What I learned from this article is more than the draw of urban factory opportunities, the Great Migration was primarily about equal rights and human rights. The Constitution does guarantee basic, equal rights to all people in the United States, but from a practical point of view – they were not being granted to everyone.

One sentence that particularly stuck out as I was reading, was towards the beginning. The author describes that a major factor playing into a family’s decision to emigrate was the fact that “[y]ard boys [were] scared that a single gesture near the planter’s wife could leave them hanging from an oak tree.” Aside from the glaring issue that a person is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, never does a meaningless gesture or glance constitute sexual harassment. This overzealous drive to punish the weak, just because one can, for me epitomizes everything ugly about bullying and systemic racism.

It reminds me so much of one of my favorite books as a child, “Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry,” in which the main character’s father hires a man whom she describes as a gentle giant, muscled and taller than anyone she knew. However, despite his physical prowess, under the circumstances, he was powerless over the crowd which joked about lynching him with a new rope – one that would be thick enough not to snap as they hung him to death.

Clearly, not only the yard boys had what to fear in the post-Civil War South. Until reading this, I didn’t know that it was actually black power, the strength in numbers of those who moved north and west, that forced the South to move past its feudal caste system. Since so many black folks left town, they no longer could lord themselves as superior to the poorest, most downtrodden members of Southern society.