Instructify

What do the Middle Passage, the post-Civil War movement of rural African Americans to the north, and Caribbean immigration have in common?  All of these events involved the migration of people of African descent to, within, or from what is now the United States.  These and other migrations are the focus of In Motion: The African American Migration Experience, a project of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.  This unique resource brings scholarly research and primary sources on many different migrations together, creating exciting possibilities for student research on both individual topics and comparative themes.

Each section of the website includes a detailed historical overview of a specific migration, interspersed with primary sources that the reader can explore in detail.  For example, in the section entitled Runaway Journeys, you will find paintings, engravings and photographs of enslaved people, interviews with former slaves, maps, newspaper advertisements for runaways, photographs of the shackles and collars used to restrain slaves, letters, personal narratives of escape, writings from slave holders, secondary accounts from historians, and much more.  In all, the website brings together more than 16,500 pages of text and 8,300 illustrations to create an incredibly rich archive for historical research.

The Educational Materials section provides lesson plans for using these resources that go well beyond history and into other curriculum areas, including economics, mathematics, language arts, performing arts, and world religions.  For example, students can use documents from the Great Migration to study wages and expenses in 1919 in an economics lesson plan, focus on the arts of the Harlem Renaissance while learning about the Second Great Migration, or explore the Constitution in detail while studying the slave trade.

Taught well, history is always a comparative endeavor — we want our students to understand how the past differs from the present, and also how different moments in the past relate to one another.  In Motion beings together an incredible collection of tools that students can use to figure out the connections between migrations and to develop their own interpretations of African American history. -KATHRYN WALBERT

In Motion: The African American Migration Experience

Related Stuff:

Drop Me Off in Harlem: Learn how people and culture intersected in the Harlem Renaissance

Learn about the lives of runaway slaves with The Geography of Slavery

Stock up on history resources at the National History Education Clearninghouse