In 1921, Chandler Owen, a Socialist writer and editor from North Carolina, embarked on a trip to the west to increase circulation of the Messenger publication, then based in New York City.  He chronicled this trip for readers, noting how to avoid discrimination on the railways, but also highlighting what one might experience as the train dashed at “incredible speed over the plains, across the mountains, thru tunnels-on, on to the great Western portals.”[2]  Over the course of the twentieth century, African Americans departed the South in search of new possibilities where they could live freely.  Known as the Great Migration, this exodus began in 1910 as thousands of migrants left the American South and relocated to northern and midwestern cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and New York.  They also moved West.  One of the “great Western portals,” that received Black migrants was Los Angeles.  During World War II, the city experienced an influx of migrants who relocated for a variety of reasons.  As the state of California was infused with $11 billion in war contracts, the need for labor in war manufacturing industries was acute.  

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One of the Black religious institutions in the city that welcomed migrants was People’s Independent Church of Christ (PIC).  Formed in 1915, the church became known in the city for an emphasis on incorporating “democratic ideals” into its religious orientation.  This orientation focused on crafting church members who were active in politics and focused on building a religious institution that would be of, by, and for the people in the community.  The church’s second pastor, Reverend Clayton Russell, was a homegrown talent and a bulwark for civil rights on the radio, in the pulpit and on the streets. In 1938, under Rev. Russell’s direction, the church began collecting detailed membership rolls which documented the biographical information of every new migrant who joined.  From 1938-1946, the church collected the names, addresses, and former church homes of each new member.  Eight years of data resulted in over five hundred pages of migrants’ biographical information, which roughly equates to a sampling size of 3,053 individuals.  The geographic diversity represented in the dataset reveals that World War II Black western migration patterns were complex and not unidirectional.  

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In “Migration as Methodology: Digital Mapping and Black Religion in the American West,” the digital map conveys a small aggregate sample size of the numerous routes that led Black people to Los Angeles.  In what follows, you will see and experience “religion on the move.”  Unlike physical belongings, migrants’ religious backgrounds were readily accessible, as they wrote down their previous affiliations in the membership rolls.  The beliefs, value systems and ritual practices that governed migrants’ religious identity could be transplanted in new places but were equally transformed by the force of the migration experience.  The membership rolls reveal that the migration experience was not only a religious event.  It was also a significant political and cultural event that reshaped the Black community in Los Angeles and led to new imaginings of Black cultural expression. This digital resource attends to the important role of religious diversification within community building.  Of the small sample size, it is evident that the church was comprised of parishioners from diverse religious backgrounds ranging from Baptists, Pentecostals and Catholics to Converts.  This digital source provides context to better understand the ordinary people who made the extraordinary decision to leave their homes to build a new life in a new city.  

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Some of the people you will encounter on the map will only have their name and previous religious affiliation listed.  Others, like Mabel Scott, a famous music artist, will have copious amounts of information with pictures and media.  Recovering information on Black migrants through digital archaeology methods can often mean that there are gaps in what is possible to find about someone’s life.  People are unable to be located as historical subjects for numerous reasons, from a misspelled name in the Census to someone’s social status as a domestic worker, Black migrants and their contributions remain elusive because of historical methods that privilege written sources.  In particular, Black women and their contributions are difficult to locate.  While women have overwhelmingly contributed to the organizational development of religious institutions, the texture of their stories and experiences is often silenced by an archive that catalogs the contributions of men in leadership positions.  "Migration as Methodology" serves as a corrective, revealing the spatial reality that Black women, men, and children traversed, and the power of digital mapping as a methodology to overcome the historical absence of Black presence.