected to varied modes of racialized social control, from the legal to the extra-legal to the categorically violent. Nonetheless, millions of Black people created new worlds and found success, changing America forever.
Join us for two ninety-minute lectures/discussions as we explore the dynamics of Black migration and work to understand what made people reestablish life elsewhere. We will examine how their courage and perseverance provide lessons for us all.
Lecture One: 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 is 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 lecture one, 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?
What to Expect:
This is a NO knowledge shaming space. You are not expected to have a certain level of understanding of the material to participate. Just a willingness to learn.
While this is meant to be an interactive space, this space is open to all. Some may want to participate in the question and answer portion that will be sprinkled throughout the session and others may want to turn off their camera and just listen.
There will be small “assignments” and reading to help orient the conversation that are optional but do add to the learning experience.
There will be NO QUIZZES. While this will mimic a college class setting, this is not meant to mimic all aspects of college.
One ticket will be good for BOTH lectures!
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