- [Narrator] In 1927, Ma Rainey,
the bombastic mother of blues,
and her band's rowdy live shows
were a hot ticket in Georgia.
Her provocative lyrics
became the soundtrack to black southern life
and the racist reality of the Jim Crow south.
Now here's a song you may already know.
Racial injustice decreed by law in the south
through separate drinking fountains,
colored washrooms,
segregated schools,
and senseless violence.
The tune to the north promised something different.
They called black people to seek refuge
and better opportunities in cities in the north and west.
This mass exodus would become known as the great migration
in which over six million African Americans
fled the south for cities,
like New York, Detroit, and Chicago,
between the years 1915 and 1970.
But it didn't deliver on the utopia it promise.
As black people, including Ma and her band,
left the south searching for freedom
and an identity of their own,
they found more struggle, more segregation, more inequality.
Through Ma's story,
let's take a deeper look
at the great migration's impact on American culture.
In Wilson's play,
Ma Rainey may seem larger than life,
but she was very much a real person.
She was born Gertrude Pridgett in Columbus, Georgia
on April 26th, 1886.
At least that's how Ma used to tell it.
Other accounts list her birthplace as Alabama in 1882.
Maybe Ma was just trying to seem younger
as one does,
or maybe we don't have a definitive answer
about her birthdate
because white authorities in America
were notoriously bad at tracking black births.
The region Ma was born into
was no place for anyone black, let alone a child.
Even after the Civil War and the emancipation proclamation,
whites in the south created a cast system
that thrived on injustice,
severe wage inequality,
and mob violence
that was slightly more humane than slavery.
So still, completely inhumane.
Living in the south AKA The Black Belt of America,
where 90% of African Americans called home,
was becoming increasingly unsustainable and deadly.
For seven decades,
a black person was lynched
more than once a week in the south
with few repercussions.
By 1915, black Americans, thinkers, artists, activists,
became refugees seeking asylum
from racial terror in their own country
and started leaving the south in droves.
With the encouragement of the Chicago Defender,
the era's leading African American newspaper.
Through persuasive headlines,
the paper pushed the north
as a real opportunity for blacks to live in freedom.
The paper regularly ran features
exposing anti-black violence in the south,
side by side with job postings in Chicago.
More work, less lynching,
was a pretty convincing sales pitch.
Thanks to Defenders PR campaign
and high demand for factory workers in the north
due to World War I,
southern blacks left en mass.
But, they were still a critical pillar
for white southern economies,
because black people
were significantly and systemically underpaid.
Black teachers for instance might make $27 a month
to a white teacher's $100,
for five times the students.
So, white people tried anything and everything
to stop their cheap labor from fleeing,
starting with an exorbitant tax
on anyone trying to recruit black workers,
usually it was white labor agents
sent by northern businessmen.
They also went after the migrants themselves
who travel by boat, bus, and primarily by train.
As black people sought opportunity
in the face of oppression,
white people literally tried to derail the great migration.
The first part of their plan was simple,
restrict space on trains.
It was done by mandating that all African Americans
travel in one designated car,
the Jim Crow car.
Second, there was further humiliation,
separate waiting rooms and washrooms
at bus and train stations.
And as always,
black people had to deal with intimidation
by a law enforcement.
Goons would post up at ticket counters
to try to block access to booths
and they arrested blacks on made up grounds,
like vagrancy or for simply buying a ticket.
There's a scene in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
where band member Cutler
tells a story about a reverend
trying to make his way from Tallahassee to Atlanta.
His band mate Levy interrupts
to rattle off the train's schedule by heart.
- Aint but one train,
aint but one train that come out of Tallahassee
here to north to Atlanta,
it don't stop at cigsby,
that only train that stop at cigsby is the Santa Fe,
you got to transfer at Motre to get it.
- [Narrator] No spoilers,
but their story proves that racism
was waiting for black southerners
no matter what stop they got off at.
Still, for many,
those trains were their only hope for a better life.
Is it any wonder that so many turned to the blues?
Despite the hurdles,
Ma Rainey made the journey north.
She did it for that fateful recording session in Chicago,
the play is based on.
And she also spent most of her adult life in Chia Town.
Ma was revolutionary,
because she brought a new sound to the north
during the great migration.
She was the first artist to combine vaudeville
with an authentic black southern aesthetic.
Therefore, in many ways, Ma was the northern dream realized.
Her blunt between songs banter during shows
and her southern folk style storytelling
were a hit with black and white audiences.
She was a black woman who managed to cross over
without sacrificing her blackness
or her sexuality.
She was proudly queer,
writing explicitly about her attraction to women.
The characters in her songs were feminists,
vengeful and powerful.
Traits southern women possessed of course,
but they weren't able to express.
So, the fact that Ma was doing it and making money,
was downright heroic.
Between 1923 and 1928,
the height of the first wave of the migration,
songs that were for and by black people
were called, race records,
and they were big business.
As Ma gained mass appeal,
record labels in the north were clambering
for more black music like hers from the south.
Ma Rainey's mentee, rival, and rumored lover,
Bessie Smith, empress of the blues,
was also an import of the great migration.
She was born in Tennessee but moved to Philadelphia.
While she would eventually surpass Ma in popularity,
it's believed that Bessie
wouldn't have sounded the way she did
without Ma's influence.
The great migration spawned
an unprecedented artistic movement in the black community,
all centered in the migrate settlement of Harlem.
This is the Harlem Renaissance.
Artists like Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington,
Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay,
birthed a new black identity of the north
by centering African American culture in their work.
They reclaimed and redefined
what it meant to be black in America
through their art.
Their lure of the north stayed strong,
sparking a second wave of the migration
that lasted from World War II until the 1970's.
By the 70's,
five million more black people would make the journey,
officially making it
the largest migration in American history.
But cracks developed
in the glittering facade,
the hope of the great migration.
There was the dismal economy
left over from the great depression
but more alarming
were the signs of segregation and degradation
that were supposed to have been left in the south.
The challenges blacks would face in the north,
racism, subjugation,
manifested in which jobs they could get
and where they could live.
For example, in the 1940's,
half of Chicago was off limits to African Americans.
They were pushed into segregated areas
like the south side of Chicago
and also Harlem in New York,
where they still weren't able to buy property
because of a racist practice known as redlining.
Neighborhoods that were predominantly black
were flagged as hazardous,
and loans for the area were essentially nonexistent.
The great migration is responsible
for the emergence of black ghettos in northern cities.
And the effect of the oppression these communities faced,
they're still being felt today.
Just look at this map
outlining upward mobility of blacks in America.
Places with the highest numbers of black people
are still struggling to catch up to a system
that was rigged against them.
The lasting negative impacts of the great migration
can't be understated,
but the emergence of these ghetto communities
alongside the continued
violent discrimination against black Americans,
also gave way to something else;
an iconic uprising.
In the 1960's,
the Civil Rights Movement carved out a new black identity
and pushed against the country's white supremacist systems.
During the movement, a bold and defiant black voice emerged,
inspired by the artist of the Harlem Renaissance,
who are embolden by the examples set by Ma Rainey.
Many poets of that era cite her as an inspiration.
And later in the 90's,
while black suburban prosperity
seemed to suggest the promise
of the great migration realized,
many of the migrant settled areas
roiled in riots and resistance.
Newark, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minnesota,
every major American city
has a riot that defined a generation.
And at every one,
black people who tried
to leave brutality behind in the south,
plead for their humanity in the form of protest.
Over the past decade,
many black Americans have chosen to return
to the south their grandparents fled
in search of another promise land.
This reverse migration
is sometimes referred to as, black flight.
Think of it as a reclamation.
Now, more than half of black Americans
who live in metropolitan areas,
call the suburbs home.
In Chicago, over 200,000 African Americans
left the city in the last two decades.
Again, a new group of idealistic,
black artists, thinkers, dreamers,
are packing their bags
in hopes of a better future.
Black Americans continue to hope in spite of hate,
celebrate joy in the face of pain,
and live in a country that refuses to love them back.
That's a song America can't stop singing.