A "Fresh" Response

The title of this particular blog post resonates on several levels.  On the surface, it is my own response to the "Fresh Air Interview: Journalist Isabel Wilkerson re: Great Migration."  It is also a marking of my own findings upon reading this interview.  One of the lines that struck me the most in the article was when Wilkerson says of her own research of the Great Migration, "it began to hit me that this was so much like the immigration experience of so many others."  Once again, a reading that brings a new insight to something I have already learned about in school.   The Great Migration was, in its own way, a sort of "second immigration" for African-Americans.  For those making the decision to move from the South, life had always been determined by the culture and slave/servant status they were condemned to in the South, and while they were not moving to a new nation, it was as if they were continuing the journey of their ancestors, beginning to find their OWN place in American culture, less determined by race.  Clearly, the Great Migration did not signify absolute freedom or even equality.  But it did give African Americans a taste of a new way of life as well as the hope, challenges, and confusion of adapting to a new culture- that of Northern, often industrial life.  Similar challenges were faced as those that faced earlier waves of European and Asian immigrants- instead of prejudice because of ethnicity, there was racism.  There was fear that the influx of African-Americans would take jobs from poor whites or even upset the small niches that earlier, professional African Americans had carved for themselves in the north.  Poor housing conditions were passed on to these "immigrants,"  much as earlier Irish, German, and Polish lived in their own communities, as discussed in earlier readings from the Encyclopedia of Social History.   Yet, as is always the case, the migrants themselves find in the mass movement their own individual story.  As Wilkerson says, "Sometimes they would even say, 'Well, I migrated from Texas to Los Angeles in 1947, would that mean that I was part of it?' And that would mean they were right smack in the middle of it. But they didn't see themselves as that, partly because these decisions were individual personal decisions," she explains. "And in some ways, to me, that's one of the inspiring and powerful things about the Great Migration itself. There was no leader, there was no one person who set the date who said, 'On this date, people will leave the South.' They left on their own accord for as many reasons as there are people who left."  As all great migrations and great changes begin, it was personal.