BHM 2019: Diaspora

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.

Winner of a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship, Mathis opens her career with a book about the Great Migration. Hattie Shepherd is only 17 when she leaves Georgia for Philadelphia, where she raises nine children. Theirs is a life of extraordinary hardship, reportedly told with unflinching beauty. A big push for this one.

A history of the Fillmore Jazz District in San Francisco.

Over seven years, Lisa Krissoff Boehm gathered oral histories with women migrants and their children, two groups largely overlooked in the story of this event. She also utilized existing oral histories with migrants and southerners in leading archives. In extended excerpts from the oral histories, and in thoughtful scholarly analysis of the voices, this book offers a unique window into African American women's history.

These rich oral histories reveal much that is surprising. Although the Jim Crow South presented persistent dangers, the women retained warm memories of southern childhoods

From the beginnings of "Harlemania" to the beginnings of the Great Depression, this authoritative resource presents the people, places and times that defined an era and documents the launch of cultural development among African Americans in 1920s Harlem.

The great World War II migration is the most important event in the history of Africa American people in the San Francisco Bay Area.In 1944, African Americans made up 10 percent of the labor force with 70 percent of new comers working in one industry-the shipyards.