This virtual event will premiere on ESFL’s Facebook page and YouTube channel

This is the next in ESFL’s monthly series of labor history films. It is important that we understand “labor history” to include the histories of working people, not just the histories of unions. How was the American working class made and unmade, in era after era? The migration of 2,000,000 African Americans from the South between 1910 and 1930 led to profound changes in their lives and in the lives of all working people, setting the stage for the industrial union movement of the 1930s, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Movement.

Narrated by a Mississippi barber and a sharecropper woman who organized migration clubs to Chicago, “Up South” tells the dramatic story of African-American migration to industrial cities during World War I. Letters, oral histories, songs, photographs, and art convey how southern black culture and traditions helped sustain migrants as they rejected the oppression and indignity of the Jim Crow South. But the migrants encountered new problems and challenges in the “promised land.” Among the issues and events explored are the rise of black politics, women’s club and church activities, the July 1919 race riot, the industrial workplace, and the emergence of the “New Negro” movement.

Join us before the film for a conversation with historian James Robinson, who has joined Metro State’s faculty this year. Dr. Robinson will also respond to your comments and questions after the film, another in the series of creative documentaries produced by the American Social History Project. 

If you’d like to learn more about the subject, email us at [email protected] and we will send you the 15 page “Viewers’ Guide” that the filmmakers also created.

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