You must leave this world a better place than it would have been if you had not existed.

That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. They didn't look back, and they often didn't tell their children about it. They didn't want to talk about it. It was too painful, what they'd gone through and the caste system of the South, which was Jim Crow.

At the beginning of the 20th century, before the migration began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the end of the Great Migration, nearly half of them were living outside the South in the great cities of the North and West. So when this migration began, you had a really small number of people who were living in the North and they were surviving as porters or domestics or preachers - some had risen to levels of professional jobs - but they were, in some ways, protected because they were so small.

Anything that could be conceived of that would separate black people from white people was devised and codified by someone in some state in the South. There were colored and white waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know.

It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.

What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most people of color can find someone in their own family who had experienced a migration of some kind, knowing the sense of dislocation, longing and fortitude.

America is made up of people who came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came over the Bering strait... America is what it is because people came from someplace else.