New Web Site Traces African-American Migration
This story originally appeared in the SLJ.com E-Mail Alert on Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2005
Meg McCaffrey -- School Library Journal, 2/23/2005
How did migrating African Americans help transform America? Students and educators can mark Black History Month by visiting a recently launched Web site that answers just that question.
"In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience" provides a wealth of source materials that trace the history of black communities over the past 400 years. Created by the New York Public Library's (NYPL) Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the site includes 8,300 illustrations, 60 maps, and 16,500 pages of essays, articles, manuscripts, and books.
"Most of the text (2,000 pages on the slave trade alone) has never been online," says Sylviane Diouf, Schomburg researcher and content manager.
Schomburg director Howard Dodson says In Motion shows how African-American migrants helped transform both the black community and our country. "This shows African-American history in a new light," says Diouf. The result is a study of how blacks "empowered" themselves, as opposed to familiar lessons on slavery and "coerced migration."
While textbooks tend to focus on how migrating Europeans helped build American cities, In Motion reveals how African Americans were just as important. One of the 100 featured lesson plans explores this fact. Entitled "Runaway Journeys," it aims to help students in grades six through 12 understand how economic and religious prospects spurred 19th-century black people to urbanize.
The site complements other projects, including a book of the same name released by National Geographic in January, a Schomburg Center exhibition, and a Black History Month education kit.
