Most of the following questions begin with a short thematic introduction, and all include at least one image. Please note that some questions ask you to read a primary or secondary text that is not included in your anthology.
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| The Depression brought hardship to all agricultural workers in the South and led many to leave the region. This migration coincided with the on-going exodus of African Americans fleeing the entrenchment of segregation, which the Supreme Court declared constitutional in Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896). But if black southerners were "pushed" from the South by a climate of racial oppression since the Reconstruction era, they were also "pulled" to the North by industrial expansion and the eagerness of employers to recruit and hire black workers. The photograph above illustrates these details of the Great Migration: the men, women, and children have loaded their belongings onto a single car and are headed for what they hope will be a better future. |
| 1. As a consequence of these patterns of migration, many of the cultural expressions of African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s feature themes of mobility and loss. Read the blues lyrics collected in the anthology and write about one or two lyrics that use these themes. If possible, try to infer from the rest of the song's lyrics the cause of the singer's absence from friends, family, a lover, or home. |
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| 2. Choose another text from the period 1900–1945 in which the themes of blues lyrics appear. Write about what causes "the blues" in this text and how the text's writer, narrator, or primary character "navigates" the blues toward the new life that migration always promises. |
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