Fly Away: the Great African American Cultural Migrations
The Great Migration, the mass exodus of blacks from the rural South to the urban North and West in the twentieth century, shaped American culture and life in ways still evident today. The authors trace the ideas that inspired African Americans to abandon the South for freedom and opportunity elsewhere. Black Southerners fled the Low Country of South Carolina, the mines and mills of Birmingham, Alabama, the farms of the Mississippi Delta, and the urban wards of Houston, Texas, for new opportunities in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Los Angeles.