The Cassette Tapes of the Great Migration

Oral historians at Oakland University, led by Johnetta Brazzell, spent years in the mid-nineteen-seventies capturing stories that might otherwise have been lost. According to JSTOR Daily, they recorded roughly eighty interviews with Black residents of Pontiac, Michigan who had migrated from the rural South seeking opportunity during the Great Migration. T.C. Holland was among them—he had fled Georgia at seventeen and arrived in Pontiac in nineteen nineteen, when the city was booming. But by the time Brazzell was recording in nineteen seventy-five, many migrants had grown disillusioned with what Pontiac had become. Today, twenty-three of those cassette recordings are publicly available through JSTOR with machine-generated transcripts, preserving not just historical facts but the pauses, laughter, and lived experience of people whose stories might otherwise have vanished.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton