When sixteen-year-old Minnie Savage boarded a train from Lee Mont, Virginia, to Philadelphia in 1918 with nothing more than a sandwich, she told no one of her plans. The promise of jobs and opportunity in the North was too enticing. And the conditions in Accomack County, Virginia, were especially difficult for a young black girl. Only a few years earlier, in 1907, a white mob had attacked the town’s African-American neighborhood after rumors of black laborers’ plans to demand better pay from prosperous white farmers.

Savage found work in Philadelphia. But the North had its own challenges, including many that resembled life in the Jim Crow South. Shut out of most jobs in the city, Savage was forced to toil as a cleaner at a local drugstore. The work was grueling. Each day, she scrubbed the floor of the drugstore on her hands and knees.

Savage’s experience mirrored those of millions of other black people who left the South during the Great Migration. One of those traveling to the North was Bruce Murphy, historian Blair L. M. Kelley’s grandfather. He arrived in Philadelphia around 1918, also from Accomack County.