ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter begins with The Great Northern Migration: a spontaneous mass movement between 1916 and 1970 in the US that brings six million blacks from the Jim Crow South to northern cities. The National Lynching Memorial, in Montgomery, Alabama, might stand as a shameful anti-memorial to the Great Migration. Between 1882 and 1968, white mobs mostly in the Deep South lynched 4,743 blacks. Slavery and the Great Migration, ironically, are almost unimaginable to several African-American descendants who undertake intellectual and emotional journeys of reverse migration to reclaim an understanding of their migrant or enslaved ancestors. Morgan Jerkins in Wandering in Strange Lands (2020) undertakes to travel in reverse (south to north) the journey that her ancestors took on the Great Migration. Saidiya Hartman, whose family history disappears in the nineteenth century, traces the Atlantic slave route in order to understand what it meant to be a black slave. Sun Ra, a jazz musician born in Alabama, offers the vision of escape from a society in which blacks remain configured as invisible. The planet Saturn is his metaphor for an Afrofuturist colony where the terrestrial Great Migration officially ends.
