Over at Black Perspectives, historian Adam Lee Cilli introduces us to “Migrant Voices,” a website collecting oral history interviews of African Americans who migrated from the rural South to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania between 1915 and 1930. It is an amazing resource.
Here is a taste of Cilli’s piece:
Ten years ago, as a graduate student, I embarked on a mission to reconstruct the lived experiences of southern Black migrants in Pittsburgh and to better understand their relationship with reformers who operated in the city’s racial advancement institutions. The information came slowly and by piecemeal. The Library of Congress had a set of letters prospective migrants wrote to the Urban League office in Pittsburgh in 1922; the University of Pittsburgh’s Archives and Special Collections held a number of interwar-era master’s theses on Black living and working conditions in the Steel City; and microfilm reels of the Pittsburgh Courier yielded some information as well. But I had yet to locate the greatest treasure: several large collections of oral history interviews.
I learned about these collections when I read Dennis Dickerson’s Out of the Crucible and Peter Gottlieb’s Making their Own Way—both of which are indispensable studies of Black life in western Pennsylvania. Between 1973 and 1977, Dickerson and Gottlieb interviewed fifty-three African Americans who had lived and worked in the Pittsburgh area sometime during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Gottlieb conducted his interviews while still a PhD candidate at Pitt, first for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission’s Pittsburgh Oral History Project and later for his doctoral dissertation on Black migrants in Pittsburgh. Dickerson likewise conducted interviews for his dissertation on Black steelworkers in western Pennsylvania. After earning his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis, Dickerson developed his dissertation into the book Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1980. Gottlieb meanwhile published Making their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-30.
Both scholars went on to have distinguished careers in history, but the interviews they conducted fell into relative obscurity. The Pennsylvania State Archives housed the interviews from the Pittsburgh Oral History Project, although it made copies of some of them for the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh. Gottlieb donated his dissertation interviews to Pitt’s archives, and Dickerson eventually gave his interviews to the Heinz History Center.
When I first located these collections, they still had not been digitized, so I spent countless hours at the archives listening to and learning from the migrants who shared their stories—and taking copious notes. Only later did it dawn on me that I was likely one of only a few dozen people who knew about and had listened to the recordings. Their existence and location were too obscure and inaccessible for anyone but a handful of specialists.
Read the entire piece here.