A Discussion of the Literature

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 well-

documented: 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

28 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.

are a part of this story don’t contextualize their own experiences or family history as part of a

broader narrative of Black migration.

To live in the District is to live in the wake of this history. The legacy of the Migration

can be seen in the city’s politics, language, music, food, even the physical layout of the city.

Despite this (and the fact that it’s Wilkerson’s hometown), the Migration has yet to make its way

into public school curricula in DC. While helping DC high school students connect past and

present and to think like historians, Real World History introduces young Washingtonians to this

history and facilitates their interaction with someone who participated in it. Students become

local historians, and, together with their narrators, explore this transformational history. After six

years of collecting oral histories, what does the Real World History collection have to offer

studies of the Migration? To determine how this new archive fits into the history of the

Migration, I will first position it in relation to how the Migration has been studied.

Contemporary studies of the Great Migration are interdisciplinary projects. The

Migration has been studied with different disciplinary lenses and research methodologies in

different eras. In The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race,

Class, and Gender, Joe William Trotter, Jr. identifies three distinct paradigms applied to

scholarship of the Great Migration:30

 The Race Relation Model (1920s-1950s): primarily sociologists and socialanthropologists concerned with the push-pull factors of the Migration. This model acknowledges preceding historical patterns but does not firmly position the

Migration as a historical phenomenon. It is heavily focused on Chicago due to the influence of sociologists and social scientists at the time in that city.  The “Ghetto” Model (1960s-1970s): primarily historians concerned with the impact of the Migration on the formation of 20th century “black ghettos” in northern cities.

30 Joe William Trotter, Jr. “Introduction. Black Migration in Historical Perspective: A Review of the Literature” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race Class and Gender Ed. Joe William Trotter, Jr. (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1-2.

 The Proletarian Model (1970s-1980s): studies the Great Migration as a historical process and examines the Migration as a component of class formation.

Since the 1980s oral history has featured prominently in studies of the Great Migration

both in research and writing. Due to the over-emphasis on impersonal push-pull factors in early

scholarship, oral history came to be used as vital, corrective primary source material for speaking

to the Migration in a nuanced, personal, and individual sense.

One of the first studies of the Migration to use oral history as a central archive was Goin’

North: Tales of the Great Migration, a five-part public radio documentary series produced as

part of a public history project at the Philadelphia History Museum. 31 Goin’ North came at the

beginning of a revival of Black migration studies and both the oral history project, and the

subsequent radio documentary had a significant impact on the study of the Migration. Interviews

from the Goin’ North collection were prominently featured in the 1987 exhibit, Field to Factory:

Afro-American Migration, 1915-1940, at the Smithsonian National Museum of American

History. One of the most significant moments of this period’s efforts to bring the Great

Migration into the public consciousness, the exhibit would remain on the floor for twenty years.

The exhibit not only remained on display far longer than originally intended, but it also later

became a popular travelling exhibition.

Field to Factory sparked renewed scholarly interest in the Migration and was followed by

a flurry of publications which gave rise to some of the most widely-cited texts on the topic.

Several works that are relevant for thinking about the collection of student interviews are:

Elizabeth Clark-Lewis’s Living in, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington,

D.C., 1910-1940; the essay collections, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New

2010. 31 At the time the Philadelphia History Museum was called the Atwater Kent Museum. It was renamed in

Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender, edited by Joe William Trotter Jr.; and Black Exodus: The

Great Migration from the American South edited byAlferdteen Harrison. The Phillips Collection in

Washington, DC, also revamped their exhibition of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, the

iconic 60-panel series about the Great Migration, during this time. Following Goin’ North,

several significant oral history projects related to the Migration were designed and conducted as

well.32 Beginning in 1995, The Warmth of Other Suns, too, was born out of this renewed interest

in the Great Migration, and the book itself is in conversation with several of these texts and

exhibitions.

The collection of essays, Black Exodus, made two significant interventions in the study of

the Great Migration that Wilkerson would develop in The Warmth of Other Suns. First, the

authors effectively made the claim that, through community and kinship networks, the study of

the Great Migration had to be grounded in the South and a study of its impact on the region. This

stood in contrast to much of the pre-existing literature which was primarily concerned with the

Migration’s impact on northern cities. Another significant intervention of the essays was the

attention the authors paid to the period following World War II. Black Exodus expanded the time

frame of the Migration to 1960, whereas previous scholarship was exclusively focused on what

is now thought of as the First Great Migration (1915-1940). Black Exodus also framed the

Migration as a means for seeking freedom and full citizenship for Black southerners, a framing

32 Immediately after Goin’ North in 1987-1988, another oral history project entitled, “African American Migration to Philadelphia Oral Histories,” was conducted and archived at Temple University Libraries Special Collections and Oral Histories Repository. Two other significant projects were carried out in the early 1990s: the “African American Migration and Southern Folkways in New York City Oral History Project” (1992-1993), conducted by City Lore and archived at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and an oral history project with senior citizens at the Potomac Gardens public housing development in Washington, DC, (1993) sponsored by the DC Community Humanities Council’s City Lights program.

Wilkerson would adopt. The student interviews, focused on the experience of migrants in the

Second Great Migration, build upon this foundation.

Another important collection of essays, Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration,

also examined Black migrants’ role in shaping their own geographical movement. One

particularly influential essay from the collection was Darlene Clark Hine’s, “Black Migration to

the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915-1945.” In this essay, Clark Hine argued that a

focus on economic motives obfuscates the experience of many Black women migrants who left

for reasons thus far underexamined and that women were integral to the maintenance of travel

networks used by migrants to make their way north. She also challenged historians to further

investigate women’s different migration experiences since pushing past a purely racial or

economic lens to incorporate gender would provide a more nuanced understanding of why Black

southerners left their homes and what their lives were like in the North.

Acknowledging the direct influence of Clark-Hine’s work on her own, Elizabeth Clark

Lewis’s Living In, Living Out explored the specificities of Black women’s migration experiences

and patterns. 33 Living In, Living Out was significant in that it both spoke to Black women’s

experience and situated Washington, DC, as a migration city. Through in-depth oral history

research, Clark-Lewis chronicled the experience of Black women migrating to work in

Washington, DC, as domestic workers, and, in so doing, examined some of the ways in which

women aided and prepared one another for the realities of the move.

Earl Lewis’s essay in Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration, “Expectations,

Economic Opportunities, and Life in the Industrial Age: Black Migration to Norfolk, Virginia,

33 Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 19101940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), XI

1910-1945,” added another important intervention into studies of the Migration. Using Norfolk

as a case study, Lewis argues that the Migration must be understood not only as a movement

from the rural South to northern urban centers, but also as a migration from the rural South to

southern cities. He points out that more people migrated to southern cities than northern cities in

the early years of the Migration, and that for many migrants, southern cities served as their

launchpad north. 34 Wilkerson would build upon these interventions in her book.

The interviews of the Real World History collection provide new evidence for future

historians to build upon the interventions of the aforementioned texts. First, being comprised

primarily of interviews with people who migrated during the 1950s and 1960s, this collection

provides insight into the later years of the Migration. Secondly, the majority of the interviews are

with Black women who migrated. Third, this collection is focused on the migration experience in

Washington, DC. Having become the nation’s first majority-Black city in 1957, due in large part

to the influx of southern migrants, the Great Migration is part of the narrative of DC history.35

But, the migration experiences of the people who came to the Washington region have rarely

been the focus of historical studies. Fourth, through a life history interviewing approach, students

make space for narrators to ground their migration experience in their upbringing in the South,

illuminating their own family and kinship networks. Students then facilitate the narrator’s

reflection on the decision to leave, the experience of migrating, what their lives have been like

since and their ongoing connections to the South. Though students do not read the books

discussed in this section, as they prepare for their interviews, they are grounded in the history of

34 Earl Lewis. “Expectations, Economic Opportunities, and Life in the Industrial Age: Black Migration to Norfolk, Virginia, 1910-1945” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race Class and Gender Ed. Joe William Trotter, Jr. (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1991), 22. 35 Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) 242-243, 318.