Presentation: Precarity and Possibility

During the Great Migration, more than six million African Americans left the rural South for the North and West. Great Migrants were not only adults, but also children. Using visual storytelling, and original audio and video footage, we hear from Black girls who came of age in the San Francisco Bay Area in their own words about the racialized and gendered social and political context of their childhood, and how it shaped various aspects of their lives, including the children’s educational experiences and extracurricular activities, the neighborhoods they lived in and had access to, their friendships and life chances. 

Bay Area native, Mariama Smith (Mari) Gray,  Ph.D., is a 4th generation Californian whose family settled in San Francisco and Oakland in the early 20th century. She is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at CSU, East Bay and a cultural anthropologist of education. Her research interests include Black girlhood and education, the Great Migration, educators’ decision-making practices, and the production of social, cultural, and spatial in/equities. Her current research project, the Great Migration Study, examines the childhood experiences of African Americans of Southern US ancestry who came of age in Northern California during the Great Migration (1910-1970). A mother of four sons, Mari enjoys photography, reading, cooking, and traveling.