In Little Haiti, a predominantly Haitian neighborhood in Miami, elementary school students dress up as Toussaint L'Ouverture to commemorate Haitian Independence Day. Toussaint L'Ouverture was responsible for the only successful slave revolt in the world. (courtesy of the Schomburg collection)

In recognition of black history month, officials with New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture have released a new Web-based teaching tool, called “In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience.”

The Web site, accessible at http://www.inmotionaame.org, offers students, teachers and the general public a wealth of user-friendly information on African-American migration. More than 16,500 pages of essays, books, articles and manuscripts, 8,300 illustrations, 100 lesson plans and 60 maps are available on the site.

Funded with a grant from the Congressional Black Caucus and administered by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the project was spearheaded by Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY). The U.S. Congress appropriated $2.4 million for the creation of the digital archive.

National Geographic has released a companion book to the project, titled “In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience.”

The mission, say organizers, is to help users understand the people, places and events that have shaped African-American migrations over the last four hundred years.

“It presents a unique interpretation of African-American history,” says Howard Dodson, director of both the center and the project. “We’ve used the migration theme as a central organizing principle.”

Teaching Migration
Often, when African-American population trends are taught, educators focus on the Great Migration, when about 1.5 million black people moved from the South to the North between 1916 and 1930.

However, the In Motion project allows students to learn about thirteen major migration moments.

“Only two of those movements were forced—the domestic slave trade and the transatlantic slave trade,” explains Dodson. “All the rest of them were voluntary.”

The project, stresses Dodson, allows students to see and understand the choices made over 400 years by the country’s diverse population of African Americans in terms of where they would live and why.

“Much of history previously has been written about black victimization and what has been done to blacks—the slavery, oppression, exploitation, segregation, job discrimination,” says Dodson. “All of those are real parts of the history, but no people’s history is comprised of the sum total of their victimization. It’s what people do in the context of their situation.”

And the migrations weren’t purely physical in nature: “With the geographical movement of individuals go social, political and cultural resources that groups carry with them,” says Dodson.

Appreciating Complexities

About 32,000 sub-Saharan students attend American universities and colleges. Many more, who migrated with their parents or were born here, are enrolled in primary and secondary schools. (courtesy of the Schomburg collection)

The project also combats the notion of all African Americans sharing a single history. “There’s a tendency to think about the black population in the United States as very monolithic,” explains Dodson. “What these migratory experiences reveal is that the degree to which the population not only is very complex today, but it has been very complex from its inception.”

Exploring the Web site, one finds, for example, that some of the earliest black people to arrive in the United States did not come directly from Africa. Many came via the Caribbean. In fact, the borough of Brooklyn in New York today has a larger Caribbean population than any city in the Caribbean islands.

“Within the early black population, there was a multiplicity of ethnic and national and religious groups,” says Dodson. “Those individuals, upon arriving in the U.S., actually genetically mixed with Native American as well as virtually all of the European populations in the United States. All of America’s people are part of that community.”

Black Kids in Motion
Researcher Sylviane A. Diouff, a content manager for the project, says the Web site can help today’s black children learn more about why their ancestors – or, in some cases, their parents – made decisions to live where they did. “[In Motion] is an invitation to every person of African descent in the U.S. to revisit their and their families’ migration histories to determine their roles in the making of African-American and American history,” says Diouff.

One segment of the project, labeled “Return South Migration,” focuses on a fairly recent migration within the U.S, in which millions of African-American families have returned to the South to live since the 1970s.

A theme covered in this section is the role of children in forging links between their old homes and new ones.

From the 1970s through the 1990s, many African American children became a sort of bridge between two cultures, says Dodson, as they were sent to stay with relatives and learned about the culture and communities of the South. “They were, in many respects, the catalyst for the movement back to the South,” he explains.

“Yours truly included,” Dodson adds. “I was sent back to Virginia, my mother and father’s home community, every summer until I was about 16.”

Black History in Schools
The debut of the In Motion project comes at a time when some educators are questioning how African-American history should be taught in schools.

Some teachers gear their February lesson plans on the topic of black history. This way of teaching traces its roots to 1926, when educator Carter Godwin Woodson created Negro History Week. Then, in 1976, Congress expanded the week into the full month of February.

But some educators are more comfortable with the idea of lacing black history into curricula throughout the school year. The Schomburg Center ascribes to that philosophy. Its motto is: “Every month is Black History Month.”

Dodson also says that it’s problematic when teachers have their students focus on black history by solely studying Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X. “The teaching of black history in many schools has unfortunately turned into a litany of ‘great men, great women’ stories,” he says. “It’s important to understand that each and every one of us—ordinary people—has the power and capacity to change ourselves and our world.”

In Motion organizers hope to help teachers reach students in new ways. Says Dodson, “We want teachers to be able to incorporate a more profound and depth-filled understanding of the African-American experience into the context of the larger American experience.”

Resources:

• Connect for Kids’ Diversity Topics Pages
• Black History: Best Taught in February or All Year Long?
• The Schomburg Center

Rob Capriccioso is a staff writer for Connect for Kids.