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The "great migration" of African Americans has traditionally been viewed by historians as the era of the movement of black people out of the South - beginning with World War I and ending in the late 1960s. Some six million African Americans made this journey to "the promised land" of the North and out to the West Coast. Ira Berlin, however, challenges us to rethink the history of black America by considering that "the entire African American experience can best be read as a series of great migrations or passages, during which immigrants - at first forced and then free - transformed an alien place into a home, becoming deeply rooted in a land that once was foreign, unwanted, and even despised" (p. 9).
Berlin's new publication is a comprehensive synthesis of 400 years of these 4 great migrations, drawing on hundreds of the most important histories of these events, as well as key primary sources. The text is quite brief - only 250 pages - but the concepts and connections which the author introduces provide a foundation for rethinking migration history beyond just that of the Africans who arrived in what is today the United States. His approach is thematic, emphasizing the significance of narrative rather than theory. However, this methodology can certainly contribute to more complex theoretical developments by historians.
In the first chapter, Berlin focuses on notions of "movement" and "place" in African-American history. The "movement" is characterized by the migrations, or "passages", while "place" is the anchor for the time and location between these migrations. By linking "passage", "movement", and "migration", Berlin can draw the historical connection between the slave trade's "Middle Passage" and the late twentieth century "African migration to America". Africans, whether slaves, Southern sharecroppers, urban Northerners, or Africans freely migrating to the United States, are seen as having agency even in the worst circumstances. The "Middle Passage" is no longer portrayed solely in terms of its total brutality, but also as a transformation forced on Africans who managed to adapt and survive their enslavement, and which led them to create their own world and institutions, however limited, within bondage in a new country.
The book then continues with a chapter on...