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How My Grandmother Changed the Course of History
A Great Migration Story
My grandmother moved North, so she didn’t have to keep working on the farm. She journeyed first to Philadelphia to live with a cousin, then to Maryland, where she worked for the State of Maryland for 36 years. Technically, Maryland is still the South, so, in one way, she did not get as far away from the South as she wanted. But, she did journey far enough away that she could have greater choices for her family.
She worked at an institution initially used as a state-run hospital for “colored people” with tuberculosis, then later converted into a facility for adults with mental disabilities. Then, during the tumult of the Reagan years, it and other such institutions closed due to funding changes.
Since I read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, I have added context to my understanding of my grandmother’s life and place in the Great Migration. For example, when Wilkerson points out that ninety percent of African Americans were still farmworkers or domestic workers in the 1940s, I can feel how anxious she must have been to leave the farm more acutely. Still, I can also imagine that it was a scary time.
Her older brother and sister got married and set up farms close to where their parents lived, but she was going to travel hundreds of miles away from familiar…
