Friday, February 18, 2005

African-American Migration Experience Project

In early February, I was reading through the Yahoo News Most Popular articles when one caught my eye. It was an article about the In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience project sponsored by Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. When I was at UCSC in college, I got accepted to a summer honors research program at University of Delaware. The article happened to be one of the areas of expertise of one of the two professors who sponsored and ran the program, Dr. Carole Marks. I checked out the contributors page and saw her name. Plus both sides of my family were part of the Southern migration from Georgia to industrial Cleveland in the early 1900s.


African American Great Migration

The Great Migration, 1916 to 1930

So I got in touch with her to say hello. She pointed me to the University of Delaware's a wonderful African American art Paul R. Jones collection. In addition to sociology, she teaches courses in art and the African American experience as well as other courses.

Carole got me in touch with the other professor who organized the honors program, Dr. Margaret L. Andersen, also known as Maggie. Both of them have been working on the Jone project. Separately, Maggie has been very productive writing books, etc. The cool thing is that she collaborated with professors who were guest speakers during our program.

Check out their books on Amazon: