A Power Stronger Than Itself - Alejandrocasales.com

FOUNDATIONS AND PREHISTORY
Coming North: From Great Migration to Great Depression
In terms of both personal histories and historical resonance, the roots
of AACM discourses of mobility and atmosphere can be traced to the
decades- long movement known as the Great Migration. From around
1915 to the early 1960s, working- class black migrants, hoping to better
their condition in the classic fashion of the American Dream, streamed
out of the Old Confederacy in one of the largest internal relocations
in U.S. history. The oldest members of the AACM’s fi rst wave, including
pianist and composer Richard Abrams, saxophonist Fred Anderson,
pianist Jodie Christian, drummer Jerol Donavon, trumpeter Phil
Cohran, drummer Steve McCall, and violinist Leroy Jenkins, were all
born between 1927 and 1932, the children of migrants who settled in
Chicago and St. Louis.
The migration narrative inevitably turns upon the question of
loss—in particular, the loss of land. African Americans in the South
were subjected to economic warfare, including land seizures and various
forms of terrorism, whether state- sponsored, privatized, or formulated
through private- public partnerships. 1 The practice of “whitecapping,”
whereby whites physically drove blacks from their land and
confi scated it, compounded the diffi culties blacks already faced in
buying and owning land, ultimately contributing greatly to the urgency
of plans to leave the South. 2 The fi ercely independent Cohran
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