Slave Migration Essay

The History of Slave Migration

The typical African-American experience with migration is seen through my family’s migration experience. Their experience was typical, reflected in most freed slave’s stories. This story starts off with a freed slave; this was due to the Emancipation Proclamation. “During the Civil War in 1863, a huge step was made in the favor of enslaved African-Americans. The President at the time, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the southern states at war with the North. The Emancipation Proclamation was so important because it gave enslaved black people the chance to leave their owners, move north, and finds jobs or start new lives with their families.” (Boundless)

“The black migration

Most freed slaves were quick to escape their old lives of being slaves. The Urban north offered job opportunities, a fresh start, and endless possibilities. The journey began in the late 1800’s with a man named Tom. Tom was a slave and married Martha, the child of a plantation cook, and plantation owner. The late 1870’s, Tom and Martha were free. The first thing Tom wanted to do was find his siblings because they had all been split up from slavery. This was a really hard task, being that their last names had changed, also due to slavery. Based on Everett Lee’s theory of migration, my family should have motivations for their migration; push and pull factors. The push factors are the reasons why my family left their home land, in this case Mississippi. The pull factors are the reasons why my family wanted to go to the new land, in this case the urban North. Lee’s theory also includes the intervening obstacles of migration, this will be the struggles that Tom and Martha faced while going

For example a common pull factor could be well known jobs at other places, as well as just the simple fact that going somewhere that you were not enslaved in for years seems like a very attractive reason to leave. Another example of a major pull factor for some slaves would be if they were able to get into contact with their family in other states, and that was one pull factor; living with family and having them as a resource to help start over as a free person. This is referred to as sponsoring in terms of refugees, who were similar to that of freed slaves.

Refugees are a specific type of immigration group. As define in section, “a refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social