(bright music) (upbeat music) (train clacking) - My grandmother and her siblings were all cotton pickers.

They hated that life.

They picked up everything they knew and left to the North.

- My grandmother migrated to Philadelphia from Eastman, Georgia.

- My mother's family migrated to Los Angeles in 1924.

- My grandfather, he jumped on a moving train and headed to Kentucky.

(train squealing and clacking) - I think migration is freedom to Black America.

- That decision to migrate was everything.

It broadened Black life and what that life could look like.

To create a whole new life in these new places is what made the next generation possible.

(seagulls cawing) (bright music) - The African American Great Migration was, in fact, one of the most significant demographic transformations in United States history.

- The music that we associate with America, (upbeat music) the food wave we associate with America.

- [Cook] Doc, I got something for you.

- [Doc] Oh man, it look like it's out of a magazine.

(both laughing) - The North always had this connotation of the promised land.

It took on new meaning with the migration.

- I have seen this photograph a thousand times in every book or essay about the Great Migration, you see this photograph.

- There was a very tragic story as to why they moved.

(dramatic music) - If there's a Black American dream, I think it's to have the freedom to dream, freedom to imagine oneself and a future for oneself that involves both African Americans and immigrants.

- Why is it important for people to understand that Black people came through here too?

- It's like affirmation saying, "This is our dream too."

You don't see that.

You don't hear about it.

- We are still fighting for visibility around Black immigrants in the US.

- When did you become aware of the phenomenon of the reverse Great Migration?

- You could feel it.

If you lived in Atlanta, you saw our population growing year over year, decade over decade, and you realized something was happening.

- Movement is a really concrete way of measuring your freedom, realizing that I can make a choice to pick up and start up all over again elsewhere.

If that's not the most transformative decision that you can make, I don't know what is.

- [Announcer] As part of the PBS coverage of the Great Migration, "One Detroit" is collecting stories from local residents.

We start with "American Black Journal" host and "One Detroit" contributor, Stephen Henderson.

He sat down with "One Detroit's" Bill Kubota to tell the story of his family's migration from the South to Detroit.

(bright music) - Like many other people here in the city, and especially many African Americans, my family came from the South on both sides to Detroit at different times.

My mother's family came in the late 1950s.

My grandfather, her dad, was an auto worker and a union official in Cincinnati.

He had been born in Valdosta, Georgia.

His family moved to Cincinnati when he was a teenager.

He marries my grandmother, and they raised their kids there, and he becomes this sort of point of interest for Walter Reuther who founded the UAW and was running it.

And he needs my grandfather in Detroit to help him connect the union with the growing Black political class, among other things.

I mean, there's this growing Black population in the city in the late 1950s because of this big move from the South, and Walter Reuther is really interested in that, and so he recruits my grandfather and a guy named Horace Sheffield, whose son is still around and whose granddaughter is the current president of the city council.

- And that is why we're working today.

(crowd cheering) - Horace Sheffield and my grandfather, William Beckham, Sr., Were great friends and, and close associates who helped the union through that period.

- Segregation is wrong because it is nothing but a new form of slavery, covered up with certain niceties of complexity.

(crowd cheering) - [Stephen] The UAW is really instrumental in getting Martin Luther King here to do the March for Freedom in the summer of 1963 before the March for Freedom in Washington, he marches down Woodward Avenue and delivers his, "I Have a Dream" speech, the very first public deliverance of that speech at Cobo Hall.

- So because of the legacy of slavery and segregation, many Negroes lost faith in themselves and many felt that they weren't inferior, but then something happened to the Negro... - The UAW, with my grandfather and Horace Sheffield and lots of other people who were involved, that's how that happened.

I don't know all of the details of that story, but I know it was not an easy thing to pull off.

There was a lot of resistance to the idea of King.

He was seen by that point as something of a radical.

Lots of people didn't want this to happen in Detroit, and the UAW and Walter Reuther, in particular, stood up and said, "No, no, no, we've gotta make this happen."

(protestors chanting) I do remember, for instance, that they moved to Detroit, and they moved to Russell Woods, which is actually a place where if you just go down the roster of notable African Americans in this community in the last 50 years, a lot of 'em come out of that neighborhood.

Saul Green, who was the US attorney, Joann Watson, all kinds of people grew up in that neighborhood.

But when my family moved there in the late 1950s, it was a predominantly, overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood, and there were covenants that prevented African Americans from buying those houses for a long time.

And so my family was among the first families, African American families, to be able to live in Russell Woods, and I've heard lots of stories about what that was like.

The neighborhood was starting to change.

At the end of their block, there was a synagogue, and across the street from it, a Hebrew school.

By the time I was born in 1970, my memories of that block, that was a public school and a Baptist church.

That's how quickly the neighborhood changed once African Americans started moving in.

My father, whose story is different from my mom's family, he doesn't come until he is in his, I guess, late twenties, and he comes as an adult to escape, really, the Jim Crow South.

He's born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1933.

And that's a place that is kind of a pivotal place in the Antebellum South.

It is an important trading place for not just cotton, but also slaves.

It's also a center of human production of slaves after Congress bans the import of Africans in the early 1800s.

Some cities and some places in the South become breeders of human cattle, and that just is one of the places that was most prolific.

And so my dad's born 50 years, 60 years after the war ends.

In fact, he grows up and goes to serve in the Air Force during the Korean War and comes home and is not allowed to vote.

He can't get the GI Bill, which is in place for people coming back from that war as they were for others, because in Natchez, the schools that they would've paid for him to go to did not admit African Americans, the neighborhoods where he might have bought a house with a loan through the GI Bill, didn't sell property to African Americans.

And so his life was not going to develop, I think, the way he would've wanted it to if he stayed, so he moves north in, I think, the early sixties, I think it's a little later than my mom's family, to find that opportunity.

- [Bill] In Detroit though.

- [Stephen] In Detroit.

- [Bill] Why Detroit, do you know?

- You know, I don't know why he came to Detroit.

He's not an auto worker.

He never, to my knowledge, works in the auto industry.

He becomes a social worker and works at Lafayette Clinic, which is a pretty important mental health institution just east of downtown Detroit.

I don't know why he comes to Detroit.

Maybe he had a friend here, maybe he just heard about opportunity.

You know, Detroit was seen by African Americans in the South as a place that offered more opportunity than where they were.

Detroit and Chicago are probably the biggest beneficiaries, in fact, of that migration, but I don't know that story.

- [Bill] You haven't talked to him about it or you- - Well, my dad died when I was 14, so I never had the chance to have that conversation with him.

I go back to Natchez now pretty regularly.

I try to go once a year and try to reconnect the dots, like find more about our family, find more about him, but also learn more, I've learned a lot more about the city itself and its history.

I mean, it's a very different place.

I mean, it's very interesting.

Even in 2024, which is the last time I was there, it is a different part of the world.

- [Bill] Now would you say your story is pretty common, uncommon, unique?

How would you summarize what you've heard?

- I think this is a very common story is my sense, but it's a commonly unknown story.

I think there are tons of people, who, if they had the opportunity to go back and look at where they're from, they would find equally surprising, joyful, and painful things.

And most of us don't know, I think, past a certain point what all those things are.

So yeah, I don't think this is unusual.

I just think I'm getting this special opportunity, I guess, to look more deeply into it.