Filmmakers reveal story of Philly's African American migration

In May of 1916, as war was being waged in Europe, the Pennsylvania Railroad began offering free transportation to any southern African Americans willing to work in the north.

Such was the quiet beginning of the Great Migration.

By 1960, as the migration slowed to a trickle, about 7 million blacks had left the south. As of 1970, Philadelphia's black population was near 655,000, about 10 times the 1900 total.

This monumental story, so central to the life and identity of the city, is the subject of a Scribe Video Center project of commissioned films and community documentaries, The Great Migration: A City Transformed (1916-1930).

Scribe founder Louis Massiah, serving as a kind of executive producer for the films, says that Philadelphia was completely reshaped by the Great Migration. The black community has built an identity here, rooted in a sense of place - despite racism, both institutional and personal; despite economic difficulties; despite the hundreds of different woes.

"So the Great Migration is a time of hope," he says. "We understand that."

The sprawling project, as expansive as the communities and histories it chronicles, begins unfolding at the Slought Foundation Wednesday with a pop-up exhibition on view until Aug. 9. A selection of films from Scribe's Precious Places Community History Project - short films telling stories of very specific sites - will also be screened. A reception at Slought, 4017 Walnut St., is set for 7 p.m. Wednesday.

On Friday, Massiah will have a public conversation with the artists at Slought.

On Saturday at 5:30 p.m., the five longer commissioned films will unspool at the BlackStar Film Festival at International House, 3701 Chestnut Street.

Precious Places films will air on WHYY this fall, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia will mount a Great Migration program featuring installations and films next spring. Neighborhoods around the city will also feature screenings.

A vast website, greatmigrationphl.org, explores the films and the history behind them.

"It is an epic story," said Tina Morton, who took classes at Scribe, then studied film at Temple, and now teaches it at Howard University. (She also comes back to Scribe to pass it on.)

Morton's film, When We Came Up Here, documents the venerable Philadelphia Tribune and the crucial role it played in the migration.

"Before the internet, before Snapchat, before any of that, this is how we found out about stories important to the African American community," she said. "Newspaper clippings were sent down south telling what was going on."

The Tribune functioned as both a community message board and a clarion call.

Massiah asked Julie Dash - the first African American female filmmaker to have a full-length feature enter general theatrical release (Daughters of the Dust, 1993) - to take a look at two AME churches, Mother Bethel in Philadelphia and Mother Emmanuel in Charleston, S.C.

Dash created what she calls a "tone poem," Standing at the Scratch Line. Massiah "wanted to see the visual connection between the low country - my family is from there - and the migrants who left and came north to Philadelphia and Baltimore," Dash said. "We followed a suitcase, moved him around, followed him to various hot spots. We see the suitcase at railroad stations and churches along the way. . . . Prior to the project, I never thought of the connection between the churches along the way."

Kevin Jerome Everson, a prolific filmmaker and artist who teaches at the University of Virginia, has made a short film, Eason. It obliquely tells the story of James Walker Hood Eason, leader of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association of Philadelphia.

Eason was born in Salisbury, N.C., migrated to Philadelphia in 1915, and joined and then broke with Garvey over financial issues. Eason was shot and killed by three Garvey backers in New Orleans in 1923.

Everson filmed segments in North Carolina, Philadelphia, and New Orleans - seeking to capture something not so much directly about Eason, but about the reality of black life and labor today.

In New Orleans he filmed the corner where Eason was shot.

"I just filmed some cats hanging out there," he said. "I didn't know what I'd find."

Scribe's Massiah says the Great Migration films address his deep interest in place and memory. He wanted to look at five important community groups in place at the time of the migration, and use them to anchor each film. The two other films focus on Tindley Temple (Sonic Migration by writers and sound and visual artists Mendi and Keith Obadike), and the Wissahickon Boys and Girls Club (Ancestral Correspondence: Looking Back at Our Future, by Lonnie Graham, photographer and media artist).

"The idea was to take five really exceptional institutions and put them into the hands of five artists . . . and create works riffing on the Great Migration," Massiah said. "My own reason for thinking about the Great Migration is that in reality we are experiencing a de-migration now as people's sense of physical community dissipates with all the development going on."

In other words, the Great Migration has transformed places, and now the Great Disassembling is taking them apart.

"The place-based focus about character and a part of our identity," Massiah said, "is being lost."

ssalisbury@phillynews.com

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