Tracing History
A project by the Schomburg Center discovers new history of the black
migration
By JACQUELINE TRESCOTT of The Washington Post
The saga of the migration of African-Americans is usually limited to
the massive journey known as the Great Migration, when about 1.5 million
black people moved from the South to the North between 1916 and 1930.
But contemporary historians say there's a much broader story to be told.
A groundbreaking look at that bigger picture was unveiled last week in
a project called “In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience.”
Its centerpiece is a sprawling Web site developed by historians working
with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. It
divides hundreds of years of population shifts into 13 distinct migrations.
This electronic history contains 16,500 pages of essays, manuscripts and
maps, with 8,300 illustrations.
“Frankly, we were discovering new things about our history as we
developed the project,” says Howard Dodson, director of both the
Schomburg and the project. “We originally looked at three to four
migrations, and arrived at 13 major migratory moments in African-American
history.”
The first is the forced migration, the Trans-atlantic slave trade that
started around 1501, when slaves were brought to Mexico and the Caribbean.
The materials continue through stories of runaway slaves, the domestic
slave trade, 19th-century colonization and emigration, migration to the
Western and Northern states, waves of immigration from the Caribbean and
the reverse trek in the 1970s to the Deep South.
The concept is “mind-broadening,” says Caryn Cosse Bell, an
associate professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who worked
on the project. Her specialty is 18th- and 19th-century migration from
Haiti, one of the migrations profiled on the Web site. “This gives
people, even the historians, an appreciation of the migrations from everywhere
and puts the African-American experience in a larger and broader context.”
The project was underwritten by a $2.4 million congressional appropriation,
sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus and administered by the Institute
of Museum and Library Services. It is the most extensive digital project
ever undertaken by the New York Public Library, which includes the Schomburg.
Located in Harlem, the Schomburg has been a repository for black history
and literature since 1925. Much of the printed material on migration comes
from its archives, as do the majority of the images.
Besides the Web site, the project includes a book published by National
Geographic (which shares the same title), educational materials and an
exhibition at the Schomburg for the next three months.
This new look at history is based on the work of 12 scholars with the
final Web site text written by Lou Potter, a screenwriter for several
historical documentaries.
The diversity of the experiences is part of the strength of not only the
Web site but the broader historical record. “They are all different,”
says James Horton, the Benjamin Banneker professor of American Studies
and History at George Washington University, who researched northward
migration from the 1840s to 1890 for the project. “The contrast
over time and space is essential to what we do.
You have to ask questions about what did it do to the people who made
the trip, what did it do to the ancestors.”
Through the research process, several common theories were explored, and
some debunked. “Most of the major texts on African-Americans date
the arrival of blacks as 1619. Yet there were people of African descent
here as early as the 1520s,” says Dodson, noting that Africans were
brought to Spanish outposts in Florida, Texas and other parts of the South
during that time.
The simple scope of the numbers was given a more explanatory timeline
than usual. “The Trans-atlantic slave trade brought one-half million
people to the United States. It brought 3.5 million to Brazil.
Then a domestic slave trade occurred between 1800 and 1865, another
migration, and 1.2 to 1.5 million people moved from Virginia, Maryland
and Washington to Mississippi, Alabama and Texas over that period,”
says Dodson.
Dodson noted that migration from Africa is still a force: “Since
1970, more continental Africans have moved to the U.S. than came in the
slave trade, and they are transforming the nature of our communities.”
The materials describe the consequences of all the African-American migrations
— the uprooting as well as the search for new opportunities. Many
of the people who left the South before the Civil War became leaders in
the abolitionist movement, says Horton. In 1890, 63 percent of black males
worked in agriculture, according to the Web site; by 1930, that was 42
percent.
In addition, many of the migrants found that racism had a strong footing
in their new homes beyond the South. The Great Migration was marked by
at least 26 race riots.
The movements are discussed not simply as demographic phenomena but also
as major cultural shifts. Dodson says critical questions addressed were:
How did the black populations dispersed throughout the country coalesce
into a national population? And what was its impact?
“The migration experience is also the consequences — the change
in the physical geography of a location, in the laws of the city and the
cultural and religious templates of those areas,” he says.
And though many people might have blended into the everyday life of America,
others became heroes.
And their names are not commonly known. Lt. Col. Joseph Savary, a Haitian,
fought in the Haitian Revolution, then migrated to Louisiana about 1799,
fought in the Mexican Revolution in 1813, then recruited 250 Haitian refugees
to fight in the Battle of New Orleans in 1814, and went back for one more
try in the Mexican wars, which finally ended in 1821.
Introduction of lesser-known names to American history, the accessibility
of new materials, and the annual spotlight on black history, should pique
interest in such stories, Horton says.
“It can make intelligent, productive conversation,” says Horton,
now current president of the Organization of American Historians. “How
can you understand where you are if you don't understand how you got here.”
“In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience” can
be viewed at www.inmotionaame.org.
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