The Great Migration Escape

Gone Home ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 29-52
Author(s):  
Karida L. Brown

This chapter provides an account of the first wave of African American migration into the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky. It addresses the implementation of Black Codes, also known as Jim Crow laws, the convict leasing system, and how psychological and physical terror in the form of public lynchings helped maintain the social order of white supremacy. Brown attends to the role of the labor agent as a grey-market actor in facilitating the onset of the first wave of the African American Great Migration. Drawing on the oral history and archival data, the chapter distils a profile of the legendary figure, Limehouse, the white labor agent hired by United States Steel Corporation to sneak and transport black men and their families out of Alabama to Harlan County, Kentucky to work in the coalmines. The chapter also focuses on the psychosocial dimensions of this silent mass migration, specifically the spiritual strivings, the hopes, dreams, and disappointments that accompanied the Great Migration.

Author(s):  
Kendra Taira Field

Chapter 4 recovers the origins of the little-known 1913–15 Chief Sam back-to-Africa movement and the lifelong migrants who created it. African-American access to Indian land ended abruptly after 1907 with the advent of Oklahoma statehood, Jim Crow segregation, and oil speculation. These migrants and many of their black and Indian counterparts lost their land and the associated mineral rights to white settlers and oil speculators through a combination of legal and extralegal exploitation. Thousands, including Coleman and Davis, joined Chief Alfred Sam’s 1914 “back-to-Africa” movement in hopes of claiming lasting freedom once and for all on the Gold Coast. This chapter employs the stories of Elic Davis and Monroe Coleman to show that this movement was not only prelude to Garveyism and the Great Migration, but capstone to “a century of negro migration.”


Author(s):  
Kendra Taira Field

“Grandpa went back to Africa with Garvey,” my grandmother recalled. I carried this precious refrain into the archives with me. In Garvey’s place, I found Chief Sam, in the black and Indian borderlands of Oklahoma. While the Great Migration had largely displaced the preceding history of black rural emigration at the nadir, so had Garveyism displaced descendants’ memories of the Chief Sam movement. Meanwhile, scholars portrayed the movement as the product of a single charismatic charlatan and his nameless, faceless followers. Relying almost exclusively on U.S. sources and the memories of those “left behind” in an economically depressed and politically repressed Jim Crow Oklahoma, the only book-length study of the movement, written in the 1950s, argued that the Chief Sam movement illustrated “the desperate hopes of an utterly desperate group of people.” The image fit easily with twentieth-century American tropes of black victimhood and criminality....


Author(s):  
Felix L. Armfield

A leading African American intellectual of the early twentieth century, Eugene Kinckle Jones (1885–1954) was instrumental in professionalizing black social work in America. In his role as executive secretary of the National Urban League, Jones worked closely with social reformers who advocated on behalf of African Americans and against racial discrimination in the United States. Coinciding with the Great Migration of African Americans to northern urban centers, Jones' activities on behalf of the Urban League included campaigning for equal hiring practices, advocating for the inclusion of black workers in labor unions, and promoting the importance of vocational training and social work for members of the black community. Drawing on rich interviews with Jones' colleagues and associates, as well as recently opened family and Urban League papers, the book freshly examines the growth of African American communities and the new roles played by social workers. In calling attention to the need for black social workers in the midst of the Great Migration, Jones and his colleagues sought to address problems stemming from race and class conflicts from within the community. This book blends the biography of a significant black leader with an in-depth discussion of the roles of black institutions and organizations to study the evolution of African American life immediately before the civil rights era.


1990 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 49-78
Author(s):  
László Dobszay

The Hungarian tribes came into the Carpathian Basin at the end of the 9th century with the last wave of the great migration. There they founded a new state in a sparsely populated, politically unorganized land. After a hundred years of incursions into Western Europe they accepted Christianity under the rule of Prince Vajk, the later King Stephen, and while they preserved their political independence they integrated themselves into the social and cultural unity of the Latin world. Christmas Day in the year 1000, that is the day of St Stephen's coronation, can be taken as the symbolic date of the introduction of plainchant into Hungary. Some years later the famous monk Arnoldus of Regensburg came to Esztergom (Latin ‘Strigonium’, German ‘Gran’) to consult with the archbishop about the new office composed by Arnold in honour of the patron St Emmeram and to have the ecclesiastical choir of Esztergom sing it for the first time.


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