Reverse Migration Story
Train traveling through the woods.
For generations, my family boarded this train from South Carolina, one family member at a time, heading north, seeking a better life - for them, it was the promised land, New York City, New York. My Nana was the first to make that journey after finishing college. She found a job, an apartment in Harlem, and made room for those to follow her – one by one over the next two decades.
This train became an important part of their freedom journey on their migration out of the oppressive South. My generation was the first to benefit from some (not all) of the freedoms our parents and grandparents couldn't experience growing up in the South.
My siblings, cousins, and I loved boarding the train in D.C., where my parents later settled, traveling all by ourselves to see our grandmother and other relatives in the big city. We each toted our small boxes with chicken and snacks for the 4-hour journey. Each time we could hardly wait to see our Nana waiting faithfully for our train to arrive at the station that felt like a big city all by itself.
Then at 18, I boarded that same train, this time headed south – now a part of the reverse migration to a New South.
I was one of the first from my family who went south in the 1960s to attend college and ended up reestablishing deep family roots in a place I knew so little about and had feared until now.
As I boarded the train, I was both filled with excitement and apprehension at the same time about taking this trip all by myself. Everything I'd ever heard about life in the South for Black folks was scary and dark. But we had always traveled on these rails alone. I had a window seat on that train on this journey and prayed I wouldn't see any strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees or hooded images flashing through the thick woodland along the miles of clicking steel tracks. Jim Crow hadn't died yet.
Somehow, I knew this journey would be life-changing for me, and it was. In the belly of that swiftly moving and swaying train was my life—a big trunk filled with my favorite books, albums, bed linen, diaries, and as many clothes as my trunk could hold, headed to a foreign land where my family's lives began.
It was a blessing that the rhythmic motion of this night train rocked me gently, and I was able to sleep in the quiet of those around me, anticipating the end of their own journeys. I woke in the early morn, excited about pulling into what I envisioned as a quaint southern town with moss dripping from trees all around and land as far as I could see.
Much to my shock and amazement, when we arrived, I was in a city! A really big city! A distant relative who lived in Atlanta welcomed me to this unexpected new South, and I immediately fell in love with this city! As we rode through this wonderful city to my new campus, Clark College, I landed in a world I could never have imagined. I had lived all my life in a little town that was five miles long and three miles wide.
Clark was surrounded by four other historic colleges – Morehouse, Spelman, Atlanta University, and Morris Brown. This was just magical! I had been dropped in the land of Oz, it seemed. It was all so colorful, musical, uplifting, historical, and so much more. At times, it felt like a dream. Being in this place changed my whole life's trajectory. I made lifelong friends who changed my entire outlook on life. Just one train ride south took me to a world I first feared, but this became the beginning of over a 50-year love affair, and that was just the beginning of my story.
