THE SCHOMBURG CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN BLACK CULTURE PRESENTS IN MOTION: THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN MIGRATION EXPERIENCE

New York, NY, February 1, 2005 -- The historic Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, is proud to ring in Black History Month with the launch of In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, an extraordinary interactive four-part project that celebrates the 35 million African-Americans who have been participants in or are heirs to the migrations that have shaped this country and the African Diaspora. Through this expansive project comprised of a web site, book, exhibition and Black History Month education kit, the general public is now granted once exclusive access to a wealth of resources that illustrates the diversity and complexity of the African-American community.

New societies, new peoples, new communities usually originate in acts of migration. Most societies in human history have a migration narrative in their stories of origin. All communities in American society trace their origins in the United States to one or more migration experiences. America, after all, is "a nation of immigrants."

But until recently, people of African descent have not been counted as part of America’s migratory tradition. The transatlantic slave trade has created an enduring image of black men and women as transported commodities, and is usually considered the most defining element in the construction of the African Diaspora, but it is centuries of additional movements that have given shape to the nation we know today. This is the story that has not been told.

The groundbreaking new web site, accessible at www.schomburgcenter.org, will for the first time make accessible to the international general public more than 16,500 pages of essays, books, articles, and manuscripts, 8,300 illustrations, 100 lesson plans, and 60 maps, previously held in brick and mortar libraries, that will help users understand the peoples, the places, and the events that have shaped African America’s migration traditions over the past four hundred years.

"Years ago, I made a commitment to insure that significant aspects of The New York Public Library’s vast collections are made available to the public free of charge on the internet. In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience begins to achieve that objective for the Schomburg Center," said Paul LeClerc, President and CEO of The New York Public Library.

In an historic move spearheaded by Congressman Charles Rangel with the unanimous support of the Congressional Black Caucus, the United States Congress appropriated $2.4 million for the creation of the digital archive documenting African-American migration. The grant was administered by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). "I am sure that my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus join me in celebrating the launch of this historic project. I would personally like to thank all of the members of the Caucus for their support of the legislation that provided funding for the African-American Migration Experience Project. This is a project that will serve all of our constituents and the nation as a whole," remarked Congressman Charles Rangel.

Other project components include the companion book, In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, released by National Geographic in January 2005; a Black History Month education kit comprised of illustrations and photographs, maps, lesson plans and a bibliography; and an exhibition in the Schomburg Center Exhibition Hall. Through images, artifacts, maps, narratives and music, this extraordinary exhibition, on display through April 30, will present, chronicle, and interpret the migratory movements that have formed and transformed the African-American community and the nation in the last century.

"In addition to the extraordinary content, we are so proud of what technology has enabled us to do, and see this project as a prototype for opening our collections to the world," said David Ferriero, Andrew W. Mellon Director and Chief Executive of The Research Libraries, The New York Public Library.

"In Motion offers a new interpretation of African-American history focusing on the self-motivated activities of people of African descent to remake themselves and their worlds," explained Howard Dodson, Director of The Schomburg Center and project curator. "The project documents the centrality of migration in the making of African-American history and culture and in the total American experience." Along these lines, the project categorizes the thirteen major migrations of the last four hundred years. The scope and depth of information compiled offers an opportunity for African-descended peoples to trace their own histories and that of other groups that form the African Diaspora, serves as a resource for discovering their common and not-so-common histories and exploring future possibilities, and also provides context for fashioning family histories.

The African-American migration experience revolves around three dominant migration patterns that span four centuries. The first concerns migration to the United States launched by the Atlantic slave trade that deported an estimated 12 million men, women and children -- about 450,000 arrived in North America -- and continued through the centuries with the voluntary migration of people from the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. The second pattern that profoundly shaped the cultural, social, and political life of this country is the migration of people of African descent within its own borders. The third trend is the out-migration of African Americans in search of freedom, or opportunities they thought they could not find in their own country. They were fugitives escaping to Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean; and free people settling in Haiti, Mexico, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. These movements, which transformed the black community and the nation, always overlapped. Then and now, the interaction between peoples of varied origins, cultures, languages, religions, and migratory experience has produced a unique population whose faces, music, food, institutions, styles, clothes, literature, crafts, and sense of identity all reflect the fertile diversity brought about by centuries of African American migrations.

The In Motion project breaks down the major movements of peoples of African descent into, out of and within the United States into the following migrations: The Transatlantic Slave Trade, Runaway Journeys, The Domestic Slave Trade, Colonization/Emigration, Haitian Immigration -- 18th and 19th Centuries, Western Migration, Northern Migration, The Great Migration, The Second Great Migration, Caribbean Immigration, Return South, Haitian Immigration—20th Century and African Immigration.

" The wide body of information underscores and explains the extraordinary diversity of the 35 million African Americans living in the US today," said Schomburg researcher Sylviane Diouf. "This is an invitation to every person of African descent in the US to revisit their and their families’ migration histories to determine their roles in the making of African-American and American history."

Speaking for the millions of African-Americans with migration stories, Harry Belafonte praised the project for "its keen insights and recognition of the broad diversity of cultural experiences that African Americans bring to the American experience."

In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience was created by The Schomburg Center and is supported, in part, by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services in accordance with P.L. 107-116, with special thanks to the Congressional Black Caucus. Howard Dodson was director of the In Motion Project. Sylviane Diouf was project content manager, and curator of the exhibition. Dodson and Diouf were co-compilers and editors of the book.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research unit of The New York Public Library, is generally recognized as one of the leading institutions of it’s kind in the world. A cultural center as well as a repository, this Harlem-based modern research library also sponsors a wide array of interpretive program, including exhibitions, scholarly and public forums, and cultural performances. For nearly eighty years The Schomburg Center has collected, preserved, and provided access to materials documenting black life, and promoted the study and interpretation of black history and culture. The Schomburg Center is, itself, a microcosm of today’s African America and its diversity, counting African Americans (North and South), continentally-born Africans and Afro-Caribbeans among its staff.

More remarks on In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience

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Contact: Laini Madhubuti, 212.491.2259