“Cast of thousands.” That Hollywood tag, often flourishing an exclamation point or two, adorned movie theater posters and newspaper ads for the visual fictions of the 1960s being promoted as epic spectacles. But the actual Great Migration of African Americans from the south to the north and west has often and much more accurately been described as an epic venture. And this epic had a cast of multimillions. Its origin can readily be determined, from the time the United States entered World War I in 1916 when the labor force was suddenly depleted and mostly rural black southerners were lured north by smooth-talking recruiters who side-stepped white plantation owners and promised their black workers a freer and better-paid life. The migration accelerated in the 1920s and 1930s aided, ironically, by the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 which closed the door to Asians and severely limited the quotas for eastern and southern Europeans. The legislation, intended to favor white immigrants from northern and western Europe, opened up jobs that few others wanted to African Americans moving to the cities. The end of the Great Migration is less precisely dated but the boundary-line is generally fixed about 1970 after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the gradual (though often partial) dismantling of the barriers of Jim Crow segregation. The epic nature of this national and cultural realignment can be seen, piecemeal, in passages of poetry, fiction and memoir. But the central representations of the migration in this chapter will come from a cultural historian, Isabel Wilkerson, and a visual artist, Jacob Lawrence. Each of them, in different forms, captures both the big picture and the individual experiences of this massive twentieth-century odyssey.

The 60-year quest of southern African Americans for a home of their own is an epic story with no single hero. It was not an orderly process. Unlike the ancient literary epics, this one had no visible structure, no groups whose movements could be neatly catalogued like Homer's ships of Achaeans organized by region and household on their way to Troy. African American families went north, in the words of the narrator of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, “in shifts, lots, batches” as money and circumstances allowed.