When the celebrated country musician Hank Williams died on New Year’s Day in 1953 in a car on his way to a performance in Canton, Ohio, he had been traveling from Charleston, West Virginia, on U.S. Route 19, one of a series of north-south arteries that had conveyed millions of struggling Southern white people from Appalachia to new lives in the industrial Upper Midwest. This “Hillbilly Highway,” as historian Max Fraser calls it, was a dense network of interstate roads that couriered the job-seekers northward. It played a pivotal role in facilitating one of the most consequential migrations in American history.
Blake Gumprecht’s “North to Boston, Life Histories from the Black Great Migration in New England” focuses on ten men and women who grew up in the South and came to Boston in the 1950s and 1960s. (The years of the Great Migration are generally recognized as 1915 to 1970). Some of the ten came to live in Dorchester and Mattapan, and three are still here. The personal histories
[Headnote] Lessons for the American and Muslim Community [Headnote] Hurricane Katrina should jostle the consciousness of Americans in general and Muslim [.]
The 1919 Elaine massacre in which white mobs killed an unknown number of Black farmers in Phillips County has finally begun to receive the attention it deserves from historians. The exact number of people murdered that fall in the cotton fields of the Arkansas Delta will never be known. Their story, however, must not be forgotten.