I recently revisited Isabel Wilkerson’s epic The Warmth of Other Suns and, if you haven’t basked in this brilliance, please do. Others have said it better than I can. Toni Morrison called the book “profound, necessary, and a delight to read”; Tom Brokaw praised it as “an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation”; The New York Times Book Review” proclaimed a massive and masterly account”; The New Yorker, “a deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book.”

Black Wide-Awake is largely about people who cast down their buckets where they were, but also shines light on those whose paths carried them away from Wilson County. I can say with confidence that nobody I knew growing up did not have relatives in Harlem or Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx. Every summer, our little pack swelled with migrants’ grandchildren sent down South and inevitably one of our own went North for two weeks and came back “talking proper.” (Disclosure: I spent two years living in New York. I was in graduate school at Columbia and lived on West 121st Street in Morningside Heights. From the park at the end of my street, I could look out over the expanse of pre-gentrified Harlem, and 125th Street served up any Southernness I was homesick for.)

A definitive listing of these many thousands of migrants is impossible, but a try seems well worth it. In a slight expansion of the general timeline of the blog, these running lists will focus on documented migration prior to 1960. Arguably, New York was the lodestar for North Carolinians during the Great Migration, and I’ll start there.

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• Lynch, Noah, New York City, betw. 1860 and 1863
• Diggs, Charles, Brooklyn, ca. 1870
• Dawson, M. Hadley, New York City, bef. 1909
• Moore, Ernest A., New York City, 1910s
• Barnes, Frank, New York City, prob. 1910-1917
• Whitehead, Jesse, and Rosa (or Rhoda) Pender Whitehead, Niagara Falls, ca. 1918
• Vincent, Cora Exum, New York City, ca. 1920 
• Barnes, John, and Martha Bynum Barnes, New York City, bef. 1921
• Barnes, Madie Taylor, and children Dorothy, Rachel, Vera and Virginia Ray, New York City, ca. 1923-1929
• Smith, Mattie Taylor, New York City, prob. 1923-1929
• Shade, John A., and Ruby Purcell Shade, Brooklyn, ca. 1923
• Bowser, Astor B., White Plains, ca. 1924 (later Chicago, Ill., and Minneapolis, Minn.)
• Burke, Georgia A., New York City, 1928
• Dasher, Harvey C., New York City, bef. 1930
• Jones, Horace S., New York City, bef. 1930
• Barnes, Charles, New York City, 1930s
• Darden, Olive Blanks and son Charles A., Bronx, 1930s
• Bryant, Joseph, and Beatrice Bryant Bryant, Brooklyn, 1930s
• Ward, Alfonza, Brooklyn, 1930s
• Cotton, Andrew, New York City, bef. 1936
• Pearine, Julia A. Teachey, New York City, bef. 1937
• Rollins, Harriet Mercer, New York City, ca. 1938 (in Philadelphia, Penn., prior)
• Maryland, Florence Williams, Bronx, bef. 1940
• Carroll, Bertha Bryant Hawkins, New York City, bef. 1940 (returned to Wilson)
• Battle, Grace J., and Parker R. Battle (siblings), New Rochelle, ca. 1940
• Edwards, Charles, Brooklyn, bef. 1940
• Valle, Elba Vick, New York City, bef. 1940
• Ennis, Earl E., and Hennie Ennis Campbell, siblings, New York City, 1940s
• Crittenden, Mildred Jones, Lucille Jones Peterson, Vernon Jones, Willia Jones Turner, James T. Jones, and Elroy Jones, siblings, Queens, 1940s-50s
• Frazier, Raye Jones, Brooklyn