As I reflect on my work this summer, I stand amazed by how much is required to feel a finished project pull through. When I first started, I expected to create a complete archive of the aspects of the Great Migration that would make a holistic understanding of the period’s impact, reach, and legacies. However, my project could not be accomplished over eight weeks because of the expansive impact and irreplaceable legacy. So far, I have created an intense archive of Blues Artists and their reach/ impact within the 1900s following their birthplace, the residential area where they performed/ made a name for themselves, and their death place. Most of the artists, following the migration patterns of the Great Migration, took their music along the “Jim Crow Cars,” as Isabel Wilkerson would say. I reflect on the skills I learned using ArcGIS story mapping to create this new archive of work. To digitally map data is to bring these amazing artists’ stories to life. The story maps should spill out the pure essence of these artists’ reach and influence. However, their impact is erased by their predecessors that took similar sounds into the music industry mainstream.

I am recognizing that there is so much work to be done on this project as I plan to continue the work throughout this upcoming year at Iowa. With the help of the Studio and its amazing staff, I will continue to add new layers to this map. One storymap layer will include documenting the greater Iowa area by visiting the African American Museum in Cedar Rapids and conducting oral interviews with families to hear their migration stories. I plan to create a historic and intimate archive with these oral histories incorporated into the digital map. Another essential piece of the Great Migration is the Negro Motorist Greenbook which was another archival piece that provided information for families leaving the south and traveling to the North, North-East, Mid-West, and West sides of the country. The Book included safe towns, restaurants, and hotels to stop by and had an ever-growing list of “sundown towns” that were dangerous for African American families to visit after dark. Finally, I will be developing original pieces of poetry that map and connect a poetic story called lost pages of Green Book. This small poetry collection will follow a family as they travel through the Mid-West for safety after leaving the South to escape the harsh reality of Jim Crow laws. Thank you, Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, for working with me this summer to develop my project.

This summer, I am focusing on creating an archive of a movement that has shaped the latter half of the 20th century into the 21st when it comes to contemporary regional culture’s music, culture, and landscape. The Great Migration was a period of great peril and risks for African American families in the South. Living in a Post-reconstruction Jim Crow South, many families found means to migrate to the West Coast, East Coast, Northeast, and Midwest regions of America, where those perils were less violent but still present. Documenting this critical period has been of great interest as I reflect on my family history and how vital migration is in developing African American populations in what would soon be called Black Metropolises in the mid-1900s. The importance of such documentation and personal history builds on this collective story of intimate Black life and its relationship with the collective Black experience as diverse and distinct. Regionally, African Americans from Chicago are ultimately from various states in the South if you travel back a couple of generations. However, a collective of Chicagoan culture developed through the combination of multiple customs, values, and music from the South to form a regional base that is ingrained into the city’s roots. I want to explore these trends, so I decided to start with music.

Music is essential to my life as an artist and music lover. My research started with documenting the Blues as an African American genre rooted in the deep South and traveled northern through Mississippi into Tennessee, St. Louis, and Chicago. The blues tradition goes hand in hand with the Great Migration as its early indications of the movement. Important Blues stars like BB King, Muddy Waters, and Albert King shared roots in the Mississippi Delta Blues but branched out to their respective regions to create a distinct version of Blues that spoke with that region. My research starts with the Blues because of the Genre’s brutal honesty as it examines African American life at its most vulnerable state at one of its most vulnerable times. So far, my data has tracked the artists’ birthplace, discovery region, and death place.
Despite their commitment to the blues tradition, their trajectory and way of life left these artists in poverty or Los Angeles to record their biggest hits. This layer of my Arc GIS map will tell the story of the Great Migration’s Music: an archive lost in its novelty.