Prof part of African-American migration project

3:55 p.m., April 26, 2005--African-American migrations--from the slave trade to the Great Migration to the North of the early 20th Century to contemporary migrations as African Americans return to the South and immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa come to the United States--are part of a groundbreaking project, In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience.

Sponsored by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, part of the New York Public Library, the three-year project cost $2.4 million and has resulted in an exhibition at the center and 16,500 pages of essays, books, articles, manuscripts, illustrations and maps on the center’s web site [schomburgcenter.org], plus a book and teacher’s guide and materials.

Carole Marks, professor of sociology, was one of 12 distinguished scholars asked to contribute to In Motion. The author of the book, Farewell We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration, published by the Indiana University Press in 1989, Marks also wrote an essay for the project “The Great Migration: African-Americans Searching for the Promised Land, 1916-1930.” Both are online in their entirety as part of the project, and a chapter of the book, In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, is based on her research.

As the book states, the Great Migration south to north from 1916-30 was a “watershed in the history of African Americans. It lessened their overwhelming concentration in the South, opened up industrial jobs to people who had up to then been mostly farmers and gave the first significant impetus to their urbanization.”

In her essay, Marks writes, "Migrants of the Great Migration were representatives of a fledgling class of artisans and urban nonagricultural laborers, as well as farm owners and tenants, who had been disadvantaged by economic conditions in the South and drawn to opportunities in the North. They were the lucky ones....

"They left the South by selling all they had....They did not do these things unconsciously....They were encouraged. Encouraged by northern business, by labor agents, by the black press, by family and friends, and most of all, by their own understanding of an opportunity whose time has come."

Carole Marks, professor of sociology

She concludes, “the Great Migration was about migrants starting over and making sacrifices for future generations whom they would probably never see. As W.E.B. DuBois concluded, the journey North represented not the end of a struggle but only its beginning.”

“In Motion is an important, comprehensive and enduring project that will be available to everyone online, and I am pleased my book and chapter are included in the project,” Marks said. “It was exciting being part of the project and meeting with other scholars and Howard Dodson, director of the Schomburg, and Sylviane Diouf, who coordinated the project.”

An important part of the In Motion exhibition are the 8,300 illustrations, depicting African Americans from the time of slavery. Three UD students, Tiffany Reid, Dara Messing and Paulina Davis, helped research the photographs used for “The Great Migration” section of the project.

An article in The New York Times noted, “The project’s scholars represent a range of mostly American universities, including the University of Chicago, Columbia and the University of Delaware.”

Marks also is the coauthor of The Power of Pride: Stylemakers and Rulebreakers of the Harlem Renaissance and editor of A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore. She received her doctorate from New York University and joined the UD faculty in 1987.

Article by Sue Moncure
Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson

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