Newberry Library online exhibition showcases images from the Great Migration

This glass slide, labeled “McKeesport Church Members,” is among 44 featured in an online Newberry Library exhibition produced by the Committee on Conservation and Advance for The Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago, circa 1920s. It is a visual record of the Great Migration of the late 1910s to early 1920s. (Newberry Library)

A new chapter in Black American history is unfolding at the Newberry Library, courtesy of a recently acquired glass slides collection highlighting the significance of Chicago and several other Northern cities during the Great Migration in the early 1920s.

The Great Migration was the movement of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the urban Midwest, Northeast and West.