INTRODUCTION

The Great Migration was a period in American history when approximately six million African Americans fled the racial discrimination, violence, and lack of opportunities in the South for a better life in the North, West, and Midwest. Between 1910 and 1970, the era also known as the Great Black Exodus drove African Americans to industrial cities such as Cleveland, New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago, where better wages were offered and the American Dream was somewhat attainable.

The Great Migration was the conduit that spread Southern African American cultural traditions across the country, influencing American food, art, music, and literature. Despite its impact on American history and culture, there is no museum dedicated to the Great Migration. Furthermore, little to no research has focused on the journeys and experiences of Black travelers. Instead, scholars of the Great Migration have focused their attention on the migrants’s points of departure and arrival.

GREAT MIGRATION MUSEUM

The Great Migration Museum will focus on the journeys and experiences of Black travelers—everyday Black travelers like my grandmother Ruby Mae Rollins, who packed up my mother and aunt, then 6 and 10, and left her family’s home in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to stay with relatives in Harlem, New York, who had migrated to the city just decades earlier. My grandmother migrated by Greyhound bus during the era of Jim Crow segregation. When I was a child, my grandmother would share stories with me about having to sit in the back of buses and packing shoebox lunches.

RESTORATION & PRESERVATION

As a PhD in preservation in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, my research focuses on the spaces that represent the journeys and experiences of Black travelers. In 2024, I purchased a 1947 Greyhound bus similar to the model that my grandmother rode on during her migration. As my dissertation project, I am restoring the bus which was converted into a recreational vehicle in the 1970s. Once completed, the bus will become the only museum dedicated to the Great Migration and the journeys and experiences of Black travelers through restoration, preservation, research, oral histories, archival documents, and technology.

TECHNOLOGY

One of the features of the Great Migration Museum bus will be a mixed reality experience where:

1. Users will step onto the bus wearing a pair of mixed reality goggles. They will then assume the role of an actual African American traveler who traveled or migrated by bus during this time. (Profiles will be based on actual people from the community and archival research.)

2. Users can look down and see the hands and clothes of the person they are portraying. They can also look into the rearview mirror and see that person’s face.

3. The user will begin to walk down the aisle where they will be asked if they want to sit in the front or back of the bus. The actual bus will be empty, but the user will see passengers seated throughout the segregated bus through the goggles.

4. If the user chooses to sit in the front of the bus, white passengers will stare at them, and the bus driver will get up and ask them to move to the back of the bus. If the user refuses to move, the bus driver will get off the bus and call the police. The user will hear whispers and the sound of approaching police sirens. The driver will board the bus with a police officer who will ask the user to get off the bus. If the user still refuses, the police officers will start shouting and threatening them. The user will then be prompted to get off the bus and watch the person they are portraying get arrested and taken to jail. Here is where the user becomes the viewer and bystander to the decision that they made.

5. If the user chooses to sit in the back of the bus, in the “colored section,” they will have to walk to the back of the bus and face the angry stares and shouting. Once the user is seated, the bus will appear to move through the goggles. The actual bus won’t move, but the user will feel like the bus is moving using visuals, sound, smell, and vibrations to represent the diesel engine of the bus.

FOOD

Once operable, the Great Migration Museum bus will partner with a local restaurant and provide shoebox lunches in various locations throughout Cleveland and other major Great Migration destination cities.

CONCLUSION

Whether it was by bus, car, train, ship, or plane, we are all products of migration, so let’s tell our story together.