Trains
Trains represent the Great Migration itself, the human quest for freedom, and migration’s power to reshape society. Like most Black migrants in the 20th century, two of Wilkerson’s protagonists—Ida Mae Gladney and George Starling…
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Photographs
Photographs—and particularly Wilkerson’s old photo of her mother—represent history’s power to enrich the present. When they reach the North, Wilkerson explains, migrants generally have their photos taken. It’s like a routine of welcoming…
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Cotton
For Ida Mae Gladney, cotton transforms from a sign of poverty, Jim Crow, and repression into a symbol of freedom and her own identity. In her youth, she works as a sharecropper picking…
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