When the family moved into an all-white neighborhood, a cross was burned on their front lawn. In 1920, she gathered up her five children, including a baby still in diapers, and, with her sister and brother-in-law and their children and three friends, boarded a Jim Crow train, and another, and another, and didn’t get off until they reached California. “On one of the early trains out of the South was a sharecropper named Mallie Robinson, whose husband had left her to care for their young family under the rule of a harsh plantation owner in Cairo, Georgia. But around 1916, when the Great Migration began, a factory wage in the urban North was typically three times more than what Black people could expect to make working the land in the rural South.” In her interview with The Smithsonian magazine, the author writes that “Southern Black people were forced to make their living working the land due to Black codes and the sharecropping system, which offered little in the way of economic opportunity, especially after a boll weevil epidemic in 1898 caused massive crop damage across the South. They might be legally free, but the freedom seemed hollow when racism was still the law of the land. Building on her previous discussion of racial inequality, the author remarks that it was extremely difficult for Black people to earn a living in the South. Instead, it was simply a case of one family after another becoming desperate to build a better life for themselves. The motivations of the migrants might have been very similar, but no onenecessarily planned to orchestrate the largest inner-border migration in American history.

Interestingly, however, the author observes that the migration wasn’t really planned and it wasn’t really considered a social movement.

Under the warmth of other suns