⚓ Directory
PLAN GALLERY LXII
GALLERY LXII

The Second Great Migration

Between 1940 and 1970 about five million Black Americans left the South. They were moving toward wages and away from terror at the same time, and both halves of that have to be in the account.

Charles Horton Cooley
ON THE FLOOR
Charles Horton Cooley
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“You learned who you are by watching what other people reflected back at you. The mirror, it turns out, was people all along.”
Edward Soja
ON THE FLOOR
Edward Soja
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“Space is not the stage the story happens on - it is one of the actors. Ask WHERE, and half the mystery answers itself.”
George Herbert Mead
ON THE FLOOR
George Herbert Mead
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“The self is a conversation: the I speaking, the Me listening with everyone else's ears. You rehearse society every time you think.”
AM5-061 · The Second Great Migration — Open the drawer
A single Greyhound or regional carrier one-way ticket from a Deep South city to Chicago or Detroit, circa 1940–1965, representing the physical instrument of departure for millions during the Second Great Migration.
AM5-062 · The Second Great Migration — What is this thing?
A handwritten accounting document issued annually by plantation owners to sharecropping families, itemizing crop shares, advances, and debts owed. Standard form across the cotton South, 1920s–1960s.
AM5-063 · The Second Great Migration — Read the source
A letter from a Northern factory worker to Southern relatives describing wages, housing, and working conditions—a primary source revealing what migrants communicated about opportunity and what they left unsaid about danger.
AM5-064 · The Second Great Migration — Map it / time it
A representative letter from a northern-based migrant to southern relatives, typical of thousands written during the 1940s, offering concrete wage figures, housing costs, and warnings about racial danger—evidence that both economic pull and violence-avoidance shaped migration decisions simultaneously.
AM5-065 · The Second Great Migration — Two sources disagree
Mamie Till Bradley's public account of her son's murder and her decision to display his body, a watershed moment linking racial terror to migration decisions across the South.
AM5-066 · The Second Great Migration — State the claim
Weekly Black-owned newspaper that published migration guides, job listings, and accounts of racial violence in the South, circulating widely among potential migrants in the 1940s.
AM5-067 · The Second Great Migration — Take the other side
A trade magazine advertisement promoting mechanical cotton picking equipment to Southern farmers, illustrating the technological displacement that undercut labor demand in cotton agriculture during the 1940s–1950s.
AM5-068 · The Second Great Migration — Weigh it
A mechanical cotton picker from the 1950s—the machine that displaced hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers across the Delta and forced a reckoning between economic displacement and racial terror as drivers of the Great Migration.
AM5-069 · The Second Great Migration — Build the answer
A representative 1950s-era map showing railroad lines, highway corridors, and destination cities that Black migrants used to travel from the rural South to northern industrial centers, annotated with wage differentials and labor demand indicators.
AM5-070 · The Second Great Migration — For the file
A passenger ticket from Chicago-bound service, representative of the millions of rail journeys that carried Black migrants northward during the Second Great Migration, embodying both economic opportunity and the material trace of displacement.
AM5-071 · The Second Great Migration — Go and look
A printed Greyhound intercity bus timetable from 1955 showing routes from the Deep South to northern industrial cities. It represents the material infrastructure that enabled mass migration and the economic calculus of movement.
AM5-072 · The Second Great Migration — Now, today
A Western Union receipt documenting remittance from a northern industrial worker to family in the rural South—evidence of wage differential and sustained family obligation that together explain migration timing and persistence.
AM5-073 · The Second Great Migration — Teach it back
A single passenger ticket from a Southern rail station to Chicago, typical of thousands purchased between 1940 and 1970. Represents the physical threshold where economic calculation met the decision to leave.
AM5-074 · The Second Great Migration — The other place
A 1943 Southern Pacific recruitment broadside advertising rail work in California shipyards and war industries, distributed in Louisiana and Mississippi, exemplifying how northern and western employers actively recruited Black workers during wartime labor shortages.
AM5-075 · The Second Great Migration — One object, close
A 1954 itemized wage record from a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation, showing earnings, deductions, and net annual pay for seasonal labor—a primary document revealing the economic mathematics of agricultural work that prompted migration.
🎧 A moment to consider
What will you carry out of this room?
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