“We, Too, Sing America”: The Construction of American Subjectivity in African American Migration and European Immigrant Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
pp. 81-107
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Migration

"Who Set You Flowin'?": The African-American Migration Narrative.

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Scruggs ◽  
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Migration

Rethinking African American Migration

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Migration Patterns ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
And Migration ◽  
American Migration

This chapter explores the relationship between migration, displacement, and the Underground Railroad movement. More specifically, it considers the processes of community building and the causes of migration that led Blacks to live where they did and to flee when they had to. It shows how migration became a means of escape from slavery, first by discussing maroon settlements that functioned as the African diaspora's first communities for free Blacks and began the progression to the Underground Railroad. It then explains how Black community formation and the Underground Railroad shifted between constant migration and displacement that began with the Middle Passage, and how emigration and colonization schemes of the pre-Civil War abolitionist era influenced displacement and migration patterns. This analysis looks at African American migration from a new perspective by sifting through the range of ways in which people of color entered into and interacted with their surroundings. It suggests that migration, both voluntary and forced, courses through the Black experience.

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