Fly Away: The Great African-American Cultural Migrations

Historians Rutkoff and Scott (coauthors of New York Modern) "reject the assertion that Africans lost their culture during the traumatic Middle Passage," finding instead a rich articulation of African cultural traditions in the cultural products of the African-American "Great Migration of the twentieth century." The authors follow the movement of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North and reveal how profoundly "the culture of African American migrants helped define twentieth-century urban America." Different routes resulted in unique cultural creations, observable in music (the guitar-based Delta blues, Texas blues) and religion (most notably the growth of Pentecostal-Holiness churches), all connected to aspects of West African culture. The authors, while attentive to necessary statistics and succinct in general historical background, transform the migrating millions from an indistinguishable mass into distinct communities. As Rutkoff and Scott take the reader to Chicago’s Bud Billiken Day or Houston’s Juneteenth, August Wilson’s Pittsburgh, or Walter Mosley’s Los Angeles, "the flashes of the West African spirit that black rural southerners brought north" are rendered visible. (July)