Black Voices

New PBS Documentary Tells Story and Impact of Successive Waves of Black Migration


Between 1910 and 1970, approximately 6 million Black people left the American South for what they hoped would be a better future in the North in what’s known as the Great Migration.

A new four-part documentary series hosted and executive produced by Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells not only that story, but also modern-day stories of Black migration — both back to the American South, and from Africa and the Caribbean.

Nailah Ife Sims, who directed the new film along with colleague Julia Marchesi, said she and her team “wanted to make a series that illustrates just how migration is a defining factor in the Black American story that’s ongoing.”

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The first episode of the series, called “Exodus,” details the first wave of migration north from southern states that helped turn the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago into a Black metropolis.

The Chicago Defender founded by Robert Sengstacke Abbott played a crucial role in encouraging Blacks to move north to Chicago.

“He called it ‘the Promised Land,’” said Myiti Sengstacke-Rice, president and CEO of The Chicago Defender Charities and Abbot’s great-grand-niece. “They posted jobs in the newspaper as well as places to live and so forth. (People could see) there were opportunities there thanks to the newspaper being distributed throughout the South by the Pullman porters.”

The episode also tells the horrific backstory to an iconic photograph of the Arthur family — chronicled at the time in the Defender — who fled to Chicago during the first wave of the Great Migration.

“I don’t want to give too much away,” Sims said. “But during this era of the Great Migration — it happened during both waves but especially during the first wave — there were hundreds of lynchings happening. Southern apartheid was hard enough in terms of Jim Crow and Black codes that limited people’s livelihoods. But this family were sharecroppers and there was threat and actual violence, and I hope viewers are able to watch and learn something from this. I think it’s really telling of what people went through.”

The first episode of “Great Migrations: A People on the Move” premieres on WTTW on Tuesday, Jan. 28 at 8 p.m.

Future episodes in the series focus on the second wave of the Great Migration from the 1940s to the 1970s; the phenomenon of so-called “reverse migration” that has seen large numbers of Black families moving back to the South; and the impact of the migration to America of Black people from Africa and the Caribbean.


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