Goin' to Chicago

Personal Stories of the Great African American Migration

Part of the Series: California Newsreel Essential Collection

The migration of African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North and West during and after World War II is retold through personal stories of a group of Chicagoans born in the Mississippi Delta. They share their bitter recollections of sharecropping - owing half of each crop to the landowner, each beginning back-breaking labor in the fields at ten. A steelworker, newspaper editor, blues musician and others movingly recall their journeys up Hwy. 61 to Chicago in search of comparatively well-paying factory jobs.

GOIN' TO CHICAGO chronicles one of the most momentous yet least heralded sagas of American history - the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North and West after World War II. Four million black people created a dynamic urban culture outside the South, changing America forever.