TOPIC 7.6 HOmefront
Great Migration Case Study: Fighting Jim Crow in Grand Rapids, MI
Oliver Green & the Black community of Grand Rapids worked with the NAACP to win a major victory over Jim Crow in 1927
KC-7.2.II.C: In the Great Migration…African Americans escaping the South moved to the North and West, where they found new opportunities but still encountered discrimination.
Objective:
1. Students will analyze the extent that Black citizens’ lives improved after migrating to Grand Rapids
2. Students will compare different responses to Jim Crow from the Black community of Grand Rapids
These key concepts in an Antiracist classroom:
“This small community’s collective agency reflected the determination of African Americans nationwide to be free from the corrosive effects of racial segregation.” - Historian Dr. Randal Jelks
Jim Crow was not a problem regulated to the Southern States. High School students are familiar with the story of Rosa Parks and the NAACP’s fight to end segregation in the South but are often unaware of the fact that decades before Rosa Parks’ activism, the NAACP had employed these same tactics to fight anti-Black racism in the North. It is impossible to understand modern America without proper study of the challenges and discrimination faced by participants of the Great Migration. Students should also learn the patterns of resilience and resistance that emerged in Black communities throughout the North following the transition.
Notes
This lesson was created in partnership with the Grand Rapids Public Museum and their Archives. The museum offered the use of its Collections to create this engaging lesson. Students will take a “virtual tour” of Grand Rapids by following a map linked to artifacts and newspaper stories from the museum’s collection. This lesson shifts back and forth between teacher-led whole-class instruction and student independent work. Students will use Grand Rapids as a case study of the experiences of the first migrants out of the South by contextualizing the period right after the Civil War as the Freedman’s Bureau brought Black laborers to work in the city for the first time. Students will then follow the migration patterns of participants of the Great Migration and learn the strategy employed by the local Black community in conjunction with the NAACP to press the Michigan Supreme Court into action in the late 1920s. This strategy was remarkably similar to tactics used throughout the South decades later.