Isabel Wilkerson Quotes
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It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.
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Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It's that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.
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The Great Migration had such an effect on almost every aspect of our lives - from the music that we listen to to the politics of our country to the ways the cities even look and feel.
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The suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where African-Americans could live in the North still exist today. And ... the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration.
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America is made up of people who came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came over the Bering strait... America is what it is because people came from someplace else.
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My parents absolutely did not think of themselves as part of the Great Migration. They knew they were part of a great wave. No one really talked about it in those terms or gave it a name.
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People leave when life becomes untenable where they are.
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That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. They didn't look back, and they often didn't tell their children about it. They didn't want to talk about it. It was too painful, what they'd gone through and the caste system of the South, which was Jim Crow.
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Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't want to talk about it because there had been pain and heartbreak under the caste system of the South. They didn't want to burden their children with what they had endured.
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You must leave this world a better place than it would have been if you had not existed.