Great Migrations: A People on The Move

GATES: I'm standing in Michigan Central, the historic train station in Detroit.

Built in 1913, this place holds special significance in the history of Black America.

If these walls could talk, they'd tell the story of the hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners who arrived here during the mass movement north, known as The Great Migration.

MIGRANT: I remember getting off the train and being overwhelmed.

MIGRANT 2: Never seen that many people in one place at once, it was completely stunning.

MIGRANT 3: There was a little bit of trepidation about being in this new place.

MIGRANT 4: You sneak and look up at the skyscrapers, you don't want to look country, you know?

MIGRANT 5: The sounds of the city, all this stuff was completely new for someone who had just heard, you know, crickets in Alabama.

GATES: This station was like a portal into the future, a place where rural Southerners became urban Northerners, building new lives in the proverbial promised land.

The Great Migration lasted some 60 years and transformed the fabric of this country, our major cities, our culture, and our politics.

Even today, movement continues to shape the identity of the Black community with new waves of migration, both within the country and from abroad.

All of these movements are expressions of hope, leaps of faith, acts of resistance.

They're all "Great Migrations."

(train whistle).

(train horn).

BALDWIN: My grandmother and her siblings were all cotton pickers, and they hated that life, and so they picked up everything they knew and left with my mother at three years old to uh, the North.

GRIFFIN: My maternal grandmother migrated with her parents and her siblings from Eastman, Georgia in 1923 to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

JEFFERSON: My mother's family migrated to Los Angeles in 1924 from Montgomery, Alabama.

BROWN: My Grandfather, he jumped on a moving train and headed to Kentucky.

BALDWIN: In the "American Dream" narrative, we want to tell migrations, immigrations as stories of coming to America as a land opportunity.

But in my story, in many African Americans or Black people's stories, we were already here, so it wasn't about moving to America, a land of opportunity, but it's about going to many places within America, finally trying to find freedom.

MATHIEU: Movement is a really concrete way of measuring your freedom, especially after centuries of criminalizing movement, realizing that I can make a choice to pick up and start up all over again elsewhere.

If that's not the most transformative decision that you can make, I don't know what is.

(explosions).

(shouting).

GATES: At the end of the Civil War, Black people were legally free, free to choose their own names, free to marry, and free to move where they were able.

OGBAR: Immediately after slavery, African American families initiated all sorts of different types of movement.

Some of it was very intimate, people seeking children who had been sold away, spouses who had been sold away, and also people who were seeking new employment, people who were looking for safer places.

BALDWIN: There were movements from rural South to southern cities like Birmingham, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee; Atlanta, Georgia.

OGBAR: But when you think about the movement in the first generation after slavery, most of it was in the South.

GATES: Following the Civil War, more than 90% of all Black Americans lived in the South.

And despite the fact that the region had been the home of slavery, many newly freed people stayed put, the future, at least for a time seemed bright.

JONES: During Reconstruction, there was a great deal of promise and hope that things were going to change.

Black people gained emancipation and then gained political rights that allowed them to run for office, to vote, to gain ownership of land that they had not been able to own before.

And so the sense of opportunity gave people a reason to stick around and to stay in the South.

GATES: But by the late 19th century, the rise of Jim Crow had crushed the promises of Reconstruction.

Racial violence was a constant threat.

COOPER: White supremacy and violent racism definitely intensified after Reconstruction, which made it very clear that the obstacles were going to remain.

BROWN: There was also a lot of tension and disagreement amongst African Americans about whether to stay or go, whether it was in Black folks, political, economic, and social interests, to stay in the South and accumulate power where the majority of us already were.

Or if it was time to vote with our feet and explore other opportunities.

GATES: With racial terror on the rise, some people began to flee the South, some went west to places like Kansas or Oklahoma.

Others headed to the north, joining small Black communities in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.

But for the most part, people stayed where they were.

No one could have imagined a mass exodus out of the South, not yet.

BALDWIN: So the question becomes, why didn't more Black people leave?

If we look at it from a humane perspective, weather, family, foodways, language, all these things that make us human are overwhelmingly powerful factors in why people would stay with what they know.

WILLIAMS: For African Americans, the idea of life beyond the South really would've been for many inconceivable, there's no place for them to go.

GATES: But in the 1910s, two things happened that would shift the fortunes of many Black Southerners.

First, an insect called the boll weevil swept through the South, decimating cotton crops and threatening the already precarious livelihoods of Black farmers.

And then... (gunfire).

(explosions).

WILLIAMS: The most significant global precipitating event of The Great Migration is World War I.

GATES: This distant conflict between European empires would ironically have a profound impact on the lives of America's Black citizens.

Some fought with the allies attempting yet again to prove on the battlefield that they were deserving of full citizenship at home.

Other saw opportunities open up in the wartime economy.

GREEN: Suddenly jobs in northern cities became available that had never been opened to Black people before.

GREEN: World War I is pivotal because of course, all of these industries are working overtime to produce clothing, food, munitions, vehicles, all manner of different kind of materiality that was needed in order to be able to keep the war effort going.

JONES: During the war, there's less European immigration, so companies in the urban North who used to have a very steady supply of immigrant labor, start looking around for other alternatives.

BROWN: You'd have some say, "Hey, come to Pittsburgh."

"Come to New York City," "Come to Detroit."

"It's safe here for you."

"There are opportunities for Black folks to get jobs."

GATES: Word began to spread like wildfire.

Up and down the nation's train lines...

CONDUCTOR: All aboard!

GATES: The Illinois Central, the Southern Railway, and the Atlantic Coast.

FONER: The Pullman Porters who worked on those trains going up and down, they spread the word that there was opportunity in the North, better jobs, better housing.

GATES: House and field, churches and juke joints, beauty parlors, and barbershops, all buzzed with a talk of leaving.

Stories spread about families quickly selling off all their furniture and most of their personal possessions.

In a desperate rush to head north.

CAMPBELL: My mother kept saying to my father, "People are going North."

I remember when we decided to leave lock, stock, and barrel.

Wasn't taking nothing, just moving out.

(upbeat humming) MADDOX: Not only do we see this large movement of people, we also see movement of communities and social networks.

(upbeat humming).

MICHAELI: An entire group of Stevedores left the port in Jacksonville, Florida, all left in one night.

They had been recruited to work in the North.

COOPER: In Greenwood, South Carolina, on Saturday nights at the train depot, almost 2,000 Blacks would gather to watch people leaving.

(upbeat humming).

GATES: Thus began The Great Migration.

(upbeat humming).

BALDWIN: Those that left, it was a significant decision.

HOBSON: It is this incredibly resilient and hopeful group of individuals who overcome their own natural fears about movement, about what life in the big city will be like, and do so in a way that privileges their desire for something better than what they've been experiencing.

GATES: This surge of Black Americans from south to north is generally considered a leaderless movement, but if one individual is worthy of the title, it would be this man, Robert Abbott, the founder and publisher of the legendary newspaper, "The Chicago Defender."

I've been fascinated by the history of "The Chicago Defender" since I took my first course in African American history sophomore year at Yale in 1969.

Uh, and I've never dreamed that I would meet someone that had a familial connection to the newspaper, what is your connection?

SENGSTACKE-RICE: Well, I am the Great-Grandniece of Robert Abbott.

GATES: Robert Abbott was a migrant himself, why did he come north to Chicago and when?

SENGSTACKE-RICE: He was from Savannah.

He went to school at Hampton and he was in the Hampton Quartet.

In 1893, the Quartet went to the World Columbian Exposition... GATES: Right.

SENGSTACKE-RICE: And he saw that Chicago seemed like a land of opportunity, and decided that he was going to move there, he wanted to be an attorney.

Uh, he found it was a little difficult for a Black man to be an attorney at that time.

And so he was taught by his stepfather that the pen is your sword.

GATES: Uh-huh.

SENGSTACKE-RICE: And so therefore, he turned around and, and decided that he was gonna start a newspaper.

GATES: In 1905, Abbott started printing a weekly newspaper that he named "The Chicago Defender," featuring bold headlines, lots of photographs, and even cartoons.

"The Defender" would be a newspaper by and for Black people, and not just to be read in Chicago, but nationwide.

MICHAELI: Robert Abbott often goes without food or clothing to make sure that his newspaper has paper and ink.

He is absolutely determined not just to get the paper out, but to make sure that the paper is delivered everywhere around the country on time every week.

SENGSTACKE-RICE: You worked together with the Pullman Porters.

GATES: Right.

SENGSTACKE-RICE: You know, at that time they didn't have social media to spread the word, so what was he gonna do, you know?

GATES: Yeah, we had the grapevine.

SENGSTACKE-RICE: Exactly.

(laughter).

SENGSTACKE-RICE: Yeah, and the Pullman Porters were very instrumental at making sure that the newspapers were spread throughout the country.

GATES: Do you think "The Defender" was seen as a threat in the South to the White South?

SENGSTACKE-RICE: Absolutely and that's why the Pullman Porters smuggled the newspapers on the train.

Then they would drop 'em off in various secret locations throughout the South.

GATES: By early 1916, "The Defender" was becoming the paper of record for Black America, and Robert Abbott had become a race leader, widely known for using his platform, not just to inform, but to inspire and advise.

Surprisingly, Abbott at first was reluctant to encourage his readers to migrate northward.

MICHAELI: In those early months, he did not support The Great Migration because frankly, there were jobs in Birmingham and Atlanta the same way that there were in Chicago and Pittsburgh, and he didn't see the need for African Americans to go so far.

If it didn't really do anything for the cause, for the overall civil rights struggle.

What changed his mind was that the departure of African American workers from the South hurt the economy of the South, hurt the White oligarchs who owned everything in the South.

GRANT: The White residents of the South who couldn't stand Black people, didn't have time for 'em, are now worried about like, "what are we going to do as this mass of Black people leaves?"

MICHAELI: When Robert Abbott saw that he understood that the migration could be a weapon against Jim Crow, and he began to endorse The Great Migration as a way to fight back.

In September 1916, "The Defender" publishes on its front page, a photograph and a headline that says "The Exodus."

And it's a photograph of many people beginning to board a train in Georgia.

When Israel was in Egypt's land, let my people go BALDWIN: Using the language of the Bible as a way to talk about escaping terror towards freedom.

Let my people go BALDWIN: "Farewell, we're good and gone" signs there on the sides of trains.

"Hallelujah, hallelujah."

The ways in which Black people grafted on narratives, biblical and secular about the migration as a story about freedom is critical to how we talk about this dynamic force that literally changed the complexion of the American landscape.

At God's command... GRIFFIN: The North always had this connotation of the promised land, even if it was just across the river where one was free, it took on new meaning with the migration that these cities would be a place where they would have freedom of mobility, where they would be free from violence, where they would be free to actually meet their capacity, their full capacity as human beings.

Let us all from bondage flee Let my people go GATES: And if there was one city in particular that symbolized the promised land for Black migrants, it was Chicago, Illinois.

JARRETT: The ultimate heaven, of course, was Chicago!

The maximum heaven!

FONER: Chicago was a big manufacturing city.

They had everything, railroads, stockyards, factories.

GATES: The pages of "The Defender" portrayed Chicago as welcoming, safe and vibrant, land of opportunity.

MICHAELI: Photographs, articles, cartoons, headlines, editorials, and news, all of it was a complete portrait together.

Even if you just looked at the children's page of "The Defender", you could see that African American children in Chicago had a much richer, freer existence in that city than they did in the South.

BALDWIN: But also things like the Chicago American Giants, the Negro League baseball team, they barnstormed throughout the South.

When you saw this team of Black men in these clean, crisp uniforms producing and performing athletic acumen and excellence, and the jerseys across the front said Chicago, you thought, "Hey, that's a place I might want to go."

FREEMAN: In Chicago, the area around what's known as Bronzeville or the Black Belt dates back to the, the last decades of the, uh, 19th century.

MICHAELI: African-Americans had their own institutions, their own businesses, their own presence in this part of the city, in a way that they didn't have anywhere in the South.

And all of that made it attractive.

BALDWIN: So this is the full story of why Chicago became this Black metropolis.

It was this mixture of workers with disposable income, the central location of Chicago in the country.

Jazz, blues, gospel music, independent Black filmmaking, the things that we associate with 20th-century Black life, a lot of them got their start in places like Chicago.

RICCARDI: By the summer of 1918, maybe a dozen of the real New Orleans pioneers of jazz had gone to Chicago, and some of them had come back and told stories that you know, it's a different world up there, you know, they love our music and they respect us.

(jazz music playing).

GATES: One of the stars of this new music scene was a cornet player and band leader named Joseph Nathan "King" Oliver, with a standing gig at the Lincoln Garden Jazz Club on the South Side.

Oliver's band quickly became the talk of the town, but in 1922, Oliver decided that the band was missing something or missing someone.

RICCARDI: Oliver just wants that New Orleans sound at all times, but he no longer had the endurance he once had on the cornet.

And so he knew he needed a little help.

(trumpet playing).

RICCARDI: If Joe Oliver doesn't send that telegram, I don't know what's on the radio right now, 'cause that is how big Louis Armstrong's influence is.

ARMSTRONG: I see skies of blue RICCARDI: To some people, he's the great trumpet virtuoso, to some people he's the vocalist with the gravelly voice doing "What a Wonderful World."

He's an actor who was in 35 movies.

He's "Satchmo," he's "Pops," he's a defining figure of the 20th century.

ARMSTRONG: What a wonderful world RICCARDI: By migrating to Chicago, these New Orleans jazz pioneers, they gave this gift to the world, but it's not just jazz music... JACKSON: It's a highway to heaven BALDWIN: Thomas Dorsey moves from Villa Rica, Georgia to Chicago where he mixes a blues backbeat with sacred lyrics to create gospel music.

JACKSON: Lord, it's a highway to heaven BALDWIN: Then he finds another migrant, and she had a shake hip style in the church that she would demonstrate this music.

Her name was Mahalia Jackson.

JACKSON: I'm walking up the King Highway BALDWIN: The great blues singer, Alberta Hunter.

She was called the "South Side Sweetheart" early on she said, if you were in Chicago and you were recognized that was "some baby."

GRIFFIN: So many of the Blues songs will be first-person narrations of migration.

Going to Chicago Sorry, but I can't take you GRIFFIN: "I'm going to Chicago baby.

Sorry, but I can't take you."

Blues basically gives voice to the voiceless migrant, gives expression to that feeling of dispossession, of mobility, of movement, gives expression to the longing and nostalgia for a place home that they can't return to.

BALDWIN: Chicago it's amazing mix and matrix of Black life, entrepreneurship was a magnet, was a story, was an image that was sent all over the country as a possibility.

GATES: Letters poured into "The Chicago Defender."

People wrote to the paper from all over the South, seeking opportunities in the city whose streets seemed to be paved with gold.

But all too often another kind of letter appeared in "The Defender's" pages.

BALDWIN: The story wasn't just about job opportunities, it was also about, you know, in, in some conversations when the family was all around the table, um, and I sat at my grandmother's feet, she would whisper or, you know, look off to the side and talk about always remembering the smell of burnt flesh from a lynching.

If you look at the literature, the scholarship, the narratives, the correspondence, the degrees to which Black people left because of the conditions of racial terror, an amazing image from "The Liberator" magazine in 1923, "Exodus from Dixie."

MICHAELI: There were hundreds of lynchings all throughout the South.

By the time you get to the 19 teens and 1920s.

GATES: Often within weeks following a lynching, Black people from that community would flee for Chicago.

That's the story of Scott and Violet Arthur who arrived in Chicago in August of 1920 with their children and their grandchildren.

Missing from this photograph are their two sons, Herman and Irving.

This photograph has been used for decades to symbolize The Great Migration, but the circumstances behind the family's decision to move north are not widely known.

I tracked down the descendants of the Arthur family to hear the story behind this iconic image.

I have seen this photograph a thousand times in every book or essay about The Great Migration, you see this photograph.

WALTON-ROBERTS: We growing up also saw this photo everywhere.

GATES: Uh-huh.

WALTON-ROBERTS: I mean from "Ebony Magazine" to our school books.

GATES: Mm-Hmm.

WALTON-ROBERTS: And for us it's like, okay, this is our family.

GATES: Mmm.

WALTON-ROBERTS: This is not just the family that moved north during The Great Migration.

TAYLOR: It wasn't a "great" migration.

WALTON-ROBERTS: Exactly.

GATES: Mm-Hmm.

WALTON-ROBERTS: There was a very tragic story.

GATES: The family told me that in the summer of 1920, the Arthurs who were sharecroppers working on land owned by a man named John H. Hodges, found themselves in a dispute with their White landlord.

When he insisted they work more hours to pay off a debt, he claimed they owed, the Arthurs refused.

WALTON-ROBERTS: And when they refused, they made them strip, they stole their clothes, they stole they food, and they said, you need to be in the fields.

GATES: The Arthurs decided to leave the farm for good, but as they were packing up to go, Hodges and his son returned.

A fight ensued, and the two White men were killed.

WALTON-ROBERTS: They were attacked by these people, they were defending themselves.

GATES: Mm-Hmm.

WALTON-ROBERTS: Which is their right.

TAYLOR: That's right.

GATES: But nobody cared about that back then?

ALL: No.

WALTON-ROBERTS: The family did escape to Oklahoma, but they were found and they were brought back to the jailhouse, a angry mob gathered outside of the jailhouse, and they demanded that Herman and Irving be brought out to them and the powers that may be brought them out.

GATES: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

WALTON-ROBERTS: And the crowd took over.

They were burned, they were lynched, and they were drug through the town.

TAYLOR: Like nothing.

WALTON-ROBERTS: Right.

TAYLOR: Like garbage.

WALTON-ROBERTS: The police supposedly put the women in protective custody, and while they were in protective custody, they were raped by the White men.

The story got out to, um, some of the Black organizations, they got funds and they sent them north to Chicago.

GATES: Oh, wow.

WALTON-ROBERTS: Um, and so the story actually was in "The Defender".

GATES: "Family driven from South by mob.

Monday, an old man bowed by the weight of over half a century.

Eyes red from the loss of sleep, alighted from the Polk Street Depot behind him walked his wife and six children all looking to the old man for food and shelter.

They seemed afraid of everything."

ALL: Mm-Hmm.

GATES: "And everybody."

ALL: Mm-Hmm.

GATES: "They huddled together like a drove of birds when the huntsman had shot into them and killed and wounded son."

Oh man, that just tears your heart up.

TAYLOR: Man.

RYE: Generational trauma, like, I'm still finding out more and more about this story and they like, I just kind of feel like my ancestors, I feel what they went through those women, and I was just trying not to get emotional, 'cause it's, it's still just hitting me, it's so fresh right now for me.

But, um, I, I feel that now.

(wind howling).

GATES: Northern cities like Chicago may have been seen as places of refuge, but they weren't easy spaces to navigate.

MORGAN: I shall never forget, it was in a wintertime and I said, "Oh, I don't think I want to stay here.

It's too cold."

LEE: If I could have took my three children, turned around, and went right back to Jacksonville, I would have had.

It seemed like everybody was living in one house.

And I told my aunt, "Good Lord of mercy!

Is this what you all call living?"

HAHN: It's important to recognize that moving to the North was not just escaping horrendous repression, it was also finding out that racism and racial discrimination and forms of Jim Crow were alive and well in the North.

African Americans knew that there were neighborhoods they weren't supposed to go into, that there were stores that they weren't be served at.

There were restaurants where they couldn't sit.

BALDWIN: At least in the South, we knew who our enemy was, we knew where to go, where not to go.

Coming to the North, we were told everything was available, but there were these unwritten rules and codes of restriction.

FREEMAN: There was also some tension too, between Blacks who had been living in the urban North for a while, and the newcomers, right.

The people who had grown up in the urban North sometimes looked down on the recent migrants, seeing them as being uncouth or not sophisticated.

BALDWIN: We talk about Black people in a monolithic way, but there were very clear class distinctions within the Black experience, and they were heightened during The Great Migration.

GATES: By the end of World War I, which had set The Great Migration in motion, hundreds of thousands of working-class Black people had relocated from the agrarian South to the urban North.

Bustling Black neighborhoods like the Seventh Ward in Philadelphia, the Hill District in Pittsburgh, and Black Bottom in Detroit expanded dramatically.

But as their numbers grew in the North, so did tensions with White people.

MATHIEU: People are anxious that all the work that happened during the war because of the demand for war will disappear.

And who then gets to be at the front of the line?

Will it be veterans?

Will it be White immigrants?

Will it be Americans?

Even if they're Black?

This tremendous tension becomes explosive.

(explosions).

(shouting).

GATES: The year 1919 was one of the most volatile in our nation's history as riots erupted in city after city.

BALDWIN: In the moment right after the war, at the height of The Great Migration, when the complexion of American cities is drastically being transformed, White people attack.

(gunfire).

GATES: All that year there were incidents in at least 26 cities and towns across the country, but it was Chicago that would see some of the worst of the violence.

GREEN: Chicago goes through a municipal election in 1919, the Republican party at that point enjoyed most of the support from African American voters.

This Black constituency was growing in Chicago but was still something like 3% of the population.

But the fact that that 3% was concentrated in two wards in the city meant that those wards tipped according to how African Americans voted.

And so a pretty significant animus is coming up against African Americans as spoilers in a municipal election.

GATES: By the summer of 1919, racial tensions in Chicago reached a boiling point.

BALDWIN: A young man called Eugene Williams at a South Side beach accidentally floats across an imaginary line into White water.

White people stone his makeshift raft until he falls off and ultimately drowns.

Now, Black people immediately go to the police officer on duty and say, aren't you gonna do something?

The White police officer ignores them.

GREEN: And eventually what winds up happening is that the police officer arrests a couple of the African Americans who are demanding that charges be brought and leaves the White man to leave the scene.

BALDWIN: Black people get enraged and begin to protest until skirmishes ensue.

GREEN: And at that point, people begin to mill around the city and spread stories of what it is that happened.

And these were not just Whites who were milling around in kind of unorganized mobs.

These were Whites that belonged to groups called "Athletic Clubs" that were auxiliaries attached to the Democratic Party, The Sparklers, Ragen's Colts, The Hamburg Club.

They decide now's the time to settle the scores that go back to the election.

Now's the time to kind of go back and sort of establish the order here.

The next day it's something of a killing field.

In the middle of the day, people are pulled off of street cars beaten, and in some cases chased into alleys and then beaten to death or shot or stabbed.

MATHIEU: The Black neighborhood in Chicago is effectively under siege for three solid days.

We can't get food in there, we can't get medicine in there.

People can't go to work.

People are terrified.

And if we think about migrants who thought they had left that particular and familiar kind of violence behind.

GATES: The police offered little protection.

Some officers simply watched the violence unfold without intervening.

But the Black residents of Chicago didn't merely stand by and watch while White men ransacked their neighborhoods.

BALDWIN: When White people attack, Black people fight back.

MICHAELI: World War I vets go to the rooftops with their service revolvers and other weapons to defend the largely African-American community on the South Side at that moment, perimeters are established.

BALDWIN: And so you have this multi-day period of White attack and Black resistance.

GATES: Chicago wasn't the only city that saw this rise in Black resistance during the so-called "Red Summer" of 1919.

All across the country, Black people stood up to racist violence defending the neighborhoods that they had created for themselves.

BALDWIN: They were spaces of Black possibility and Black sociability so that when the violence came, Black people already had values of self-worth of wholeness, so that they knew that this White aggression required a response.

GATES: It was as if the act of migrating north had given them a newfound confidence, a new sense of race pride.

GREEN: The fact that African Americans fought back.

The fact that they sought to tell the story from their point of view, really fed the idea that there was a different consciousness among Black people.

GATES: Out of the ashes of the Red Summer emerged the New Negro.

BALDWIN: There are newspaper accounts in "The Chicago Defender," "The Chicago Whip," "The National Messenger" magazine that talk about the New Negro as being cultivated or galvanized in the cauldron that was the race riots.

The New Negro is this cultural, social, and political identity that is one of self-determination and resistance.

HOBSON: The New Negroes were more or less a group of young folks who were saying, you know, we're going to assert ourselves and promote our dignity and have ideas and thoughts about who we are that are unlike the older models.

GATES: The term "The New Negro" was coined in 1887, but the philosopher Alain Locke famously redefined it in a seminal anthology that he published In 1925.

GRIFFIN: Alaine Locke will make the New Negro this kind of new figure, this cosmopolitan figure that is directly tied to migration, to this large number of new, migrant, urban, highly energized people.

GATES: Locke perceptively noted that with each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement, a deliberate flight, not only from countryside to city but from medieval America to modern.

BALDWIN: When we think about the New Negro, we think about this period of 1920s, the jazz age, the migration period, we draw most of our attention to Harlem, New York.

(jazz drums).

FREEMAN: Harlem was different from many Black belts in that it was physically a very appealing place.

If you look at the physical landscape of Harlem, the broad avenues, the brownstones, you can easily imagine why it would be seen as an attractive place for migrants.

BALDWIN: One of the reasons why Harlem is such a storied landing spot and symbol of this period is because it was the home of publishing houses, literary salons of the middle-brow society.

It's where Black people were able to convert their ideas into poetry, into prose, into visual art.

FREEMAN: Harlem gave a space for people to live out the notion of a New Negro movement to be experimental in terms of the arts.

MADDOX: Harlem becomes this place, this a mythical place of Black imaginary creativity, a paradise, a Black paradise, almost in a way.

GRIFFIN: Not only because of the artists who move there, but the artists move there because the migrants move there because all of these people suddenly come both from the rural South, the urban South, and the Caribbean.

And because New York is a segregated city, there's one place where they can live and they can live in Harlem.

They create the conclave that is Harlem.

They create the village that is Harlem.

They create the dynamism and the energy that is Harlem.

HOBSON: You talk about the Langston Hughes's, the Claude McKay's, and the Zora Neale Hurston's, we're talking art, culture, and education that's being produced to promote Blackness for Black people to see themselves in their own, on their own terms.

GATES: Langston Hughes, who had become one of the most famous writers of the Harlem Renaissance, arrived in New York in 1921 to attend Columbia University.

GRIFFIN: Langston Hughes becomes the sort of voice of the younger generation of the New Negro movement, and the innovation for him is what he's hearing, walking down the street, what he's hearing in the after-hour spots, he's being turned on to the blues, to jazz, to all these younger artists, to the cabarets, and that's the life that he wants to bring to life on the page.

Hughes early on, understood the significance and import of migration makes a collection of poems about the experience of migration, about migrants, poems in the voices of migrants.

HUGHES: "I pick up my life and take it with me, and I put it down in Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Scranton, Harlem, any place that is North and East.

And not Dixie."

GRIFFIN: He's really kind of imbuing his work with the voice and the body and the experience of migrants and with the complexity of what that experience is, what it means to leave home.

HUGHES: "I pick up my life, And take it away.

On a one-way, ticket.

Gone up North, Gone out West, Gone!"

GATES: But Black creative energy in the 1920s wasn't restricted to Harlem.

BALDWIN: The Black Coast Renaissance wasn't just a Harlem story, it was a Chicago story, it was an Atlanta story, it was a Washington, D.C. story, it was a Los Angeles story.

WILLIAMS: Wherever you had large concentration of Black people, you had this flowering of Black artistic culture.

The reality is that that migration, that freedom that comes with that movement out of the South, that expose you to new ideas, onto new politics, to new culture, liberates, awakens, and inspires Black people to be their most creative, to be their most expressive, and to seek something better for themselves.

GATES: For Black Americans, North and South, the movement north had sparked a cultural awakening, a renewed sense of worth, and a vibrant realization of their own power.

And nowhere was this power more visible or more consequential than in the voting booth.

SUGRUE: One of the real benefits of migration northward was that Black people got political power.

They had what was denied to them in most of the South, the power of the vote.

HAHN: It does become clear to large numbers of African Americans that their votes count, that they can actually send people to Congress.

They can elect representatives on the local level.

GATES: There had been a time in the decades following the Civil War when Black men sat in the United States Congress, as many as 22 were seated between 1870 and 1901.

But by the turn of the century, after the fall of Reconstruction, only one Black representative remained.

FONER: 1901 the last Black member of Congress of the Civil War Reconstruction Era leaves the House from 1901 to 1928 The House of Representatives and Senate, too, are totally White.

GATES: Northern migration changed that in 1928, Oscar De Priest, an Alabama-born politician who had spent over 20 years rising through the ranks in Chicago, seizes the moment.

De Priest ran for office and won, becoming the first Black representative elected to Congress in the 20th century.

GRANT: Oscar De Priest is the first Black person elected to Congress following Reconstruction, so that's a really big deal because he's doing multiple things, he's representing Chicago where he is from, but he's also kind of the congressman of Black America.

DE PRIEST: I, as a member of Congress and American citizen, representing about 15 million voters of biracial group, I'm endeavoring to bring about the enforcement of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

WILLIAMS: De Priest will utilize his political influence in Chicago in order to fight for civil rights for African Americans in that city.

But at the same time, he's a product of The Great Migration because if not for the influx of these Black migrants to the city, they never would've had the political power to be able to elect De Priest in the first place.

BALDWIN: This comes out of the possibilities made available to vote in the North, but also the constraints of residential segregation.

You have Black political power concentrated because of residential segregation, so they turned segregation into congregation.

Black people made a way, it wasn't just given to them.

They took the conditions and made possibility.

GATES: As Black voters realized that they could influence the national politics, their party allegiance would shift in the 1930s, where once they had been unshakably loyal to the Republican party, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, that would change with the onset of The Great Depression.

EXPERT: The Democratic Party has this idea that government should be very active in its response to this economic tragedy that's happening in the United States.

And so they create all these programs to try to use the levers of government to help people along.

And so Black people start turning towards the Democratic Party at the early part of the 30s.

HAHN: By the 1930s, African Americans are becoming one of the important constituencies in the Democratic party and one of the consequences is that the Democratic party, even with its southern reactionary wing, is gonna have to pay some attention to Black demands.

WILLIAMS: One of the important legacies of the first wave of The Great Migration is simply the recognition of the power of the Black vote that they can be critical players in elections.

That's important knowledge they'll carry forward in terms of how they think about activism and pursuing an agenda for civil rights in the future.

GATES: During The Depression, movement, north slowed to a trickle as job opportunities dried up, marking the end of the first phase of The Great Migration.

By the 1930s, the migration hadn't just transformed the geographical makeup of Black America and the racial makeup of northern cities, it had changed the consciousness of a people.

The very act of migrating gave Black people a sense of agency and power, not just to determine the course of their own lives, but that of the country as a whole.

GREEN: That sense of exercising one's own prerogative really in a lot of ways is the beginnings of the revolution in racial relations and racial structures of power during the 20th century.

MATHIEU: I think of the first wave of The Great Migration as an opening up of an imagination for African Americans.

That decision to migrate was everything.

To leave and not come back.

To create a whole new life in these new places is what made the next generation possible.

GATES: In the coming decades a second wave of migration propelled by World War II, would dwarf the first, bringing millions more Black people to the north and west.

Each of them, imagining that in a new place, they might be able to build new lives and realize new dreams for future generations.

(humming).

(music plays through credits) NARRATOR: For more information about "Great Migrations: A People on the Move" visit pbs.org/greatmigrations.

The DVD version of this program is available online and in stores.

Also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video (music continues through credits)