What Great Migration?

I like to think of myself as a very worldly person, but periodically, some story about the US pops up in the Australian press which makes me, as an American, say “duh,” and I have to remember that I am in a foreign country.

ABC News has a story about how cotton has declined in Mississippi. It’s rather unremarkable for the most part, but what struck me most is that the story takes the tone of expressing shock that cotton has declined across the Mississippi Delta, as if it was only a short time ago that everybody was picking cotton galore.

Pardon the pun, but I just have to nitpick this article because it misses one of what I think is one of the most important events in American history: The Great Migration (actually there were several), where millions of American blacks moved from the former agricultural slave-holding states to the industrial states of the North and Upper Midwest.

This event helped shape the American economic engine just as much as the influx of immigrants into Ellis Island. (On a completely popular culture level, were it not for the Great Migration (mk. II), Oprah Winfrey would not have ruled Chicago, and by extension global daytime television.)

Yet, I remember it being glossed over at school, so is it that much of a surprise that it doesn’t feature into international studies of the US?

Sadly, not really.