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Why the Highway 17 North Heritage Trail?

Documenting America’s “Small” Migrations

After the Civil War, during World War I, and during World War II, waves of African Americans left Southern cities for better job and life opportunities in Northern and Midwestern cities. Historians call this the Great Migration. Making a life change like this was taking a big chance, but violent incidents of racial terror and legalized segregation in the South led many to believe that it was a chance worth taking. Was that not, after all, the American dream? James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson, A. Philip Randolph, and Augusta Savage took their chances and joined in that migration, moving from Jacksonville to New York in the early 20th Century, and each becoming important voices in the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance. 

But Randolph and Savage were not originally from Jacksonville. They had migrated there from small rural north Florida communities years earlier when Jacksonville was the largest north Florida urban center, and home to arguably the state’s most affluent and prominent black community: LaVilla. Indeed, Jacksonville was a sort of mecca for aspiring blacks in these rural communities, a symbol that they too could “make it.” The Highway 17 North Heritage Trail documents these “small” migrations from rural Southern towns to large Southern urban centers; migrations that sometimes led to greater ones, but for many ended with Jacksonville becoming the terminus of their journey. But these mental and physical journeys that Savage, Randolph, and thousands of other black Floridians took in the aftermath of slavery mirrored the same search blacks all over the South went on during the Great Migration: better starting positions from which to chase their American dreams.