The Great Migration Reconsidered - Race, Identity, and Labor in the 20th Century American City

The Great Migration not only reshaped national and local politics, but also led to fundamental changes in the ways that African Americans in the urban north worked, worshiped, dwelled, and understood their place in the world. This cross-disciplinary conversation brings together two leading scholars of religion and economics to discuss the ways that migration shapes urban communities, as well as how new insights from historical Census records are transforming our understanding of the Great Migration.

Judith Weisenfeld, Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author of New World A-Coming, Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU, 2017).

Leah Platt Boustan is Professor of Economics at Princeton and the author of Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets (Princeton, 2016).

Image: Panel 40, Jacob Lawrence. The Migration Series. 1940-41. Casein tempera on sixty hardboard panels. Each 18 × 12″ (45.7 × 30.5 cm) or 12 × 18″ (30.5 × 45.7 cm). Even-numbered panels, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.