The Great Migration, when approximately 6 million black Southerners left the agrarian South for the industrial North and Midwest between 1910 and 1970, was complicated, and is not always a morally satisfying narrative. Karida L. Brown’s oral history of the black community in Harlan County, Kentucky, complicates the familiar narrative of South-to-North movement with an unusual visit to the history of black Appalachia. “The historic catastrophe of slavery made us [African Americans] homeless,” Brown writes, illustrating “what an elusive concept ‘home’ is to black people” (5). Even after Emancipation, “black people’s relationship to home has been one of continual dislocation and displacement” (5–6). Using one hundred forty or so interview subjects, Brown sketches an image of what poet Frank X. Walker has called AFFRILACHIA that will be a revelation to readers unaware of the region’s history.
In the old debate over whether the migration from the Deep South was motivated...
