The Great Migration and the Literary Imagination

This article seeks to reconcile the diverse ways in which historians, on the one hand, and writers of fiction, on the other, have told the story of black migration in the first half of the twentieth century. In the last twenty years, historians of black migration have questioned the once narrow focus on migrants as male, working-class urban dwellers who were acted upon by the structural forces that defined the ghetto. More recent studies have re-examined the Great Migration by portraying migrants as people who not only adjusted to city life but who also transformed the urban environments in which they settled. This story contrasts with the picture of the migrants' world that emerged in the works of fiction written at the time of the migration. Novels by William Attaway, Ann Petry, and Richard Wright ( to name just a few) captured in raw and bitter prose the despair, frustration, and alienation that black migrants encountered in the urban world. This article revisits this sadder story to reevaluate the more heroic, if not triumphal, one told in recent historical scholarship. While cautioning against any return to an interpretation rooted in a view of the migrants' world as a ghetto of tragic sameness, the article suggests that historians of black migration have not sufficiently confronted how migrants' agency was often destructive as well as creative, led to despair as much as survival, and could reinforce rather than contest exploitation. It urges historians to temper their celebration of black migrants' self-determination, activism, and vitality and to recognize the powerful forces-both structural and behavioral-that undermined migrants' ability to build, sustain, and redefine their communities.