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Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, at New York Public Library, presents In Motion: The African American Migration Experience.

The Library subscribes to databases and electronic magazine resources that provide a wealth of information on this topic. Try InfoTrac OneFile. A free resource on biography, prepared for Black History Month is also available.

The emancipation proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln in January 1863 is one milestone in a long march towards freedom. This march has been referred to elsewhere as the African American Odyssey. Other documents from that odyssey are available through the Freedmen's Bureau Online.

African-American spirituals, "the rhythmic cry of the slave," in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, are a gift of grandeur. This musical heritage W.E.B. Du Bois further described as "the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas."

"What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways."
    W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk