African American History, African American DNA, African American History, Great Migration, KOLUMN Magazine

Tales of African-American History Found in DNA – KOLUMN Magazine

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Tales of African-American History Found in DNA – KOLUMN Magazine

[two_third padding=”0 15px 0 0px”]Tales of African-American History Found in DNA

The history of African-Americans has been shaped in part by two great journeys.

C A R L    Z I M M E R      |     T H E   N E W  Y O R K  T I M E S  


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A map of African-American genetic diversity

[/one_third_last][two_third padding=”0 15px 0 0px”][dropcap]The[/dropcap] first brought hundreds of thousands of Africans to the southern United States as slaves. The second, the Great Migration, began around 1910 and sent six million African-Americans from the South to New York, Chicago and other cities across the country.

In a study published on Friday, a team of geneticists sought evidence for this history in the DNA of living African-Americans. The findings, published in PLOS Genetics, provide a map of African-American genetic diversity, shedding light on both their history and their health.
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Buried in DNA, the researchers found the marks of slavery’s cruelties, including further evidence that white slave owners routinely fathered children with women held as slaves.[/two_third]



MIGRATION SERIES
JACOB LAWRENCE – Painter
The Migration Series is a group of paintings by African-American painter Jacob Lawrence which depicts the migration of African Americans to the northern United States.

Lawrence conceived of the series as a single work rather than individual paintings, and worked on all of the paintings at the same time, in order to give them a unified feel and to keep the colors uniform between panels. He wrote sentence-long captions for each of the sixty paintings explaining aspects of the event. Viewed in its entirety, the series creates a narrative, in both images and words that tells the story of the Great Migration.
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And there are signs of the migration that led their descendants away from such oppression: Genetically related African-Americans are distributed closely along the routes they took to leave the South, the scientists discovered.

The importance of that finding is not just historical, said Dr. Esteban G. Burchard, a physician and scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.

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