Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s 2019 theme Black Migrations emphasizes the movement of people of African
descent to new destinations and subsequently to new social realities. While inclusive of
 earlier centuries, this theme focuses especially on the twentieth century through today. 
Beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, African American migration
 patterns included relocation from southern 
farms to southern cities; from the South to
 the Northeast, Midwest, and West; from the
 Caribbean to US cities as well as to migrant 
labor farms; and the emigration of noted
 African Americans to Africa and to Europe
an cities, such as Paris and London, after the
 end of World War I and World War II. Such
 migrations resulted in a more diverse and
 stratified interracial and intra-racial urban
population amid a changing social milieu, 
such as the rise of the Garvey movement in 
New York, Detroit, and New Orleans; the 
emergence of both black industrial workers and black entrepreneurs; the growing number and variety of urban churches and new religions; new music forms like ragtime, blues, and jazz; white backlash as in the Red Summer of 1919; the blossoming of visual and literary arts, as in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Paris in the 1910s and 1920s. The theme Black Migrations equally lends itself to the exploration of the century’s later decades from spatial and social perspectives, with attention to “new” African Americans because of the burgeoning African and Caribbean population in the US; Northern African Americans’ return to the South; racial suburbanization; inner-city hyper-ghettoization; health and environment; civil rights and protest activism; electoral politics; mass incarceration; and dynamic cultural production.