Part II – Section One
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Section One – How Real World History Contributes to the Study of the Great Migration Real World History students conduct oral history interviews with African American residents of the District of Columbia who arrived as part of the Great Migration. Their work has produced a growing archive of primary source material on an experience that has not been welldocumented: the impact of the Second Great Migration (1940-1970) on Washington, DC. In preparation for their interviews students engage with the scholarship of the Great Migration through Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. As Wilkerson synthesizes and builds upon decades of scholarly production in her book, the sources produced by Real World History students are informed by historical narratives about the Great Migration. From 1915 - 1975, over six million Black Americans left their homes in the South to escape their status as second-class citizens. At the outset of the migration in 1915, only 10% of African Americans lived outside of the Southeastern United States; By its conclusion in the early 1970s, nearly half of all African Americans (47%) lived outside the South.28 With the exception of its dramatic peaks around the world wars, particularly World War I, scholarly analysis of the Migration has tended to position it as the backdrop for other historical dramas playing out in 20th century American history. As a decades-long, leaderless movement of people, the Migration does not conform to the ways Americans are taught to conceptualize history as a procession of key characters and pivotal moments. Wilkerson, in The Warmth of Other Suns, goes so far as to characterize the Migration as “perhaps the biggest under-reported story of the twentieth century.”29 In writing her book for a general audience, Wilkerson brought the Migration to the fore on a national scale. Though her book is widely read, many people who
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York, NY: Random House, 2010), 10, 177-178; “Great Migration, 1910-1970,” United States Census Bureau, September 13th, 2012, https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/020/ 29 Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 9. 28
