Title: The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations

Author: Ira Berlin

Year of Publication: 2010

Thesis:

A work of synthesis that includes Berlin's trademark primary research, then binds together four migrations that serve as a "contrapuntal" to John Hope Franklin's slavery to freedom master narrative. Berlin's work serves to complicate the movement of Africans and African Americans by examining forced and unforced migrations; the first two: the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Atlantic migration to Southern plantations are clearly forced. South to North migration is certainly coerced, and immigration of Africans after a long hiatus between 1924 and 1965 opens up new possibilities for African American identities connected to how people were able to stay or forced to move. This conflagration of migrations, according to Berlin, is the ground on which African American culture developed.

Time: 15th-20th centuries

Geography: Black Atlantic / U.S.

Organization:

Prologue

- Argues that enslaved people had a much larger hand in freeing themselves than they are given credit for

- Concerned with collective Black consciousness

- First plantation, then industrialization force African Americans to move (tobacco & rice to cotton/sugar)

- Attempts to correct slavery to freedom paradigm

CHAPTER ONE - Movement and Place in the African American Past

- Middle Passage retains the standard meaning but takes on a metaphorical meaning in this chapter, allowing it to describe a number of forced migrations

- Place described as both rootedness and exclusion ("stay in your place")

CHAPTER TWO - The Transatlantic Passage

CHAPTER THREE - The Passage to the Interior

CHAPTER FOUR - The Passage to the North

CHAPTER FIVE - Global Passages

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Largely a synthetic work

Historiography: Definitely makes use of John Hope Franklin's work as counterpoint.

Keywords:

1965 Voting Rights Act (overrides the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act)

1965 Immigration and Nationality Act

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

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Notes:

How might this be useful for my research? Migration and movement is certainly a theme that arises in the development of African American communities in the West, so this book will be helpful in thinking about the long durée.

20min book talk here - https://www.c-span.org/video/?303077-7/the-making-african-america