Black Migration Quotes

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?

The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness.

The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America, and he will say that government welfare programs were designed to attract large numbers of blacks to the cities, where they would foment a vicious race war... .

The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping and yet deeply personal tale of America's hidden 20th century history - the long and difficult trek of Southern blacks to the northern and western cities. This is an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation.

When I came to Detroit, if you threw a stone up in the air it would hit an autoworker on its way down. A few years after that, if you threw a stone in the air it'd hit an abandoned house or a vacant lot on its way down. And most people saw those vacant lots as blight. But meanwhile during World War II, blacks had moved from the South to the North. And they saw these vacant lots as places where you could grow food for the community. And so urban agriculture was born.

In the years after World War I, blacks began to migrate to the North and its imagined freedoms in great numbers - 'Russian' came to mean a black who had rushed from the South.

I deem it best and, therefore, recommend a resolution memorializing the Congress of the United States to purchase territory, either domestic or foreign, and provide means to purchase the property of the negroes at reasonable prices, and to transport the negroes to the territory purchased by the United States. The United States to organize a government for them of the Negro race; to protect them from foreign invasion, to prevent white people from living among them in the territory; and to prevent negroes from migrating back to the United States.

That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. They didn't look back, and they often didn't tell their children about it. They didn't want to talk about it. It was too painful, what they'd gone through and the caste system of the South, which was Jim Crow.

The first Black Migration to this country was forced migration. It was the Middle Passage.