The Next Great Migration. By Thomas Chatterton Williams. Last year, he left New York for a new job in London. When I called him to compare impressions of life abroad, he. In many ways, the Great Migration consisted of many smaller migrations between local communities. The African Americans who left South Carolina were particularly likely to migrate to New York and Philadelphia, while migrants from Louisiana mostly headed to the great cities of the West.
The turn of the twentieth century is often referred to as the nadir of race relations in the United States. Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and other forms of racial violence plagued the southern region of the country. Moreover, the cotton industry was severely affected by the boll weevil, a cotton-eating insect; the weevils’ consumption of cotton crops hurt the southern economy and eliminated many of the agricultural jobs held by African Americans. Consequently, the South became a place of economic and racial turmoil, and African Americans were desperate to find some relief. The promise of jobs in northern factories during World War I provided African Americans an opportunity to escape the harsh realities of the South. Between 1910 and 1930, approximately 1.6 million African Americans left the South to pursue opportunities in the Northern and Midwestern states. This exodus is known as the Great Migration, and was the first phase of an African American migration that would continue until 1970.
The Great Migration Map
In conjunction with its exhibit of Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration” paintings, MOMA is offering a noteworthy film program, “A Road Three Hundred Years Long: Cinema and the Great Migration” (through June 12). It features the work of several black filmmakers who themselves moved North in the early twentieth century, and who made the transition their subject.
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Oscar Micheaux, who directed his first feature in 1918, wasn’t the first black American filmmaker—the great comedian Bert Williams directed his own comedies several years earlier—but he may well have been the first director of reflexive autofiction, as seen in “The Symbol of the Unconquered,” from 1920 (screening June 3 and June 6). Born in southern Illinois, a virtual Southern territory at the time, he lived in Chicago as a young man before becoming a homesteader in rural South Dakota. In “The Symbol of the Unconquered,” he dramatizes that experience, probing both its over-all contours and its most intimate details.
The story is centered on Eve Mason (Iris Hall), a light-skinned young black woman from Selma, Alabama, who inherits her late grandfather’s property in the northwest. There, she meets a neighbor, Hugh Van Allen (Walker Thompson), a darker-skinned black man who falls in love with her but, taking her for white, doesn’t dare to declare his affection. The story parallels Micheaux’s own romantic misfortune—his undeclared love for a white woman—but the filmmaker builds the underlying theme of racial conflict into a political conflagration that reflects the monstrous violence of the day. As if in response both to D. W. Griffith’s heroic depiction of the Ku Klux Klan in “The Birth of a Nation,” and to the race riots of 1919, Micheaux focusses on the story of Van Allen’s persecution by a local version of the Klan, a cabal of pointy-hooded, torch-bearing men on horseback who plan to kill Van Allen and steal his land. Micheaux, an autobiographical novelist before turning to movies, packs “The Symbol of the Unconquered” with a wealth of side characters and subplots that feel like a journalistic deep dive into the economic, social, and criminal underpinnings of the startup town as well as a literary study of the complex psychology of race relations in the North.
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The New The Great Migration Cartoons
The novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s film work is one of the great revelations of MOMA’s series. Born in Alabama, she moved to Baltimore in the nineteen-tens, and to New York in the nineteen-twenties. Between 1927 and 1929, she returned to the South to study black residents’ customs and culture. Equipped with a 16-mm. movie camera, she filmed “fieldwork footage” (June 9-10), depicting them at work, at school, and at leisure. Though her motives were anthropological, her results are poetic. Hurston’s visions of a baptism in deep water foreshadow the ecstatic imagery of Julie Dash’s 1991 feature, “Daughters of the Dust” (screening June 7-8), which dramatizes the 1902 departure of Gullah island residents for Northern cities. ♦