The Great Migration: NMH Library Resources

This critically acclaimed picture book suitable for a wide range of readers chronicles the Great Migration--the diaspora of African Americans who headed to the North after WWI--through the iconic paintings and words of renowned artist Jacob Lawrence. The New York Times praised it as "a compassionate and sensitive portrayal of history." After World War I, large numbers of African Americans began leaving their homes in the rural South in search of employment, and a better life, in the industrial cities of the North like Chicago and Pittsburgh. Jacob Lawrence chronicled their journey of hope in his sixty-panel Migration Series, a flowing narrative sequence of paintings that can now be found divided between the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection. In this profound picture book, Lawrence brings all those landmark paintings together and pairs them with poetic text that further explores the experience of those enduring this mass exodus. From dealing with poor working conditions and competition for living space to widespread prejudice and racism, this is the story of strength, courage, and hope of the more than six million African Americans who were trying to build better lives for themselves and their families. This book features an introduction from Lawrence--whose family was part of this great migration--about its personal significance as well as a poem by Newbery Honor author Walter Dean Myers. ALA Notable Book ALA Booklist Editors' Choice IRA/CBC Teachers' Choice Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies (NCSS/CBC) Carter G. Woodson Outstanding Merit Book

NATIONAL BEST SELLER * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER * NAMED ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE AND ONE OF BUZZFEED'S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE   "A brilliant and stirring epic . . . Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth."--John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal   NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times *USA Today * O: The Oprah Magazine * Publishers Weekly * Salon * Newsday *The Daily Beast   In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.   With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an "unrecognized immigration" within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.   NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker * The Washington Post * The Economist * Boston Globe * San Francisco Chronicle * Chicago Tribune * Entertainment Weekly * Philadelphia Inquirer * The Guardian * The Seattle Times * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * The Christian Science Monitor 

A New York Times bestseller, the groundbreaking authoritative history of the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. A definitive book on American history, The Promised Land is also essential reading for educators and policymakers at both national and local levels. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Great Migration brought immense change to the entire American nation, as millions of African Americans left the South in search of social, economic, and political justice. This encyclopedia describes the movement of southern African Americans to the urban North and West in the broadest social, economic, cultural, and most importantly, political context. Entries provide students and researchers with information about the key people, places, organizations, and events that defined the era of the migration from 1900 to the 1990s. Describes the movement of Southern African Americans to the urban North and West in the broadest social, economic, cultural, and most importantly, political context. Entries provide students and researchers with information about the key people, places, organizations, and events that defined the era of the migration, from 1900 to the 1990s. Each entry provides cross-listings to related entries, suggested readings for further information, and refers readers to relevant Web sites and archival collections. The encyclopedia draws on the expertise of leading scholars in African American history, providing entries that incorporate the interpretations and insights of recent scholarship. Encyclopedia contributors portray the migrants not as composite characters, but as individuals enmeshed in a complex web of relationships who negotiated difficult circumstances and assumed enormous risks to migrate. Migrants did not shed their southern past and become northerners as soon as they arrived at Chicago's Union Station. Rather, the migration of black southerners to the North that began during the World War I era was part of a much larger and longer process by which southern blacks had long migrated within the South in search of social, economic, and political justice. Understanding the Great Migration partly as a critical chapter in the history of the South, the encyclopedia devotes space to the social, economic, and political conditions in the South prior to World War I. It also examines how war and migration transformed the South as profoundly as it changed the dynamics of life in the North. Since nearly half of those who migrated north during the period did so during the era of the Great War, several entries emphasize how America's mobilization for World War I not only fostered the migration but sharpened black critiques of the social and political order of the era. Entries on the draft, military service, changing labor markets, and the uneven expansion of federal power, for example, demonstrate how black Americans-- migrants, industrial workers, farmers, domestic servants, men and women, political organizers, and editors--spied possibilities for meaningful change in the era of the First World War. Other entries capture ways in which the war and migration opened fissures and debates within local black communities, South and North; describe the extent and intensity of white, conservative reaction to the migration; explore the family dynamics of the migration; and identify the multiple concerns in addition to the search for work that confronted migrants: finding places to live, establishing childcare arrangements, seeking a place to worship, and maintaining long-distance kinship networks. Other entries convey how blacks described these years through song, art, and fiction and explain the ways in which black migrants encountered not only new worlds of work and politics, but new worlds of leisure and consumption.

For nearly five decades, Jacob Lawrence has been widely regarded as America's most important black artist. His work is known throughout the world for its depiction of the black American experience from the Civil War to the civil rights movement and beyond. But Lawrence's paintings are more than a chronicle of this history. He has created a uniquely American vision that affirms the place of all individuals in our society and honors the struggle for independence. Jacob Lawrence has given us powerful, lasting images which, when seen as a whole, constitute a narrative of epic proportions. This major book celebrates the creative genius of Jacob Lawrence. It is the most comprehensive survey ever made of his work and traces his developments as an artists as well as places his work within the tradition of American modernism. In this context it examines for the first time works he has completed since 1974, when he was honored with a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art. The paintings reproduced here illustrate a broad array of moods and subjects. Representing each of the artist's significant periods, they range from fond portraits of Harlem street life in the 1930s to angry depictions of racial injustice during the 1960s, from images of people working in harmony to bleak depictions of civilization shattered by nuclear war. Yet together they reveal an essential unity in Lawrence's work. His distinctive cubist-expressionist style and his basic humanist credo remain intact throughout fifty years of changing artistic fashion. The artist's life encompasses a broad spectrum of experience that formed the character of three American generations. He was raised in the Depression, and his first art training was through social programs under FDR's New Deal. In the late 1930s he was employed as a painter by the WPA, then served in the Coast Guard in World War II. From the start of his career, he achieved success and recognition in the competitive world of New York artists and galleries, all the time maintaining a powerful representational style that went counter to prevailing forces of Abstract Expressionism. Ellen Wheat examines Jacob Lawrence's life as an integrated whole. She discusses the cultural and political grounding of 1930s Harlem, effects on artists of the Depression and New Deal, art in New York, all in relations to Lawrence's long-standing commitment to depicting the history of black Americans and to the narrative series format he adopted to convey it. Among other subjects, he has dealt with Toussaint L'Ouverture, Harriet Tubman, the community of Harlem, the American South, Nigeria, civil rights, and John Brown. Wheat also documents and analyzes developments in the artist's technique and style in relation to the work of some of his teachers and peers (Charles Alston, Claude McKay, Romare Bearden) and those who influenced his work (Orozco, Albers, Grosz, Giotto). Throughout these pages Lawrence speaks of his work and development in the first person. The author draws on her numerous interviews with the artist since 1982, as well as other sources. This chronological overview of Lawrence's career is enhanced by over 150 illustrations of his work, 85 in color, and a generous selection of photos that place him in his studio, in the art world at large, and among his friends and colleagues.