Fly Away: The Great African American Cultural Migrations

The Great Migration—the mass exodus of blacks from the rural South to the urban North and West in the twentieth century—shaped American culture and life in ways still evident today. In Fly Away, Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott trace the ideas that inspired African Americans to abandon the South for freedom and opportunity elsewhere.

Black southerners fled the Low Country of South Carolina, the mines and mills of Birmingham, Alabama, the farms of the Mississippi Delta, and the urban war...