The Great Migration functioned as a mass antiracist movement through escape rather than protest.

Evidence

Then again, southern Blacks did not need these recruiters to entice them to escape a place that in some ways was worse than hell. During the Great War, Black people once again used their legs as activism, escaping from rural towns to southern cities, from southern cities to border-state cities, and from border-state cities to northern cities in what became known as the “Great Migration.” In the first mass antiracist movement of the twentieth century, migrants eschewed beliefs in the New South’s racial progress, in the notion of Jim Crow being better than slavery, and in the claim that Blacks’ political-economic plight was their fault. Segregationists tried to slow the migration through racist ideas, ideas put into action when they terrorized northern labor recruiters, when they arrested migrants, and even when they tried to improve labor conditions. But nothing and no one could stop this movement. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 807

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of placing arguments into Kendi’s segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist scheme — the migrants eschewing self-blame is migrating away from assimilationist reasoning. — connects to: Black Baptist women turned the Great Migration into voter mobilization despite their own disfranchisement — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1029