Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It's that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.

The suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where [African-Americans] could live in the North [still exist today.] And ... the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration.

My parents sent me to a school across town, an integrated school, where I had the chance to meet and grow up with people who were from other parts of the world. ... I remember feeling that I would never have anything to contribute on St. Patrick's Day. I couldn't tell the stories that they might have been telling about their forebears and I felt left out.

It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.

I mean my mother migrated from Georgia -Rome, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., where she then met my father, who was a Tuskegee Airman who was from Southern Virginia. They migrated to Washington and I wouldn't even exist if it were not for that migration. And I brought her back to Georgia, both my parents, actually.

[The Great Migration] had such an effect on almost every aspect of our lives - from the music that we listen to to the politics of our country to the ways the cities even look and feel.

And in some ways, to me, that's one of the inspiring and powerful things about the Great Migration itself. There was no leader, there was no one person who set the date who said, 'On this date, people will leave the South.' They left on their own accord for as many reasons as there are people who left. They made a choice that they were not going to live under the system into which they were born anymore and in some ways, it was the first step that the nation's servant class ever took without asking.