Dr. Henry Louis Gates brings our hidden history to life like we’ve never seen before in Great Migrations: A People On The Move, a new series premiering Jan. 28 that reveals how Black Americans’ search for a better life changed the U.S. forever. If you think you’ve seen and heard it all before, you have no idea how much more there is to the story.
Source: McGee Media / PBS
What does it mean when you think of home? For many Black Americans, the answer is complicated. Fortunately, it doesn’t take an appearance on Finding Your Roots for the Emmy-nominated series’ host and executive producer Dr. Gates to help uncover the people and the past that still shape our politcs, cultures, and communities.
From the hope of a “promised land” in the North after Emancipation to Black immigrants searching for and reimagining the “American Dream,” these four episodes capture the hopeful and harrowing stories of Black people fleeing inequality, finding home, and forging new identities over more than a century.
BOSSIP Talks To The Directors/Producers About Bringing The Hidden Histories Of Great Migrations To Life
In an exclusive interview, BOSSIP sat down with series directors/producers Julia Marchesi and Nailah Ife Sims to discuss what that it took to create Great Migrations: A People On The Move and what viewers can expect starting Tuesday, Jan. 28 at 9 pm ET.
Source: McGee Media / PBS
This interview has been condensed and edited for clairty.
Marchesi, who previously worked on 2019’s Reconstruction: America After the Civil War and 2022’s Emmy-nominated Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches with Dr. Gates (or Skip) explained what it was like to collaborate again on Great Migrations and how this series is different.
MARCHESI: I’ve worked with Skip Gates for about 20 years. Reconstruction was the biggest, but we also did Frederick Douglass for HBO, and a Finding Your Roots episode with John Lewis and Corey Booker. All this work has been like getting a PhD in, not just Black history, but American history.
This project bridged a gap in my knowledge of Black history about everything between the periods of Reconstruction and Civil Rights and that’s how I approached Great Migrations.
Source: McGee Media / PBS
Sims describes how Great Migrations hit close to home with her own family history. She also shared what made this project different from her previous documentaries like 2021’s Who Killed Malcolm X? and 2022’s Black Patriots: Heroes Of The Civil War.
SIMS: It was really special to be able to work on a series that touches on my own family history. I am the proud descendant of participants in the Great Migration from Arkansas and Mississippi to Chicago. On my mother’s side, I’m the descendant of Haitian migrants to the U.S. who also settled in Chicago. So I’ve always known the story of migration through a personal level, but it was really special to work on something that contextualizes those personal histories within the larger American history. I was really excited to learn more about how consequential those migrations were to American culture and society.
In terms of my other work, I’ve worked on histories that are piecemeal along the timeline of American history from the 19th century to the mid-20th century, so this connected a lot of dots for me.
Great Migrations captures more than textbooks about the pivotal years between the Civil War or Reconstruction and Civil Rights. What was it like to work with the descendants personally connected to these stories like the Aurthur family from one of the most iconic photos of the Great Migration or the Laws, who made headlines defending their new home from housing discrimination in Los Angeles?
MARCHESI: One of the challenges of this series was to make it personal because the Great Migration touches politics, culture, arts, and economics. Six million people migrated North, so that’s six million stories. So which ones do you focus on? That was hard to find stories that exemplify the phenomenon, but the Arthur family from this photo was used over and over in books and documentaries to signify the Great Migration.
To find the true story behind this family and understand that they were fleeing the South and racial violence. Two of the sons had been lynched in Texas. Then we were able to track down the descenedants who had seen this photo used all over, who knew the real story. It was a really gratifying sort of Finding Your Roots moment, for sure.
SIMS: I would just add that compared to social justice movements, Migration is a social movement embodied by the choices and decisions of everyday people. So we need to make sure people feel reflected in these people’s experience. We chose people who represented difference cities and phenomena in the Migration story about the journey and what happened afterwards, like the Laws family who had to fight the restrictive covenants in Los Angeles. In latter episodes, we have everyday people who experienced Migration in their own lifetimes like a Finding Your Roots in reverse.
Source: McGee Media / PBS
A common theme throughout the series is that all roads culturally and physically seem to lead to Chicago. Train workers like Pullman Porters somewhat created an Underground Railroad for The Chicago Defender newspaper and information about the North. Can you speak more about how that contributed to Chicago’s importance as a “promised land?”
SIMS: My grandmother’s family migrated from Mississippi and her father was also a porter. That position available to Black men in Chicago in the early 19th century and porters spread the word about Migration, life in Chicago, and Black people with middle class lives.
It was incredible to see with Julia how much more profound Chicago was as the place Jazz spread North, and where Gospel music was born. One fact that fascinated me is that the train lines determined where people migrated. For Chicago, it was mostly folks from Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi simply because of the Illinois Central train line.
The series explores the 1919 Red Summer racist terror attacks in Chicago and several other northern cities. That history seemed to repeat a century later with the protests in 2020 about racial injustice. We also learn that another March on Washington almost took place 20 years before the Civil Rights movement. Did you discover other historical moments in Great Migrations unexpectedly mirroring current events?
SIMS: History does tend to repeat itself, and some is super cyclical within the series. One thing that comes to mind for what we see today is the Reverse Freedom Rides, which exploited Black southerners looking to move North and make a mockery of the Great Migration and Civil Rights efforts.
That sounded a lot like the busses we’ve heard about full of immigrants brought to Northern and Western cities, dropping them off without a plan or support system waiting for them.
MARCHESI: Migration is very different from immigration, but I realized when you have a lot of people moving from one place to another, history tells us it sparks a lot of anxiety among people already living in those places. However, history also tells us that those people create positive transformations and contributions wherever they build communities. Red Summer came out of that tension and anxiety, but look at everything the Great Migration has offered to make these destination cities better.
A Sneak Peek At Great Migrations: A People On The Move
Great Migrations: A People On The Move premieres on PBS on Tuesday, Jan. 28 at 9 pm ET with new weekly episodes through Feb. 18. Watch a preview of the series below.
Check out a breakdown of what to expect each week from this groundbreaking documentary series.
Tuesday, January 28, 9:00 pm ET – “Exodus”
Episode 1 explores the first wave of the Great Migration (1910–1940), when more than a million Black Americans fled the Jim Crow South for the promised lands of the North, forever changing the country and themselves.
Tuesday, February 4, 9:00 pm ET – “Streets Paved in Gold”
Episode 2 explores the second wave of the Great Migration (1940-1970), highlighting how Northern and Western Black communities matured through migration and transformed the cultural and political power of Black America.
Tuesday, February 11, 9:00 pm ET – “One Way Ticket Back”
Episode 3 shows how the reverse migration of Black Americans to the South—driven by mass movements, economic change, and an ongoing struggle for freedom and opportunity—continues to reshape the country.
Tuesday, February 18, 9:00 pm ET – “Coming to America”
Episode 4 tells the story of African and Caribbean immigrants in the United States, examining their profound impact on American culture and what it means to be Black in America.
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