History Is Alive in All of Us
This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
The 20th century was nearing its close, as were the lives of the people seated before me. There they were in their windbreakers and tracksuits, pensioners shifting in their folding chairs at a senior center in Los Angeles, or at a regularly scheduled meeting of the Greenville Mississippi Club in Chicago, or at a repast in the basement of a Baptist church in Brooklyn.
These were the people I was hoping to convince to talk with me for a book I was setting out to write about their role in history — or more specifically about the phenomenon known as the Great Migration. Except this official-sounding language, as I learned soon enough, would not get me very far. History does not always happen in the neatly drawn lines of treaties and legislation. It often arises in the agitated hearts of everyday souls yearning to breathe free. History has no start or end date. It is the flow of humanity acting upon its interior will. It could be happening all around us if we just open our eyes to it.
The people I was making my pitch to had been part of perhaps the largest migration in this country's history: the defection of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the great cities of the North and West, from World War I to the 1970s. Their individual decisions to seek asylum outside their ancestral homeland reshaped every city they fled to and helped pressure the American South to eventually set aside the formal machinery of what could be seen as a feudal order. The movement opened pathways for generations to come. It brought us jazz, Motown, R&B and hip-hop. It produced some of the most recognizable names in American culture, from Toni Morrison and Aretha Franklin to Prince and John Coltrane.
Yet the people who had lived this history did not see themselves as part of any grand narrative; they did not attach a name to their decision to leave all that they had known for places they had never seen in hopes of being free. They saw what they had done as merely the best among the limited options of their era.
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