ASALH Black History Celebration Highlights Black Migration

The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) celebrated its 93rd annual Black History Month luncheon by spotlighting the mass migrations of Black people and how those experiences have helped shape their identity and efforts to make progress.

Black Americans can not be understood apart from their experiences during voluntary and forced migrations over the centuries, speakers told more than 1,000 guests Saturday in a ballroom of the Washington Renaissance Hotel.

Black migrations are stories of “pain and unbridled hope” that “ultimately are about our striving, about our endurance, and about our perseverance in America,” said Dr. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, ASALH president and history department chair and Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.