A moving history that aims to show that the migration of African-Americans from the South to the North was similar to the immigration of other peoples to the US. It is written as the biographies of three African-Americans who left the Jim Crow South to live and work in California, Chicago, and New York. Their harrowing stories are both a reminder of the depth of the tragedy of African-Americans in the land of the free and a salute to some of their great accomplishments.

I found some of the statistics about Detroit to be especially interesting. I liked the analogy of German Jewish immigrants' relationship with newly arrived Eastern European Jews to that of Blacks in the North to newly arrived rural Blacks from the South.