The most recommended books about the Great Migration

Kelly Norman Ellis is the Chairperson for the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Literatures at Chicago State University. And like those who have made the “Great Migration” before her, she too has taken the South with her in this wonderful debut collection of poetry. In this book, she deftly taps into the Blues ethos to conjure vivid imagery of a Mississippi unique with its patois, cuisine, and customs that have unmistakably shaped her worldview as an adult. It was the South that would try to degrade and dehumanize Black life. But it was the same South where family and a village would instill pride, confidence, and self-worth. This is a book of a poet coming to terms with where she has come from and celebrating the journey. It reinforces the notion that everywhere you go, home is already there.

I can understand people who may want to avoid a book with “poverty” and “survival” in the title, but it is as gripping as any great novel. Andrea Elliott does an amazing job of making Dasani, her siblings, and her parents–who face the challenges of poverty, addiction, and a social services system that fails too often–come to life as a complicated, loving, angry, joyful, and at times, desperate family. 

I grew to deeply care about the family because Elliott doesn’t portray them as passive victims but rather people with agency who often make bad choices–but she gives the context for those choices. I learned so much about how a large part of this country lives–one that is all too often invisible to most of us.

The Promised Land is written in an engaging, eloquent style that makes it an excellent introduction to the history of the Great Black Migration. A noted journalist, Lemann interviewed dozens of migrants and their descendants to create a richly textured story of their experiences. Layered onto this story is description and analysis of the political contexts for the migration, including the civil rights movement and the Great Society programs. He follows a group of Black Americans from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago and, in some cases, back. He shows how the migration affected not just the migrants themselves, but America as a whole, for it shifted race relations from a regional to a national problem. Chicagoans like me will enjoy its wealth of local detail.

This well-researched account of this poorly understood era in U.S. history drew me in with the personal stories of the individuals within the great exodus of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South. Witnessing the daily threats, insults, and indignities the migrants experienced in their birth places opened my eyes as never before to the myriad ways that race based assumptions and rules structured life and stifled aspirations. Relying on thousands of interviews, and focusing on the experiences of three individuals, Wilkerson paints such a realistic picture of their journeys that I felt the nerve wracking secrecy in which they planned their exits and their deep relief when they crossed borders to safety. Yet the indignities and barriers to success didn’t vanish upon escape from officially Jim Crow country. And so, as the migrants confronted more subtle but nevertheless real obstacles in their destination communities, my relief, life theirs, gave way… show more.

As brilliantly written as it is sometimes difficult to read, this fantasy novel set in the early 20th century travels from rural Georgia to Chicago, part of the Great Migration. Hairston says "I wrote Redwood and Wildfire to celebrate folks like my great-aunt and grandfather who faced impossible choices." In so doing, she has told stories history has all but forgotten. I began to read this book because I knew it contained a passage involving a visit to the 1893 Columbian Exposition—The White City—but my favorite parts of this novel involve the show folk and the Black film industry in Chicago. Hairston's characters don't just do magic. They are magic.

Harlem painter Jacob Lawrence composed a series of sixty panels, applying tempera to composite board, to tell the story of the Great Black Migration; he numbered them sequentially and added captions to tie it all together. It opened to acclaim in 1941. You can see the entire work in the book Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series. Read it and you will discover the conditions African Americans faced in the South, the networks that migrants used to make the journey northward, and the lives they formed in the cities. Lawrence’s images are bold and geometric, using expressionistic brushstrokes and a consistent color palette from panel to panel. I saw the series exhibited in Chicago and was impressed by the intimate scale of the panels—they measure only 18 by 12 inches. 

Invisible Man is a classic that, somehow, I never got around to reading until this year. The story line is Dickensian, to a point. In Ellison's telling, the young man on his own makes his way to the city and meets unscrupulous characters at every turning. But he never meets the wonderful woman or mysterious benefactor who makes everything OK at the end. Instead, we find the narrator living "underground" having deliberately made himself "invisible," but promising to re-emerge. So what is Ellison’s invisibility? Many current reviews online say that invisibility is imposed on the narrator (who stands for all black people) by whites who are racist. Ellison's position is actually more complex. While there's no lack of white-on-black racism in the novel, the narrator receives some of his roughest treatment from the hypocritical Dr. Bledsoe and gang leader Ras the Destroyer, who are black. For the narrator, everyone he… show more.