The Real World History Collection (Size, Scope, and Demographics

The Real World History collection (size, scope, demographics):

In thinking about what this new archive has to offer historians of the Great Migration,

let’s first get a sense of the size and scope of the collection. What follows is a sketch of the

collection at the time the interviews were donated to the People’s Archive (2020). New

interviews will be added each year, and we are still reaching out to narrators from previous years

with the hope that they may be interested in donating their interviews to the Library.

As of the summer of 2021, there are 40 interviews (with a total of 39 narrators) in the

Real World History collection (one narrator, Ms. Jaqueline Hines, was interviewed in both 2018

and 2019). Of these 40 interviews, 37 are fully accessible through the Library’s digital gateway,

Dig DC. 41 Of course, given the design of the oral history project, all of the individuals

interviewed by Real World History students are Black/African American.

Figure 1.

Gender Breakdown of Narrators

Men (12) 31%

Women (27) 69% Women (27)

Men (12)

41 Three narrators, Rev. Evangeline Taylor, Hattie Dunston-Tanner, and Clara Benjamin Neal, placed restrictions on their interviews requiring researchers to request access.

In terms of gender diversity, Black women comprise the majority of the narrators (see

figure 1), and this trend continues in the latest group of interviews conducted by the 2020-2021

cohort of Real World History students. This is significant because most studies of the Migration

have focused on men’s migration experience, and these interviews provide more opportunities

for learning about the experiences of Black women who migrated to Washington. As was

discussed above, in her essay, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension,

1915-1945,” Clark Hine calls attention to the need for more exploration of how migration was

different for Black women and challenges scholars to find new sources for interrogating

women’s migration experiences.

“[W]e need micro-studies into individual lives, of neighborhoods, families, churches, and fraternal lodges in various cities. Examination of these themes makes imperative an even deeper penetration into the internal world of Afro-Americans. Perhaps even more dauntingly, to answer fully these questions requires that the black woman’s voice and experience be researched and interpreted with the same intensity and seriousness accorded that of the black man. Information derived from statistical and demographic data on black midwestern migration and urbanization must be combined with the knowledge drawn from the small, but growing, numbers of oral histories, autobiographies, and biographies of twentieth century migrating women. …[T]hese sources, properly “squeezed and teased” promise to light up that inner world so long shrouded behind a veil of neglect, silence, and stereotype, and will quite likely force a rethinking and rewriting of all black urban history.” 42

The interviews of the Real World History collection represent a new addition to that

growing number of oral histories. Along with The Warmth of Other Suns, the collection should

be examined alongside Lisa Krissoff Boehm’s Making a Way Out of No Way: African American

Women and the Second Great Migration due to her focus on the experience of women during the

later decades of the Migration. Basing the book on oral history interviews with 40 women who

migrated to various cities in the Northeast and Midwest, Boehm puts her narrators in

42 Clark Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915-1945,” Great Migration in Historical Perspective, 129

conversation with one another in order to explore the dynamics of Black women’s migration in

the forties, fifties, and sixties. How the interviews of the Real World History collection converge

and diverge from Krisoff Boehm’s history will be discussed in the next section.

Home State of Narrators

Georgia 17% South Carolina 15%

North Carolina 42% Virginia 12%

Other 14% TX

LA NY

CO

MS North Carolina (17)

Georgia (7)

South Carolina (6)

Virginia (5)

Mississippi (1)

Louisiana (1)

Texas (1)

New York (1)

Colorado (1)

Figure 2.43 Real World History narrators made their way to Washington from a variety of southern

states, but by and large they traveled up the East Coast. In particular, many hailed from North

Carolina (see figure 2). The narrators represent a relatively random sample of people, and the

breakdown of states where the narrators migrated from aligns with both the history of the Great

Migration and the history of Washington, DC. Not only was Washington the first major stop for

migrants following the East Coast stream of the Migration, but a preponderance of people from

the Carolinas, particularly North Carolina, is a well-known aspect of DC history.44

43 On occasion, students have interviewed the children of southern migrants, who themselves migrated to Washington, DC, later in life. Such is the case with Alberta Bryant, born in New York City, and Korea Strowder, born in Denver, Colorado. 44 Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 240; Martin Austermuhle, “When Blacks Fled The South, D.C. Became Home For Many From North Carolina,” WAMU, September 23, 2016, https://wamu.org/story/16/09/23/when_blacks_fled_the_south_dc_became_home_for_many_from_north_carolina/

At the outset of the Great Migration in the early 20th century, the major streams of

migration followed the existing infrastructure: the railroads; people took the most direct path out

of the South available to them. But Wilkerson and other historians of the Migration have shown

how, once these routes were established, inertia maintained these patterns despite the decline of

railroad travel and interstate transportation becoming more open. People moved to where they

knew people. Once patterns of migration were established, migrants followed their friends and

family.45

Following Family North

6 4

29 Joining Family

1st in Family

Unspecified

Figure 3.

Joining family who were already living in Washington is a theme of the interviews, and

this speaks to a distinctive aspect of the collection: its focus on migrants of the Second Great

Migration (1940-1970). Krissoff Boehm discovered a similar trend with the 40 women

interviewed for her book.46 During the later decades of the Migration far fewer migrants were

45 Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 242-243. 46 Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Making a Way Out of No Way: African American Women and the Second Great Migration, (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 94.

pioneering an uncharted path as the first in their family to make the trip North. With the majority

of the narrators arriving in Washington in the 1950s and 1960s, the Real World History

collection speaks most clearly to the experience of the Second Great Migration.

Figure 4.47

To illustrate the focus on the Second Great Migration in the collection, figure 4 provides

a breakdown of the decades in which the Real World History narrators migrated North.48 The

18

16

14

12

10

8

6

4

2

0 2

1930s

Decade of Migration North

17

12

6

1940s 1950s

Number of Narrators 1960s 2

1970s

combination of the collection’s focus on women narrators and the experience of the later decades

of the Migration makes it distinctive. As Krissoff Boehm points out, “Existing archival

47 One narrator, Alberta Bryant is discounted from this chart since she was born and raised in New York City. Ms. Bryant’s parents both migrated to New York City in the 1920s before she was born. Through they did not migrate to Washington, DC, both Bernard Hayes and Jettie Brown are counted in this chart since they did migrate north during the Great Migration. Mr. Hayes migrated to New York in 1960 with his family, and Ms. Brown migrated to Chester, PA, in 1950. 48 The predominance of narrators who migrated after 1940 does not represent an active decision to record the history of the Second Great Migration, but rather the temporal realities of when the project began. Most of the people who were part of the First Great Migration (1915-1940) had passed away by the time Real World History students began interviewing in the fall of 2014. In fact, the instructors emphasize the importance of identifying older narrators since it is more likely that there will be more opportunities in the future to interview a narrator who is in their seventies, for example, than their nineties.

collections feature few stories of the Second Great Migration and only rarely has the movement

been considered from the female viewpoint in oral histories.”49

18

16

14

12

10

8

6

4

2

0 4

≤10

Age at time of migration

17

13

2

11--15 16-20

Number of narrators 21-25 2

25-30

Figure 5.

As figure 5 demonstrates, the individuals interviewed by Real World History students

made their migration at a young age. This reflects the fact that by these later years of the

Migration, with kinship networks firmly established, most of the narrators migrated north to live

with relatives at a young age. Since the experiences of children in the Migration are not well-

represented in the literature, it is worth highlighting that several of the narrators were children

when they were either sent north or their family made the migration together.50 One common

story that emerges from several of the interviews is that some children were raised with the

understanding that when they finished high school, they would be sent to live with family up

North.

49 Krissoff Boehm, Making a Way Out of No Way, 92. 50 Krissoff Boehm, Making a Way of Out No Way, 98.

25

20

Level of formal schooling

22

15

10 8 8

5

0

1

Grade School High School Post-secondary Graduate degree

Number of narrators

Figure 6.51 Another demographic dimension is the level of formal schooling of the narrators. As

depicted in figure 6, by and large, the narrators were well-educated. The majority of the Real

World History narrators had some form of post-secondary education whether that be technical

education or attending a four-year institution of higher education. In talking about the

educational background of her narrators, Krisoff Boehm points out that a study on migrants in

which working-class and lower-middle-class women do not predominate is highly irregular.52

The narrators’ educational attainment aligns with Wilkerson and Tolney’s arguments about the

greater educational attainment of migrants in the later stages of the Migration. These could also

speak to the educational and economic opportunities of the DC region.

While migration themes are present in much of the oral history resources of the DC

region due to the impact of the Great Migration on the city, the Real World History collection is

51 All post-secondary/pre-graduate education has been grouped under “post-secondary” in this graphic. For example, individuals who went to nursing school, barbering school, beauty school, etc., are included in “postsecondary.” 52 Krissoff Boehm, Making a Way out of No Way, 15.