Learning about and from the Great Escape of African Americans to Appalachia

This commentary is based on Karida Brown’s book, Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia, an insightful, path-breaking examination of the formation of the racial self among African Americans who escaped Alabama and moved to work in the coalmines of eastern Kentucky. The book focuses on the constitution and transformation of the self through the memories of the second generation, now dispersed throughout the country, not as an individual project but as a collective process. The analysis draws from an exceptional dataset of oral histories and it is set during macro-structural transformations and major demographic shifts of the twentieth Century. This remarkable book invites questions about community formation and the place of cultural pillars such as the church in the diasporic communities that the Great Migration of African Americans and subsequent internal migrations created.