North to Boston: Life Histories from the Black Great Migration in New England by Blake Gumprecht (review)

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• North to Boston: Life Histories from the Black Great Migration in New England by Blake Gumprecht
• Brian Mitchell

North to Boston: Life Histories from the Black Great Migration in New England. By Blake Gumprecht. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. x, 235. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-19-761444-0.)

The Great Migration was the transformative movement of more than six million African Americans out of southern states to the northern and western [End Page 652] cities of the United States. Escaping discrimination, racialized violence, and debt peonage, migrants hoped to build new lives for themselves and their families. Blake Gumprecht’s North to Boston: Life Histories from the Black Great Migration in New England fills an important void in the historical record by providing accounts of the migrants who left the South and settled in Boston, Massachusetts. Gumprecht argues, “Much has been written about the Great Migration and its impact on cities such as Chicago and Detroit, but almost nothing has been written about its history in Boston and New England” (p. 1).

Gumprecht’s study focuses on the lives and experiences of ten migrants who arrived in Boston between 1943 and 1969. The author acknowledges his difficulty finding his subjects and his reliance on the assistance of the Reverend Gregory Groover, minister of the Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in identifying the subjects whom he would later interview. In many ways, North to Boston is as much about the Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church and the community of Roxbury as it is about the individuals interviewed. Each interviewee was a member of the church, and although many had changed residences several times, they stayed committed to and maintained their membership in the Roxbury church.

The author organizes the text into twelve chapters. The first chapter, “The Great Migration in New England,” serves as an introduction and explores Black migration to Boston. The life story of each individual is the subject of chapters 2–11. Organized by the year of the interviewee’s arrival to the city, these chapters explore the driving forces that brought these migrants north to Boston and their trials in establishing a new life for themselves and their families. Many of the narratives are stories of flight: tales of men and women escaping violence, oppression, and racism in hopes of creating new and better lives in the North. What each of the subjects shared was a hope that their individual migrations would transform their lives and those of their families. All of Gumprecht’s interviewees faced the struggles of creating new lives for themselves in their new home; all faced racial discrimination in the North, but all believed that their economic outcomes were improved by their decisions to move northward. The last chapter, “Ten Lives, What They Teach Us, and Why They Matter,” offers a final analysis of Gumprecht’s subjects and Boston’s African American community.

While North to Boston offers readers an examination of Black Boston through its stories of migration, one cannot help but wonder what the author might have discovered had he expanded his research beyond the membership of the Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church in Roxbury. The text acknowledges that there were “tens of thousands of Black people who migrated to Boston from the American South” during the Great Migration, yet Gumprecht relies entirely on ten subjects, all of whom were brought to him by a single pastor and were congregants of the same church (p. 1). Although I was moved by the narratives of Gumprecht’s subjects, I question his methodology and believe that the book may have benefited substantially from a broader base of subjects. [End Page 653]

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