Up From the Bottoms: The Search for the American Dream tells the story of the massive
migration of African Americans from the rural south to the prosperous north during the
World War II years and beyond They left behind the legacy of slavery and segregation and
set out to find the American dream. The voice of Cicely Tyson guides us through these
touching, thoughtful and often funny stories as told by fifteen residents of Muskegon,
Michigan. During the late 1930s through the 1960s, factory jobs in the north were
abundant while farming jobs in the south were disappearing. It started as a trickle but once
word got back to families in the south, it turned into a flood of people uprooting their lives
and moving to the land of prosperity, the industrial north.