Advance ticket sales have ended but plenty of additional tickets remain available at the door.
Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Charting the Great Migration,” a look at how the movement of millions north remade our nation, with Marvin Overby, professor of political science and director of Penn State’s School of Public Affairs.
Between 1910 and the 1960s some 20 million Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North. It was one of the most momentous internal migrations in human history, with immense implications for our nation’s politics, economy, and future.
Gain a much richer understanding of the Great Migration’s causes, contours, and consequences with Professor Marvin Overby, a noted scholar of American politics and minority representation who has wowed Profs and Pints audiences in Washington D.C.
Professor Overby will start by discussing the “Magnolia Curtain” that had limited north-south migration in the United States up until the early 1900s. You’ll learn about the various developments that caused this curtain to be lifted, which included the disruption of European immigration by World War I, New Deal economic and agricultural policies, and mass mobilization in World War II.
Professor Overby will examine the various waves of the exodus from the South to the North. He’ll focus mainly on African Americans but also will discuss White migration north and west.
In examining the immense political consequences of the Great Migration, he’ll discuss how the political mobilization of African Americans became more realistic when they moved from the diffuse rural South, where they had been disfranchised, to the concentrated urban North, where they could vote. Among its other impacts, the Great Migration gave Northern politicians reasons to care about conditions in the South, made historically Republican states more competitive for Democrats, and laid the foundation for the Civil Rights movement.
In learning about this vital, if often overlooked, chapter in American history, you’ll come to see how the Great Migration truly did result in a “more perfect Union.” You might even gain some insights into your own family’s history. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: The Arthur family arrives at Chicago's Polk Street Depot in 1920, two months after two sons were lynched in Paris, Texas. (Chicago Defender photo / Chicago History Museum.)