Overview
Hear how the Great Migration – the mid-twentieth-century movement of hundreds of thousands of Black families from the rural South to the urban North – transformed Newark, in the words of those who made the journey themselves, and those who welcomed the new arrivals.
Dr. Katie Singer will present a talk on “Newark’s Great Migration: Stories from the Krueger-Scott African American Oral History Collection” at the Newark Public Library’s James Brown African American Room on April 8 at 6 PM.
Dr. Singer’s research is based on scores of recordings of Newark residents — mayors, ministers and regular, everyday people —who experienced the impact of the migration on our city. The recordings were made in the 1990s to serve as an exhibit at a Newark museum of African American history that was planned but ultimately never built. The recordings were then stored on cassette tapes at the Newark Public Library for decades until a cohort of Rutgers University – Newark graduate students including Dr. Singer unearthed, transcribed and digitized them.
Among those whose voices are included in the collection are the late Newark Council president Mildred Crump, former Newark Mayor Sharpe James, and Dr. Zachary Yamba, former President of Essex County College.
Dr. Singer’s talk is based on her new book, “Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark” (Rutgers University Press, 2024), a history of Newark’s evolution based on the stories told in the oral history collection.
