The Piano Lesson By Elizabeth Shafer

The mass movement of African Americans from the southern regions of the United States to the north during the early 20th century is often referred to as the Great Migration. In her essay, Elizabeth D. Schafer examined the underlying causes of this phenomenon and concluded that it was driven by economic forces which were out of the migrants’ control. By taking this macro approach, Ms. Schafer discounted the personal choices and inclinations of the people themselves. Nonetheless, her arguments could be highly persuasive should one look at the vast numbers per se. Surely, personal choice could not have been the overarching reason why a multitude would arrive at the same decision. Nonetheless, as we examine her line of reasoning, we must also examine
Schafer developed her thesis, she averred that after the Civil War, African Americans perceived the north as desirable since it was somewhere that did not hold memories of their enslavement. However, she then quickly expanded and clarified that by saying, “Many perceived the north as offering economic and social opportunities that had been denied in the south.” She further contended that many Blacks held the belief that land ownership would improve their financial and social standing. Thinking back to August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” with Boy Willie’s determination to buy land and his many arguments that he would thus make something of himself, we see some reinforcement of this idea. But then she threw in the macro-economic forces of “depressed markets,” “agricultural losses,” and “indebtedness to landlords,” and thereby underlined the economic realities that were outside of their control. She painted a grim picture as she invoked the dreaded “extreme poverty” as the major force driving them to pull up stakes and relocate. And so she juxtaposed their desire to escape their history with the economic drivers to highlight how much more influential the latter were in creating the change that we
Schmidt further argued that sources such as diaries, letters, and interviews, which had previously been ignored, once examined, revealed that the reasons had much to do with race and gender perceptions. He cited James R. Grossman’s, “Land of Hope: Chicago, Southerners and the Great Migration,” which claimed that migrants made the important decision to move based just as much on those perceptions as on the economic