Yale historian Jonathan Holloway traces the Great Migration, the movement of black Americans from the rural South to northern cities that began in the early twentieth century and accelerated through the mid-1920s. Part of his course American History: From Emancipation to the Present, the lecture opens with Sterling Brown's poem "Old Lem" and surveys organizations working to improve black urban life before turning to the migration itself. Holloway frames the relocation as an act of self-determination and social protest against southern disenfranchisement, economic limits, racial violence, and the revived Ku Klux Klan, while acknowledging that northern city life brought its own cruelties. The final third of the lecture examines D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation as evidence of how white anxieties about this demographic shift played out in popular culture. Recorded at Yale in Spring 2010, the lecture runs with clear chapter breaks and is delivered in a straightforward classroom format.