The Great Migration: An American Story was published by Amistad in 2011, with illustrations by Jan Spivey Gilchrist. The book tells the story of the Great Migration — arguably the most important demographic event in twentieth-century American history — through the experience of one family: their reasons for leaving the South (economic exploitation, racial violence, the desire for dignity), their journey north (the excitement and fear of the unknown), and their arrival in the city (the shock of industrial life, the building of new community).
Greenfield’s approach is characteristic: she makes the vast and abstract (six million people moving across a continent over sixty years) intimate and concrete (one family, one journey, one set of feelings). The text is spare and poetic, each sentence weighted with significance, and it trusts young readers to understand both the historical forces at work and the human cost of displacement. The family leaves behind a world they know — however oppressive — for a world they do not know, and the book honors both the courage of that choice and the grief of what is left behind.
Jan Spivey Gilchrist’s paintings are monumental in scale and emotion — sweeping landscapes, crowded train stations, the vastness of northern cities — while maintaining the intimate focus on the family at the center. The collaboration between text and image creates a work that functions simultaneously as history lesson, family story, and meditation on the meaning of home.
Collecting The Great Migration
First edition (Amistad/HarperCollins, New York, 2011): Hardcover with dust jacket, illustrations by Jan Spivey Gilchrist.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Later printings: $5–$10