Goin’ North: Stories from the Great Migration to Philadelphia (review)

Goin’ North is rich in every way. The website uses dozens of voices from oral history interviews among a variety of media to tell densely textured, in-depth stories of how the Great Migration played out in one Northeastern city. Equally important, it provides an exemplar of how twenty-first-century oral historians can use new tools from the digital humanities to breathe new life into legacy interview collections. The product of some truly innovative teaching and a collaboration among professors, students, librarians, and archivists from multiple universities and public history institutions, it was the deserving winner of the Oral History Association (OHA) 2015 Oral History in a Nonprint Format Award.

A hundred years ago, African Americans who were dissatisfied with life in the Jim Crow South began leaving the region in search of greater opportunities in the industrialized cities of the Northeast and Midwest. There were many push and pull factors behind this collective decision, but arguably the most significant was the availability of factory jobs in northern cities as the US ramped up military spending in preparation for its involvement in World War I. The migration continued even after the war ended, and over the next sixty-some years an estimated six to seven million men, women, and children made the journey north and/or west. It truly was “a turning point in history… [that] would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched,” as the journalist Isabel Wilkerson claimed in her best-selling book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration ([New York: Vintage, 2010], 9).

In the early 1980s Charles Hardy, a renowned oral historian, radio docu-mentarian, and history professor at West Chester University, began interviewing black Philadelphians who had either participated in the Great Migration to the city or had witnessed their arrival. He produced a terrific five-part public radio documentary, Goin’ North: Tales from the Great Migration, in 1985 and archived the interview recordings at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky. He returned to the subject in the 2010s. Working with his West Chester colleague Smucker and staff from the Nunn Center, including Doug Boyd, Hardy and his colleagues sought to “resurrect” the interviews using digital tools that had not been invented at the time of their recording. (See http://goinnorth.org/about.) Smucker and Hardy designed a new course for West Chester undergraduate and graduate students, Digital Storytelling and the Great Migration to Philadelphia. They cotaught the course for the first time in spring 2014 and offered it again in spring 2016; the website showcases the class projects.

Goin’ North is built on the Omeka web-publishing platform; this is free, open-source software created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University that has quickly become the default content management system for digital historians. (For more, see http://omeka.org.) Simple in its design and intuitive to use—take it from this reviewer: if he can work with it, anyone can—it is ideal for digital archiving and flexible enough to support any number of historical projects. The oral histories from the 1980s-era collection, which West Chester students indexed with the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS; for more on this system, see http://www.oral-historyonline.org/), are the centerpiece of the Goin’ North archive, but there are many more forms of media present and the site weaves them together elegantly. Working with Smucker and Hardy, students digitized newspaper articles from the archives of the Philadelphia Tribune, images and documents from local churches, historical societies, and the city government, and from repositories on the other end of the Great Migration. As of May 2016 the site team had uploaded 527 digitized items at the “Archive” section of the site.

The “Biographies” section of the website displays the ways that the site’s creators...