‘Great Migration’ changed nation’s history

Dear editor,

During the first World War, July 28, 1914, to Nov. 11, 1918, there was a silent pilgrimage that took its first steps within the borders of this country – America. The fever rose without warning that was not as much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach.

It would not end until the 1970s and would set its transition in the north and south that no one, not even the people leaving could have imagined at the start of it, dreamed it would take a lifetime to play out.

It was known as the Great Migration – the biggest, unreported story of the 20th Century. Their migration was a reaction and response to an economic and social structure not of their making. They did what humans have done for centuries when life becomes untenable.

It’s what the Pilgrims did under the tyranny of British rule, what the Scottish and Irish people did in Oklahoma, what the Irish did when there was nothing to eat and what the European Jews did during the spread of Nazism.

What binds these stories together was the “back against the wall,” reluctant yet hopeful search for something better – any place but where these people had lived. They did what human beings looking for freedoms throughout history have done – they left.

God bless America.

– Rhonda O’Hanley, Glenns Ferry