FOLLOWING THE GREAT MIGRATION, AND A MONTH'S CHICAGO CULTURAL ROUNDUP
“Whether this music came from Alabama or Mississippi or other parts of the South doesn’t matter anymore. The men and women who make this music have learned it from the narrow crooked streets of East St. Louis, or the streets of [Chicago]’s Southside, and the Alabama or Mississippi roots have been strangled by the northern manners and customs of free men of definite and sincere worth, men for whom this music often lies at the forefront of their conscience and concerns. Thus they are laid open to be consumed by it; its warmth and redress, its braggadocio and roughly poignant comments, its vision and prayer, which would instruct and allow them to reconnect, to reassemble and gird up for the next battle in which they would be both victim and the ten thousand slain.” – August Wilson, introduction, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom , page xv-xvi Two shows have opened in the last month in Chicago about the impact of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to North in the 20 th ...