Telling the Story of the Great Migration

Many of the blacks who made the migration from the Southern U.S. to the North and West in the late 19th Century and into the 1970s carried with them a copy of Psalm 121, said Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson on Wednesday.

Kicking off Calvin College's January Series 2014, Wilkerson said the psalm provided these men, women and children hope and comfort as they took the journey from a life of oppression to a new one of freedom.

“Many fled for their lives in the middle of the night. They were inspired by the words ‘I raise my eyes to the mountains ...My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth',” said Wilkerson, author of the 2010 bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns and currently a professor of journalism at Boston University.

“These were people who had to cross deserts and mountains… They were seeking asylum in their own country. They felt they had no other option but to flee from their homes in the South to other areas."

The annual January Series runs through January, presenting speakers who will tackle such topics as climate change, child prostitution, a Christian response to video gaming and developments following the Arab Spring in Egypt.

Olympia Snowe, the moderate U.S. senator who announced in 2012 that she is retiring from the Senate, given the rancorous atmosphere of politics in Washington, DC, spoke on Thursday.

All of the presentations take place in the Calvin Covenant Fine Arts Center. In addition, people can listen to live audio streaming of the talks on their computers. There is also the option of watching speakers at any of 44 remote locations in North America and abroad.

In making the journey from the South to other parts of the U.S., said Wilkerson, blacks did what the government could not and would not do. They freed themselves and broke the “horrible caste system" that they were living under in the South.

Although they had been freed by the Civil War, blacks in the South were far from free. They were trapped by this caste system that kept them at the bottom of the social ladder, making them virtual prisoners.

In her research, she found that the caste system came largely as the result of an agricultural economy in which landowners in the South, in need of cheap labor, kept blacks from doing anything other than working for little or no pay in the tobacco, cotton and rice fields.

Even worse was the overt racism and persecution.

On average, she said, a black person was lynched every four days in the South for such infractions as not making way on a sidewalk for a white person, for stealing as little as $.75, for simply walking in the wrong door, or by acting as if they were a white person.

She also found that many Southern courtrooms used separate black Bibles and white Bibles when putting people under oath. Blacks swore an oath on one and whites on another, no exceptions.

"They used the same King James Version of the Bible, but even the sacred word of God was segregated."

Ultimately involving more than 6 million people, the Great Migration began in earnest in 1915 during World War I when manufacturers in the north, finding themselves short of workers, began recruiting blacks to come north for work.

It took Wilkerson 15 years and interviews with more than 1,200 people to gather what she needed to tell the story.

In the end, she decided to focus on the stories of three people, each of whom took a different route to a new life. One traveled from the South to a new home along the East Coast. Another came from the South to the Midwest. And another to the West Coast.

People usually followed “beautifully predictable streams,” often using the railroad lines to guide them in their journey, she said.

As a result of this process, people from the South had the chance to free themselves from poverty and lack of opportunity and begin lives in which they used their God-given talents.

They could become Nobel Prize-winning authors, Olympic gold medal winners, renowned jazz musicians, and esteemed doctors, lawyers, politicians and business people, she said.

“This was a spiritual, emotional, and psychological journey that occurred within the lifetimes of many, many Americans living today," she said.

When asked during the question and answer session if she could name one the lessons she tries to convey in the book, she said she hopes the stories of these people coming from the South resonate with everyone.

Nearly everyone has an exodus journey, often involving their ancestors, to tell. It is a journey -- this movement of people from one place to another --  that at its core binds us all together, she said.

"It is important to realize that we all beat the same inside our hearts. We have all been created by the same God," she said.