“People Were Forever Coming and Going”: Return as Part of the Great Migration Narrative

Spanning from the beginning of World War II to the 1970s, the Second Great Migration is one of the largest population shifts in American History.  Yet as millions of African Americans were leaving the terrorism of the Jim Crow South, millions also decided to stay. This presentation will explore why African Americans chose to stay in the American South despite the racial terrorism of Jim Crow, and argues that education played a key role in their decision making process.

This paper specifically focuses on education at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). It analyzes two ways the education provided by HBCUs shaped its students’ relationship with the American South to motivate them to not migrate out of the region. First, it explores the education received at HBCUs as a general economic, political, and social advantage. I argue that graduates of HBCUs had certain privileges within the Jim Crow South that encouraged them to stay. And second, I argue that African Americans were motivated to stay in the South to participate in community building and racial uplift because the educational ideologies and pedagogies of HBCUs both encouraged and mandated social responsibility.

The striving for education and the power obtained from receiving an education are themes that were invoked in the personal narratives of many prominent African Americans from Benjamin Mays, who was the President of Morehouse College; a prominent HBCU, to Diane Nash, who was a student at Fisk University when she began her campaign for human rights. This presentation re-imagines the desire for education and the power education provided, to help historians better understand what motivated millions of African Americans to remained in the South throughout the Great Migration.