Distinguished Law Professor Featured in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.' Docuseries: "Great Migrations: A People on the Move"

Thomas Healy, Board of Visitors Distinguished Professor of Law at Seton Hall School of Law, is featured in a new PBS four-hour docuseries, "Great Migrations: A People on the Move," from Emmy-nominated executive producer, host and writer Henry Louis Gates Jr., now streaming on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS app. Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, interviewed Healy among a group of prominent experts, scholars, professors and notable national figures.

"The Great Migration was not just a seismic historical event; it's an ongoing story," said Gates, adding:

"Our series focuses on three dramatic migrations that have profoundly shaped the African American experience, and redefined what it means to be ‘Black’ in this country:  the great migration from the Deep South to the North and West; the reverse migration back to the South, and most recently the astonishing large migration of Africans and West Indians to this country in recent decades. In fact, more Africans migrated to the United States in a ten-year period than were forcibly shipped here over the entire course of the slave trade!  Our series is the first to explore these three mass movements of Black human beings to this country, and what that has meant for the reshaping of American culture."

In Episode 3, One Way Ticket Back, Healy recounts the research he chronicled in his latest book, Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia. Published by Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co. and winner of the Hooks National Book Award,  Healy’s book explores the rise and fall of Soul City, a concept developed and nurtured in the 1970s by civil rights leader Floyd McKissick. Soul City was designed as a model of black economic empowerment and to help relieve northern urban decay. The planned city was to be built on an abandoned slave plantation in rural North Carolina and was to reflect the latest thinking in social policy and urban planning. Despite support from the Nixon administration and various private organizations, the plan ran into stiff resistance from conservatives, including the late Senator Jesse Helms, and was abandoned after 10 years. 

In the series, Healy discusses how the North for a long time had been viewed as a promised land, a place where Black Americans could escape the discrimination and the economic subjugation that they were facing in the South.

Healy said:

"I think for a large number of Black migrants, it really turned out to be much less than what they had hoped it would be. Housing was scarce. The quality of education was not good. There were jobs, but many of them were low-paying, quite menial jobs. Crime was fairly bad in northern cities, especially beginning in the late 1960s. There had been this old saying for Black Southerners that it was either Baltimore or hell, but eventually, some of them came to realize that the two were the same thing, that Baltimore really was hell, or Newark or Detroit or New York City or whichever northern city we're talking about."

Many Sun Belt cities begin to attract significant investment in the 1970s and beyond, which resulted in abundant job creation.

Healy reflected: "There was a sense of nostalgia for the place that they had grown up in, which might seem strange given the oppression that they had faced. But nostalgia is a powerful force, and I think for many people those memories and those early associations had a really strong hold on them."

He added, "Soul City was envisioned to have 50,000 people within 30 years. The plan was they start in around 1970; they'd be done by 2000 with most of the construction. He [McKissick] wanted to build a multiracial community. He had no desire to exclude White people, but his main goal was to build something that would exist primarily for Black people. Much of the land had been at an earlier point in time a slave plantation. I think for McKissick there was this sort of poetic justice."

Looking at his research in the context of three great migrations, Healy said:

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To access the docuseries, visit PBS Great Migrations: "A People on The Move."

To learn more about Soul City, visit here »