Migratory Patterns

A JAH-appropriate review of In Motion: The African American Migration Experience. Created and maintained by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library:

The removal of a people is one of the central narratives of the African American experience. In many ways migration, both coerced and voluntary, is the African American experience. The makers of In Motion: The African American Migration Experience recognize this centrality and have devoted a website to its history. In Motion does double duty as an interpretive online exhibit and an encyclopedic archive. Combining chronological overviews with primary documents, archival images, interpretive maps, and recent scholarship, the site is of primary use to students and educators. But a cogent site design, diversity of content, and clean, fluid prose make In Motion a valuable resource for the unique visitor as well. Whether mining the rich material here or simply perusing its pages, visitors are provided a narrative of African American migratory patterns, from the transatlantic slave trade to recent immigration from modern African nations, and leave with an improved understanding of the African American diaspora.

With respect to scholarship, the site leaves most of its interpretative muscle to excerpts from published works and independent essays. Some of the sections suffer from a lack of fresh voices. A page devoted to Haitian immigration in the 20th century, for example, relies heavily on scholarship from the late 1970s and 1980s. To what extent this is a reflection of existing scholarship or in fact editorial oversight is beyond my expertise. Nonetheless, the site is a fantastic introduction to the principal themes and conflicts of African American migration and motivated users have an opportunity to delve deep into the primary and secondary material.

In Motion first came to my attention while an adjunct offering an introductory course on academic writing. A student had included the site in his list of sources for an essay discussing Toni Morrison’s Jazz. Much of our discussion that semester focused on making use of online content and how to best decipher what was appropriate and inappropriate for an academic assignment. In Motion easily represented the upper end of online content submitted for consideration that semester and was subsequently used as a model for students still struggling with the utility of Wikipedia and Microsoft Encarta. By marrying the organizational strategies of a traditional encyclopedia with a historically sophisticated archive of primary documents and visual media, In Motion has performed something of a bait and switch. Young users are familiar with its initial interface, but by the end of their session, they have explored by proxy archival research and the opportunities afforded beyond explanatory paragraphs and fragmentary bullet points. The site further offers an extensive collection of lesson plans and writing prompts for middle and high school educators.

The Schomburg Center has thus provided a content archive appropriate for 6th graders exploring Black History Month and young college users learning how to avoid the pitfalls of the “shallow web.” For their efforts, Schomburg Center and the New York Public Library deserves the attention of educators, scholars, and the open enrollment classroom that we now call the internet.