WASHINGTON – The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) celebrated its 93rd annual Black History Month luncheon by spotlighting the mass migrations of Black people and how those experiences have helped shape their identity and efforts to make progress.
Black Americans can not be understood apart from their experiences during voluntary and forced migrations over the centuries, speakers told more than 1,000 guests Saturday in a ballroom of the Washington Renaissance Hotel.
Black migrations are stories of “pain and unbridled hope” that “ultimately are about our striving, about our endurance, and about our perseverance in America,” said Dr. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, ASALH president and history department chair and Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
In a letter to event guests, Higginbotham noted that ASALH will stress at events throughout the rest of the year the impact of Black migration. Highlighting the 400th anniversary of Africans arriving in 1619 on slave ships to Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America, she said ASALH applauds Virginia congressman Bobby Scott’s introduction in the House of Representatives “The 400 Years of African American History Commission Act.”
During a panel discussion moderated by Dr. Jelani Cobb, the Ira R. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, speakers noted that Black Americans continually forged new identities with each major transfer of population, from the Great Migration from the agricultural south to the industrial north to a current reverse migration of sorts back to the south.
“Folks are constantly negotiating what it means to be African-American on the back end of these migrations,” said Dr. G. Derek Musgrove, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Events that have triggered forced or voluntary Black migration punctuate “400 years of perseverance” seeking economic progress, safety, and respect, yet “when we reinvent ourselves, laws change to undermine our progress,” said Dr. Gloria Browne-Marshall, professor of constitutional law at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
