In the introductory portion of the reading, Wilkerson makes a reference to the “customs turnstiles” at Ellis Island, stating that the participants of the Great Migration were different from the thousands who came to the great American cities from abroad because, unlike the latter, the former were, already legal citizens of the United States. Yet, when they moved into the northern cities, they might as well have been migrating to a new country given the way of life that had been thrust upon them in the segregated south. In my opinion, the great migration that African Americans undertook in the first half of the century is equal in bravery, pioneering spirit and individual strength of character to any undertaken by the first European settlers to the New World. The distance may have been smaller, across a few degrees of latitude as opposed to over the great ocean, but the stakes were some of the highest in human history.

In the description of Ida Mae’s life as a young girl in Georgia, it could not be clearer that the former slaves and newly turned sharecroppers were not leading the lives that were technically promised to them at the end of the Civil War. Not having shoes was considered normal, a man in a coma may have been buried alive because there were no doctors who would visit him at home, young children went to school only when they were not needed on the farm – these are not the hallmarks of the lives of citizens in a free country.

Another highly interesting point brought up by Wilkerson is that the Great Migration was the first major act of choice for a people whose history in this country had until that point been defined by slavery. The first slaves who had been brought over to the New World had no choice in that decision, but their descendants now were making the choice to migrate. Ida Mae herself, however, did not have that choice – she followed her husband against her better wishes. There is a careful juxtaposition of the individual and the collective here.

Wilkerson shows us many such contradictions. Yes, African Americans made the collective choice to leave the South, where they were being oppressed and treated like second-class citizens. But, that choice was made in portion out of necessity. Life under the Jim Crow mentality would have unbearable – in a way, there was only ever one choice if one wished to live as a free and equal human being. The kindness of certain well-meaning whites is again a contrast to their willing participation within a society that stuck to a cruel system of segregation and stigmatization. Change was thus inevitable and it came in the form of the Great Migration.

The Great Migration literally changed the face of America. The ripple effects created in the cities that the migrants moved into are felt to this day in the economic, cultural and social lives of urban America. Amidst these large societal implications of the Great Migration, however, it is also important to acknowledge and understand the individual journeys made by these extraordinary individuals who, as Wilkerson points out, stood up to social injustice in perhaps the most defiant of ways – “they left.”