How Chicago Became a Cultural Beacon of the Great Migration

“… If there was one city in particular that symbolized the promised land for Black migrants, it was Chicago, Illinois,” narrates Henry Louis Gates, Jr, in his new documentary series, Great Migrations: A People on the Move.

In the four-episode program, Gates, a respected filmmaker, historian, and educator, explores the impacts of these mass migrations, with a particular focus on the period from the 1910s to the 1970s.

And as the docuseries demonstrates, the impact of this widespread migration of African American people from the South to the North continues to shape the cultural landscape of the city — and country — to this day.

Davarian L. Baldwin, the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Trinity University, traces this Chicago influence in an onscreen interview. “Jazz, blues, gospel music, independent Black filmmaking… a lot of the things we associate with 20th-century Black life got their start in places like Chicago.” 

Think about some of the 20th century’s great Black artists — writers like Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, classical musicians and composers like Margaret Bonds and Florence Price, jazz icons like King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Ramsey Lewis, gospel artists like Mahalia Jackson, and so many more. Whether their time in Chicago was short or spanned their entire life, each individual played a vital role in their field. And each artist was a migrant, or the child of a migrant, who chose to settle in Chicago.

These pivotal artistic and cultural movements, argues Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin, are as much a product of the confluence of artists and thinkers into one place as the transformative experience of migration.

Griffin, the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University, is among those who lent their voice and expertise to the docuseries, which is presented in installments this month on WFMT’s sister station, WTTW.

An accomplished researcher on the topics of literature and African American and African Diaspora Studies, Griffin has also written extensively about 20th century music, with a biography of Billie Holiday and a book detailing the “Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever,” between Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

To learn more about Chicago’s unique position in the Great Migrations, WFMT spoke with Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin via Zoom.

Rooted in the Blues

Musical traditions are a central part of telling the stories of the Great Migrations. Music, Professor Griffin explains, “accompanies work, it accompanies worship, all of it.” Add to the mix the melding of different musical forms — both European and Native American — in the United States.

“I think that for African Americans in particular, music is the primary expressive form. I think it’s part of an African culture that places primary focus on musical forms. And then when other forms are shut off to them, particularly around literacy, they imbue music with a great deal of meaning.”

But Griffin identifies one particular genre as the standard bearer: the Blues. 

The Blues is a first-person art form, “it welcomes the autobiographical. It’s also a kind of everyman. It’s the ‘I’ as everyone. The person who’s singing is expressing all of the listeners’ stories.”

Itinerancy is a central theme in the Blues, Griffin explains to WFMT. “You have this image of the bluesman, who throws the guitar on his back. He becomes this legendary figure, moving from town to town.” 

Not only do the Blues present the experience of migration, but their spread reflects the human patterns of migration as practitioners from the South relocate… and bring the Blues with them. And Chicago was one of the biggest destinations of them all.

Chicago the Beacon

Chicago held a special appeal for migrants.

As an industrial and cultural metropolis, Chicago offered a wide range of career, life, social, and family prospects that just weren’t attainable elsewhere.

These draws were touted in the Chicago Defender, one of the most significant Black newspapers. Distributed around the country, the newspaper itself was the creation of Robert Abbott, who was born in Georgia and migrated to Chicago.

“Even if you just looked at the children’s page of the Defender,” author and journalist Ethan Michaeli explains in the series, “you could see that African American children in Chicago had a much richer, freer existence… than they did in the South.”

Word of mouth was also a powerful tool. 

“By the summer of 1918, a dozen of the real New Orleans jazz pioneers had gone to Chicago, and some of them had come back and told stories,” explains Ricky Riccardi, of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, in the series. “‘It’s a different world up there. They love our music and they respect us.’”

Speaking with WFMT, Professor Griffin adds, “It’s the same reason that Chicago created the Chicago Defender and Ebony Magazine. Migrants chose Chicago because they believed in the possibility of it.”

Art and Migration

“When you take everything away, it requires human beings to be their most creative. At the forefront is always music,” says Professor Griffin.

Florence Price, a classically trained musician, fits this description. Born in Arkansas, Price migrated to Chicago in 1927. Though she still faced discrimination because of her race and her gender, in Chicago, reflects Griffin, Price was able to explore genres in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before. And indeed, five years after arriving, Price became the first Black woman to have her music performed by a major orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

“The richness is in every form. Gospel, jazz, R&B, Blues. Everything that comes out of Chicago and is directly related to those people who made a decision to leave and the children who were born or grew up when they got there.” 

That same phenomenon is true for literature, she adds. Citing Wright’s Native Son as a paragon, Griffin reflects that “almost more than any other African American literature, the Black modernist literature that comes out of Chicago is a migrant literature.”

Making Something New

Chicago was a cultural crossroads, where different music and artforms could mingle, meld, and new ideas and inspirations arrived to town.

“You could just take that first generation of migrants. You think about what came out of it musically. There is no genre that is untouched,” explains Professor Griffin to WFMT. “Genres are born because of the migrants. Many of them are Blues-based.”

Chess Records, for instance, played a vital role in creating new traditions in the Blues and beyond. “We can hear the migration in the music. We can hear it in the sound. The tempo, the timbre, the fact that the Blues get electric when it gets urban.”

After all, Griffin explains, artists tend to have “big ears,” meaning they listen to music of many different forms. “A Mahalia Jackson, a Dinah Washington is hearing everything. They’re feeding it into something they want to produce and create.”

So living in a city with artists and thinkers from all over would introduce a broader palette.

“That’s happening in every genre. Think Minnie Riperton training to be an opera singer. And in the meantime she’s also singing backup somewhere.”

Another model of this musical melding is the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Established in Chicago in 1965, “those founders are migrants! That comes because they’re hearing the Blues but they’re also hearing classical music and experimenting with jazz. To me, they are the most Chicago of Chicago, they’re just blowing it wide open.”

That, Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin, perfectly encapsulates the enterprising spirit of the city. “We hear that in Chicago music. It’s bold, it’s experimental, and it has that sense of ‘We’re going to make something new.’”

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Great Migrations: A People on the Move is a four-part documentary series written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr and produced by Julia Marchesi and Nailah Ifeh Sims. For more information and upcoming airdates, visit wttw.com.

The interview with Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin and some quotes from the series have been edited for clarity.