Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper explores the Great Migration of Black Southerners from 1916-1930 to the Northeast, Midwest, and Western parts of the country and the Harlem Renaissance as two of the most notable periods in African American history. The Great Migration allowed Black Southerners to leave the Deep South in search of economic and educational opportunities that were not available to them in places such as Alabama, the Carolinas, Texas, Georgia or Mississippi. Many Black Southerners fled the South in search of the “promised land.” Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. affirms in his The African-American Migration Story-Many Rivers to Cross, “The Great Migration saw a total of 6 million African Americans leave the South.” The Harlem Renaissance served as an extension of the Great Migration where Black Southerners attempted to take advantage of those aforementioned opportunities in the “promised land” but developed and indulged in their creative perspectives by becoming authors, musicians, sculptors, intelligentsia, and businessmen. The “epic or Great Migration of Black Southerners to the Northern, Eastern and Western areas of the U.S. during the twentieth century intensely impacted the religious, social, and economic landscape of the country. The “promised land” for Black Southerners was anywhere other than the South where extreme Jim Crow laws, segregation and lynching were the accepted norm. This was also inclusive of the destruction of entire Black communities and or the way Whites hampered any attempts of Black economic advancement in the South.